Almost three months after parliamentary elections, Iraq’s National Assembly last week approved a government with a mandate won at the ballot box, the first in the nation’s modern history. The moment, though indeed historic, came not with a bang but with something of a shrug.
Many Iraqis, especially democrats weary of a government that derives its legitimacy from ethnic representation, and that has excluded all former Baathists — not merely former political leaders and security officials responsible for crimes under Saddam Hussein’s regime — are concerned over whether Iraq is headed toward civil war and whether the new prime minister, Ibrahim Jaafari, can summon the vision to avert disaster.
The unruly coalition faces momentous challenges, including the writing of a permanent constitution, combating the culture of corruption in society, where government officials are known to turn a public career into a springboard for private gain, dealing creatively with the demands of the Kurdish community, whose representatives appear to be more preoccupied in securing autonomy in their region than in a unified Iraq, the division of power and oil revenue between the central government and regional governments, and, finally, dissipating the discontent of ordinary citizens on which the insurgency draws to sustain itself as a lethal force — and lethal it has been, with news last Friday that insurgents unleashed at least 13 mortar, bomb and suicide car attacks across the country against national forces and their US allies, killing 50 people, including three American soldiers. The toll for the next three days reached 116.
In commenting on Iraq’s new Cabinet, the New York Times editorialized last week: “History will look back on this as the moment when Iraqi democracy had its best chance to preserve a unified country and make good on the promise of human rights and economic well-being.”
Not so fast, fellows. Iraqi stability, maybe, but democracy? Alas, that will be a long time in the coming.
It’s all well and good to go to the polls, as Iraqis had done, and choose your leaders democratically, but what is more important than how power is achieved, in a country that had not known democracy in its history, is how that power is exercised.
For the people of Iraq, free elections will come to naught if the judiciary, the media, the educational system, oversight committees (both in civil society and in the legislature), a competent public infrastructure carefully designed to benefit everyone, a freedom of information act, an independent prosecutor ready, where required, to investigate officials suspected of corruption, are of dubious quality.
In a situation like that — note in this instant the genuinely free elections held in the West Bank and Gaza in 1996 and their very sad aftermath — government will brazenly hand out jobs, or phantom jobs for which workers do not feel the need to front up, in exchange for loyalty, invest in public works, absent competitive bidding, that generate kickbacks costing tax payers millions, and dismiss the need for oversight over the public purse.
American commentators have been exultant in their praise of the “first fully and freely elected government in Iraqi history,” and of Iraqi legislators’ aim to write a new constitution this year.
But the ruling elite in that sad country are a product of their political culture and one suspects they will have little incentive to create the kind of checks and balances that place limitations on their privileges and their “right to rule.”
To come to power through free elections is easy, I say, but how to exercise that power once you secure it is another matter. Political reality, for it to be equitable, in other words, should find firm anchorage in a systemic, not a narrowly centralized, exercise of democratic norms.
No one should be above the law. Even a country’s president, as happened in the United States in 1974, should be answerable to the people when he breaks that law. And Richard Nixon, the president in question here, escaped prosecution and possible incarceration by the skin of his teeth that year.
Will Iraqi legislators, Cabinet members and other officials drafting the constitution summon the courage to institute reform across the board in their country? Or will they continue to shield themselves from the intrusions of social fact?
What is the use of a putative democracy when, for example, Iraqi detainees and political opponents of the regime are tortured, or suffer death in custody, in Iraqi prisons at the hands of their fellow Iraqis, mirroring the same justice system under Saddam Hussein?
Consider this one incident, among many others, reported in the Washington Post recently. Hamid Rashid Sultan’s younger brother, Zawba, a young father of two who taught construction at a local trade school in Tikrit, was arrested by police officers at the family’s home and two days later he turned up dead at a local hospital. Pictures showed he had been brutally beaten.
The senior police official in charge of the police station where Zawba had been held, Col. Jassem Hussein Jbara, said the suspect died of “high blood pressure” shortly after he “confessed” to blowing up a car outside a shopping mall. There was no investigation of Zawba’s death.
Hamid said, in a complaint filed with the US military in Tikrit, that two other relatives of his were held at the station and that when he appealed to Col. Jbara for their release, Jbara demanded that the family pay a bribe of $5000 each for their release.
John Ward Anderson, the Washington Post’s correspondent who reported the story, wrote: “Hamid said he saw no evidence that anything had changed with the fall of Hussein. ‘They are using the same methods as the former regime,’ he said. ‘If the Americans don’t solve this case, there will be no solution at all, because the Iraqi side is a gang that hangs together, and they will never reveal their secrets’”.
Unless they deal with the issue that allows incidents like that to occur, Iraqis, free elections or no free elections, will continue to dwell in the netherland of a world increasingly divorced from the mature energies of democratic life — long after the coalition forces have lifted anchor and put out to sea.
