Thu, December 30, 2004
Democracy in a month?
By SALIM MANSUR -- For the Toronto Sun
The physical distance between Kiev and Baghdad is less than that between Toronto and Vancouver. But the distance in time between Ukraine and Iraq is a chasm separating the modern world from the Dark Ages.
The story of Ukraine's election last week -- a story that began with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and ended with this week's decisive vote against the remaining communist old guard -- is remarkable when set against the bleak reality of the Middle East, where Iraq's own historic election looms a month from today.
In the lands between the Nile and the Euphrates, a most savage war is being fought by masked men bound by tribal loyalties to snuff out any possibility for freedom and democracy to take root in the region.
The Iraqi election scheduled for Jan. 30 will be a pivotal moment in Arab-Muslim history.
It is not well understood in the West why the mere fact of a free and contested election to a 275-seat transitional Iraqi national assembly has galvanized the entire spectrum of Arab-Muslim opposition against it. But the reason for this is simple:
A free and democratic Iraq will become an irresistible force for change in a part of the world that has remained most resistant to the core principles of freedom and democracy we take for granted -- individual human rights, pluralism, gender equality, free elections, representative government and the rule of law.
In the month ahead, what is at stake is the potential of a new future opening irreversibly in a strategically important resource rich country -- or that future being denied by the spiraling cost of violence.
The election has become a race against time between those Iraqis yearning for freedom; the Kurds in the north and the Shiites in the south -- and those fearing freedom; the Sunni tribes who were loyal beneficiaries of Saddam Hussein's bloody regime, joined by fascist thugs from around the Arab-Muslim world.
It is a mistake to view the masked insurgents as patriots, freedom fighters, or the "Minutemen of the Iraqi revolution," in the words of filmmaker Michael Moore's anti-American propaganda.
They are instead, as Ghazi al-Yawar, Iraq's interim president and a rare Sunni Arab opponent of Saddam Hussein, described them, "the armies of darkness who have no objective but to undermine the political process and incite civil war in Iraq."
A year after the capture of Saddam by American soldiers, the remnants of his regime remain yet to be defeated.
It can now be surmised that this is what Saddam planned for in the eventuality of an American-led regime change in Baghdad -- of using the entrenched loyalty of his Sunni clansmen, joined by fanatic Muslim killers such as the Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, as a shield in an insurgency directed to precipitate a civil war.
A civil war will most likely break apart the ethno-sectarian fragile construction of the Iraqi state as it was created and bequeathed by Britain at the end of World War I.
Since Iraq's creation in 1919 on lands ruled for nearly 500 years by the Ottoman empire from its capital in Istanbul, the country was governed by Sunni Arabs inhabiting the area around Baghdad now known as the Sunni triangle.
The Sunni Arabs of Iraq are a minority, less than a fifth of the total population. The Shiite Arabs south of Baghdad are a majority with more than 60% of Iraq's 25 million people. The Kurds in the north constitute another fifth of the population, besides a small remainder of Iraqi Turkomen, Assyrians and Chaldeans.
But the Sunnis of Iraq have never seen themselves as a minority. Instead they ruled Iraq with an iron fist as representatives of the wider Sunni Arab majority beyond Iraq's borders.
The Pan-Arab nationalist ideology provided this minority with an ideological cover to hold the rest of the population hostage to the symbolism of a mythic Arab unity, poised against its eternal foes. Saddam Hussein exploited this myth brutally, posing as a Pan-Arab nationalist against Zionist Jews of Israel, against Shiites (represented as treacherous hypocrites and fifth columnists of converted Persian fire-worshipers), and against Kurds (despised for wanting their own state at the expense of an Arab Iraq).
The recent weekend suicide-bombings in the Shiite holy cities of Najaf and Karbala, along with the increased attacks in Mosul and Baghdad, are signs of the escalated attempts by insurgents to spark an ethnic and sectarian conflict within the country.
For the "armies of darkness," a civil war is the desired outcome as a means to forestall the Jan. 30 election, and to defeat the process of Iraq's incremental transition to a democracy. The reasoning for this is not complicated.
A civil war will seriously jeopardize the American scenario for a new Iraq. It is important to recall that the 1998 Iraqi Liberation Act, passed by the Congress during Bill Clinton's presidency, committed the United States to "remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq and to promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace that regime."
A democratically elected government will end the domination of Iraq by the Sunni Arab minority. A new Iraq will give the Shiites within the Arab world -- for the first time in over 14 centuries of Arab- Muslim history -- the right to form a government protective of their interests.
These developments, seen through the eyes of Sunni Arabs, are fatal to their sense of privilege within a closed world of tribal loyalties, traditionalist thinking and self-serving history.
Hence a civil war dividing Iraq between a Kurdish north and a Shiite south is, by this twisted logic, a preferred alternative to a democratic and united Iraq.
This would send forth the message to the Arab world, in this perverted perspective, of the great peril of sectarian conflicts and divisions lurking behind any desire of restive populations for democratic reform. This fear, at least in the short term, will provide for strong-arm measures by existing Arab governments -- all of them being without exception authoritarian -- to resist any demand for liberal reforms.
A democratic Iraq slowly emerging in an area of darkness -- a fitting description for the Middle East -- might be as consequential for the eventual transformation of the region as the dismantling of the Berlin Wall was for democratic transition of eastern Europe and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The Iraqi Shiites and Kurds instinctively understand what is at stake in this conflict mounted by their mortal enemies. They have learned from their bitter experiences how history happens to be ironic and often unpredictable.
This is why the Iraqi Shiites and Kurds are equally determined to defeat the fascist thugs by remaining firmly committed to the election in one month's time.
And they also know, despite the pervasive cynicism in the West, that without the determination of U.S. President George Bush and the sacrifices of American and coalition soldiers in Iraq, they would not have had this chance to acquire the first taste of true freedom in their history.
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