ELECTIONS OR CAUCUSES?
Artículo de “The Economist” del 22.01.2004
As the United Nations prepares
to send a team to Iraq, to see if elections are feasible, the Americans face
some awkward choices in their quest for democracy there
IF THERE is one factor that just about all the rivals for power in Iraq acknowledge, it is that the United Nations must play a big part in giving legitimacy to whoever rules the country. It was to this end that America’s proconsul in Iraq, Paul Bremer, and a delegation from Iraq’s American-appointed Governing Council went to New York this week to appeal to Kofi Annan, the UN’s secretary-general, for his organisation to return to Iraq and oversee a transfer of power from the Americans to a selected group of Iraqis by July.
At the same time, on their clerics’ orders, Iraq’s Shia Muslims were marching in their tens of thousands, demanding a direct election, to be monitored by the UN; a national assembly is due, under the current timetable, to be chosen by the end of May. In August the UN lost its head of mission, Sérgio Vieira de Mello, and 21 others in a bomb blast, after which it withdrew. Mr Annan has been in no hurry to send a team back. A huge suicide bomb in a car outside the Baghdad headquarters of Mr Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) on January 18th killed at least 25 people, all but two of them Iraqis. The single most lethal attack in Baghdad since the Americans took over, it reminded the UN how dangerous Iraq still is.
Even so, Mr Annan has agreed to send a mission to investigate. Time, however, is short. Under Mr Bremer’s timetable, announced in November, barely four months remain before a transitional national assembly is to take shape, and no one agrees on how to choose its delegates. Mr Bremer wants a series of provincial caucuses, with members vetted by the CPA, to select delegates. The country’s most powerful Shia cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, wants a full-scale election. Backers of the former regime are delighted by the prospect of political mayhem.
Since the Shias make up about 60% of Iraqis, Mr Sistani probably has majority support in the country. But many secular-minded Iraqis, including quite a few Shias, fear that he may be another Ayatollah Khomeini in sheep’s clothing; they recall that Iran’s chief mullah adopted the language of human rights as he swept the despotic shah from power 25 years ago. Only days before Mr Sistani’s recent démarche, his allies on the Governing Council had voted to replace Iraq’s civil code, which gives women broad rights in matters of divorce, with Islamic family law. Under the clerics’ guidance, far fewer women now drive cars than before the war, and the vast majority of female civil servants in ministries run by Shias are now veiled. Many secular-minded Iraqis are queasy about an election that might give a Shia cleric a veto over how the country is run.
Yet in many ways the Americans seeking to install democracy in the Middle East should be pleased. It is not often in the Arab world that a declared democrat has commanded such popular support. In a dress rehearsal for the pro-election rally, a few boys did don white funeral shrouds as a warning that if America did not do Mr Sistani’s bidding, they might join the ranks of the suicide bombers. But until now the Hawza, the Shia clergy’s highest establishment, based in Najaf, their holiest city, has shepherded its flock on a peaceful path. It has used non-violent methods of persuasion: street demonstrations and the threat of strikes and non-cooperation.
Nor, so far, does the CPA fear that Mr Sistani has a secret agenda for taking over. A CPA man who has often met him says the ayatollah is adamant that religion should be separate from politics, even over matters of religion itself. “Whoever you nominate, make sure he’s not wearing a turban,” he quotes Mr Sistani as saying.
To outsiders, the Hawza is a hierarchical order that gives authority to a papal figure, often by nepotism. To insiders, it is highly democratic. Every Shia layman chooses his own ayatollah, whose authority is determined partly by the size of his following. Iraq has at least four “grand ayatollahs”, but because Mr Sistani is plainly the most popular, he is deemed “supreme”. In a sense, there is an election every day.
Moreover, among the 100,000-plus marchers in Baghdad were quite a lot of Sunni Arabs too. Some senior people from Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party were also there, perhaps hoping to use new freedoms to subvert the new order. “We accept that the next president will be Shia,” says Mishaal Jabouri, whose party represents Sunnis from Mr Hussein’s heartland in the Tigris valley north of Baghdad.
Mr Sistani has also begun to win a few influential people within the CPA to his cause. Mr Bremer had insisted that there was not enough time, technical wherewithal or security to hold an election before the scheduled handover to Iraqis by July 1st. But in the face of Mr Sistani’s stubbornness he has agreed to a clutch of adjustments, so far unspecified, to his caucus method. In the more stable south, it is clear that a direct poll for the national assembly would not be as hard as Mr Bremer has claimed. Some in the CPA reckon that the country will grow more violent if Mr Bremer insists on sticking to his method without a popular (read clerical) mandate.
In the absence of clear instructions from the CPA in Baghdad on how to prepare for the caucuses, the British-led administration in Shia-dominated southern Iraq has drawn up a “working hypothesis” for managing an election. Under Mr Bremer’s current plan, each of Iraq’s 18 provinces would choose a caucus of notables to select representatives to the national assembly. Town councils, provincial councils and the Governing Council in Baghdad would each nominate one-third of every caucus. British officials running Basra say that municipal and provincial elections could be held to choose the council nominees, so two-thirds of each caucus’s members would be elected.
One option for placating Mr Sistani and the Shias, say British officials, is to ask the Governing Council to waive its share of delegates. But its councillors, many of them returned exiles who have some power but no evident following, are loth to agree. As a variation on the original plan, Governing Council members might be asked to appoint members of minorities, as well as women, to the caucuses, to ensure the widest possible representation.
To answer Mr Bremer’s complaint that Iraq lacks an electoral roll, the British say that in the four southern provinces under their control they could let people who own identity and health cards vote as well as those with ration-cards. Dye could be put on voters’ hands, as in rough-and-ready elections considered valid elsewhere around the world, to ensure that people do not vote twice.
Not all Iraqis would be happy. The Kurds, for instance, are reluctant to have an early election that might reduce their influence. The insurgents in the Sunni provinces in central Iraq might intimidate or even kill those who tried to vote. Caucuses, by contrast, might be more easily protected. “Who would want to oversee a voting booth in Mr Hussein’s home town, Tikrit?” asks a CPA official.
That is the sort of question that an incoming UN team will try to answer. A compromise is not inconceivable, producing a mix of voting methods to pick an assembly. The real work—drafting a constitution that gives the main say to the majority while protecting minorities within (probably) a federal system—will be even harder. That will be done by a constituent assembly elected by universal suffrage early next year, leading in turn to the constitution’s endorsement by referendum and to the direct election, finally, of a full-blown government. That seems a long way off today. But it is not unimaginable.