Four days of talks among more than a thousand Iraqi political, religious and community leaders have produced the required 100 members for the interim parliament which will serve with the interim government of Prime Minister Iyad Allawi until elections next year.
As expected, the larger political groupings are well represented in the selection while some smaller parties complain that they have been elbowed aside. No one was expecting the result to please everyone. However, it may be a sign of the relative balance to these proceedings that a senior mainstream politician also complained at the amount of time that had been given to “radical speakers”.
These are early days in Iraq’s movement toward representative government. The real test will come when voters are asked to decide for themselves who their political leaders should be. What is important now is that all these leaders have been able to sit down and do their political horse-trading calmly and without violence. No one pretends that this latest development was perfect but it was the next step along the road to a very different Iraq from that of Saddam’s era.
The new assembly must not set out necessarily to support the interim government. It must question and criticize wherever it believes the government needs to be called to account. In this respect its most important task is to demonstrate to ordinary Iraqis that though coalition troops still remain the backbone of the present security apparatus, more and more power is being taken back by Iraqis. The assembly will doubtless feel freer than the Allawi government to confront the US-led coalition where it believes Washington is getting it wrong.
It is clear that ordinary Iraqis are focusing their anger increasingly on coalition forces, even if they also accept that until Iraqi police and military units are fully ready in sufficient numbers, foreign troops must help try and keep the peace. Nevertheless, the interim government is unfortunately widely seen as a creature of Washington. Whatever he says, there is not much Prime Minister Allawi can do to disabuse these critics.
The assembly, however, starts work with much less political baggage. While always seeking to be constructive and only as a final resort going head to head with the government, the assembly has the chance to more clearly represent the views of ordinary people who fear the Bush administration still has too much of a say in the life of Iraq.
If they do a good job, representing both their own political constituencies and broader Iraqi interests, the 100 members of the interim parliament will have set an example to the elected legislators who will come after them. More importantly, they will have shown the Iraqi people that the way of debate and negotiation and compromise does indeed make for positive achievement while the way of the bomb and the bullet makes work only for gravediggers.
