De-nationalising Iraq

[chlamor]

De-nationalising Iraq

Muwaffaq Rifai, Al-Ahram Weekly



There are many forces, argues Muwaffaq Rifai*, seeking to Lebanonise Iraq

April 21, 2005 - Throughout their modern history the Iraqi people have never experienced what we might term sectarian geography or denominational politics. Since its establishment in the early 20th century the Iraqi state -- regardless of the political hue of its successive regimes until the fall of Saddam Hussein -- did not regard its citizens in terms of their religious or ethnic affiliations but rather in terms of the degree of their loyalty to or conformity with the state, and in terms of the degree to which they might be adversely influenced by neighbouring powers. Terms such as the Shia south, the Sunni centre and the like, heard so frequently today, reflect only the determination of outside powers to partition Iraq.

True, the south is currently inhabited by a majority Shia population and the centre by a majority of Sunnis. But such demographics never overrode the feeling shared by all Iraqis that they are one people. We all recall the no-flight zones the US invented, along some fictional latitudinal demarcations, both within easy reach of American bases in Turkey and the Gulf. The purpose of these no-flight zones -- or so the Americans claimed -- was to protect the Kurds in the north and the Shia in the south. At the same time, in Baghdad, a million Kurds and Shia mingled easily and anonymously with the rest of the capital's Arab and Sunni inhabitants. There was no American aerial cover to protect them and they were as vulnerable as everyone else to the aerial bombardments that the Americans unleashed regularly on the centre.

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Certainly the new constitution, in form and substance, should provide guarantees against a reversion to any form of exclusion from government of religious or ethnic groups. But government by a system of interdenominational trade-offs and balances inhibits the development of a unified nation state. Moreover, not only will it lay the groundwork for the partition of Iraq itself; the phenomenon will spill over beyond Iraq's borders. Calls issuing almost daily from Gulf countries urging the restructuring of their governments in accordance with denominational formulas raise the spectre of the sectarian cantonisation of the Middle East.

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Under such fraught and inequitable conditions it will be impossible for nationalist and liberal parties to reach out to the Iraqi people in the hope of gaining a sufficient following to become effective rivals in the forthcoming elections or even to have an impact through a referendum on the shape of the constitution. As a result the Islamist trend, with all its influence, power, machinery and methods of mobilising the traditional-minded Iraqi people will dominate the polls for a long time to come.

* The writer is editor-in-chief of the Baghdad- based Al-Manara newspaper

http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m11242

[Igel]

1. I wish his view luck.

Similar things were written in Yugoslavia after Tito's death and when the bloodshed was beginning, in an eery parallel.