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During the last two weeks I was almost totally paralyzed by Katrina and the death and destruction it left in its path to send anything to this website. My heart bleeds for those unfortunate Americans who perished and the tens of thousands who lost their homes and property in the areas which was the center of the hurricane's fury, to make things even more painful the tragedy happened struck only few days before the anniversary of the other calamity which has also so atrociously and murderously struck the Americans, the 9/11 tragedy. I have always had a great admiration and respect to the average American who is an extremely kind, compassionate and very friendly. I don't know what to say, I hope that those who have lost their lives will be in the kind hands of our lord and the others who remained to suffer the great loss they had I wish them all the best of luck in the coming days and that serendipity will be more kind to them in their new lives. Now, I would like to say to my American and other friends who are still interested in the equally tragic events which are taking place nowadays in Iraq that what I am going to say next is good enough and is not a waste of their time.
At last a draft of the permanent constitution for Iraq was voted by the Shiites and Kurdish and few Sunnis members of the committee which has been working on the draft for almost three moths. The signing was completed during the last hours of Sunday, August 28, 2005, more than a week after the expiry of the deadline for its completion [August 15, 2005] the signed draft was sent to the national assembly which listened to it and started the proceedings to present it to the people for its ratification in a referendum scheduled for October 15, 2005. Unfortunately, the document was incomplete, major issues like federalism, the role of Islam in legislation and the distribution of the oil revenues were unsettled. The Sunnis rejected the draft and vowed to continue their opposition, but the discussions went on and on September 14 we were told that at last we have a constitution which was handed to the United Nations to print few million copies of it to be distributed amongst the people before the referendum.
The signed draft was reached after very acrimonious deliberations which actively involved the Americans from behind the scenes [the Americans always denied any active involvement in the proceedings], because of the failure of the locals to compromise and reach the necessary consensus President Bush interjected himself in the proceedings with a last minute phone call to one of the important Shiite leaders exhorting him to assist in concluding the exercise and to come out with a document acceptable to the Sunnis. The Sunnis who have been practically excluded by the Americans themselves from the nation building efforts and who have in turn almost totally boycotted the process and the last election in particular, but who were now holding a very significant trump card and were in a position very seriously threatening to the American efforts intended to build a new political structure in place of the one which was dismantled after the fall down of Saddam. The Sunnis could throw all the American efforts into the air and plunge the country into a very serious political and administrative vacuum, a very serious crisis with extremely dangerous and unpredictable consequences which might turn the country into another Yugoslavia or encourage the emergence of a new Saddam.
The 75 members of the committee to draft the constitution were drawn from the ranks of the newly elected national assembly and thus they represented only two of the three main pillars of the Iraqi society, the Kurds and the Shiite, the 3rd main component, the Sunnis were not represented in the committee because they have almost universally boycotted the January 30 elections and had a meager representation in the elected assembly. By the time the drafting committee started its work it was becoming increasingly evident that the continuing opposition of the Sunnis was endangering the whole labor so to encourage them to get involved in the nation building efforts another 15 Sunnis were added to the committee, these were to have no voting rights but this caveat was not as disastrous as it sounds, because it was agreed from the beginning that the needed charter should be arrived at by consensus and compromise between the three groups and not by voting. The participation of the Sunnis began with a very tragic incident, two of their 15 were murdered few days before the starting of the work and the others absented themselves from the proceedings but they returned few days later, the tragedy did not augur well for the committee's work and did not improve the atmosphere of the meetings or to the Sunni's attitude, and from then on the proceedings turned into long monotones and non-ending haggling between the various factions with continuing jockeying for positions and endless fights for as big a piece of the cake as possible. All the talk about the people and their interests and the need to have a constitution which guarantees the rights of all the Iraqis was nothing but blabbering and rhetoric, but there were very significant differences between the positions of the big players.
The Kurds were the most assured, they were very secure in their position having been for the last 15 years practically independent from the central authority after the brutal suppression of their uprising which followed the expulsion of Saddam from Kuwait they were helped at that time by the Americans to establish a highly autonomous entity in Iraqi Kurdistan, which they have been running very efficiently during the last fifteen years.
The Shiites were in a more difficult position they were tasting the flavors of government and power after decades of exclusion and neglect, but they were inexperienced and lacked the knowledge about administration and the complexities of running a state as diverse as Iraq and most of their current leaders have been living outside the country for many years and have almost totally lost touch with the realities of post Saddam Iraq. To make things even worse for them they were badly divided into several competing wings, but they had a major asset, they had Grand Ayatollah Ali al- Sistani.
The most complex and destabilizing element in this equation were the Sunnis who represent about 25% of the population [the figures are not error free because there is no reliable census] these people have been until very recently the backbone of the previous regime with lots of privileges now they were suddenly cast by the Americans as unwanted, but now they were holding a very strong card thanks to one of the blunders of the famous Paul Bremer, the prerogative of three governorates to veto the draft of the constitution the Sunnis have four and they were in a position to turn all the efforts which has been expended in trying to build a new political structure for Iraq upside down with extremely serious and absolutely unpredictable consequences.
Once again as has very often happened during its turbulent history our country is at a very dangerous crossroad, the current situation threatens to turn Iraq into another Yugoslavia or the emergence of a new Saddam.
Dr. Najeeb Hanoudi
Sunday Sept. 18, 2005
Amman/Jordan
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