Provincial Towns You Jog ‘Round

by Eric Martin

While our elected representatives remain locked in a showdown over bailout legislation, Iraqi lawmakers were able to come to a pretty decent compromise regarding provincial elections law.  No word yet on whether or not the passage of the Iraqi law was made possible only after McCain suspended his campaign to make an appearance, or whether the law was rescued from defeat after McCain sat the Shiites and the Sunnis down and said, "Stop the bulls**t."  But one can only assume.

Snark aside, Marc Lynch is right to consider this pretty good news:

…the [Iraqi] Parliament overwhelmingly passed a new provincial elections law based on a compromise on Kirkuk engineered by the tireless UN envoy Staffan de Mistura…What’s more, they have agreed to push back the deadline for voting until January 31, 2009 (in the non-KRG provinces and Tamim province with Kirkuk). This will allow enough time for the Iraqi High Elections Commission (which will determine the exact date) to adequately prepare and organize and for the various political blocs to mobilize for the campaign.

Among the crucial details, beyond the elaborate compromise on Kirkuk:  the vote will be open list, women’s quota but no minorities quota, can use symbols of non-candidates except for religious figures (so no Sistani?  Is Sadr "religious" figure?), and some limitations on use of mosques and other places of worship for campaigning.  All in all looks pretty good – the open list is key, and goes against the preferences of what the ruling coalition, plus a way was found to accommodate the women’s quota.   Attention will now turn to trying to guarantee a free and fair vote, but this looks to be a major accomplishment at last – one key to democracy is that outcomes are uncertain but the rules are not.  Staffan de Mistura and the much maligned UN should receive major credit for this outcome…

Some of the criticism of the new law centers around the fact that it leaves the issue of Kirkuk (perhaps the most contentious issue) unresolved.  This is true, yet at the same time, these elections were being held hostage by the demand to disentangle the Kirkuk knot first.  Yet at the same time, there are large Sunni and Shiite constituents that have been demanding a cut of political power and keeping them locked out indefinitely is a recipe for disaster.  Since achieving an acceptable resolution of the Kirkuk impasse will require considerably more time and effort, it is best to proceed with the much-needed elections.  In fact, certain incumbent parties were quite comfortable using Kirkuk as the deal breaker because no new provincial elections means no new threats to entrenched positions of political power.  Reidar Visser sees a positive trend behind the jostling:

The new law is a compromise between federalists (in particular the Kurds) and nationalist centralists (now increasingly referred to as the “forces of 22 July”). Back in May this year, Kurdish politicians spoke in favour of postponing local elections in all disputed areas such as Kirkuk, arguing that their strong position in these areas – based on the heavily-boycotted January 2005 elections – would play to their advantage and could perhaps be a negotiating card towards a rapid settlement of territorial issues. The forces of 22 July, on the other hand, demanded more equitable power-sharing in the interim, thereby seeking to shake up Kurdish dominance in the local council and to challenge what they consider to be a number of pro-Kurdish placemen and figureheads that have been anointed by the Kurds to serve as “Arab” and “Turkmen” representatives in Kirkuk despite having little support in the communities they purport to represent.

The compromise is more than a mere postponement: it keeps Kirkuk and the issue of power sharing on the agenda, even if these issues are now lifted to the abstract realm of a parliamentary committee and with a timeline that stretches well into 2009. Also, it is noteworthy that the forces of 22 July scored at least a symbolic victory by gaining an explicit assurance that the central government would play an equally important role alongside the local authorities in facilitating the work of the parliamentary committee. The language on this disputed “fourth point” of article 24 is what held up the passage of the law for the last week or so, and in a testament to the lingering conflict between centralisers and decentralisers in the Iraqi parliament, both Kurds and ISCI (Jalal al-Din al-Saghir) had criticised the nationalists for insisting on a reference to the central government.

In the end, the role of the central government was confirmed, thus in some ways also confirming the diminishing parliamentary clout of the federalists in Iraq. This has apparently enabled many of the component elements of the 22 July forces – including MPs from Iraqiyya, Fadila and the Sadrists – to feel satisfaction about the passage of the law, as seen in a number of positive statements in the wake of the adoption of the law. Perhaps the more important result of the process – in addition to the fact that provincial elections may now actually be held in late 2008 or early 2009 – is the increased awareness, both inside and outside the Iraqi parliament, of this cross-sectarian bloc and the potential it represents. The big question now is whether the Maliki government is prepared to go ahead with free and fair elections given the increasing signs of a cohesive challenge from the opposition.

For more on the "22 July" faction, see this previous post. 

For the reasons stated above, this election law is a net positive.  Not that it’s time for unbridled optimism, however.  Prior words of caution still apply: regional elections could be rigged by incumbents, and even absent such election fraud, a considerable amount of political "shaping" has already taken place (read: targeting of the Sadrists and Awakenings members).  As with the much heralded de-Baathification law, legislative "breakthroughs" often later fail in the implementation.

Further, even entirely fair elections will not, alone, resolve the underlying sources of conflict that have fueled the violence and instability in Iraq (say, for example, Kirkuk).  But it is an encouraging step, and it should be welcomed as such.

[UPDATE: Gosh dangit.  No sooner do I praise the thing than the folks at Abu Mook come along and point out that the "open list" model used in the elections law is dubious at best.  In short, this will further exacerbate the "sectarianization" of the political scene (favoring the big parties organized around such principles) as well as the powers that be (synonymous with the previous parenthetical).]