However temporary it turns out to be, Friday's last-minute defection of five Shiite members of the Iraqi Governing Council over provisions of the interim constitution shows, once again, the clout of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and the growing gap between Washington and the chameleon Ahmed Chalabi - the close U.S. "ally" whose disinformation helped persuade some otherwise level-headed American officials to embrace the imperial adventure against Baghdad.
Chalabi was one of the five refuseniks, who, it is widely held, chose not to join the signing of the interim constitution because of Ali Sistani's opposition.
As Juan Cole
writes:
The dissidents included Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, Muhammad Bahr al-Ulum, Muwaffaq al-Rubaie, and Ahmad Chalabi. Jaafari is the head of the Shiite al-Da`wa Party, and Rubaie is ex-Da`wa from Basra. Al-Hakim heads the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which for decades was close to Iran's hardliners. Bahr al-Ulum is close to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. Ahmad Chalabi has said that he is a secularist, but is rumored actually to have become personally pious. The five met repeatedly at al-Hakim's house, and appear to have received instructions from outside the IGC to refuse to sign the law at the last minute.
Yet another embarrassment for the Bush administration, about which the president had nothing to say Saturday during his radio address. U.S. officials are sticking to the June 30 deadline for handing over power to the interim Iraqi government. A spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority called the setback a technical matter related to minority rights.
Al Jazeera
reported Saturday that after informal talks today and Sunday, the IGC plans to officially
"reconvene on Monday, 8 March, to finalise the issue and sign the law."
Perhaps so. On the other hand, this seems highly optimistic given the apparent depth of opposition expressed by Ali Sistani.
The
Washington Post reported:
The Shiites' refusal to sign was regarded by some council officials as a stark indication of the deep divisions that exist between rival religious and ethnic groups, suggesting that a consensus on the interim constitution reached earlier this week may not have been as solid as U.S. and Iraqi officials had claimed.
"The consensus has always been very fragile," said an adviser to one of the council's five Kurdish members. If the Shiites succeed in renegotiating parts of the document, known as the Transitional Administrative Law, Kurds and Sunni Arabs would also seek to make revisions, forcing more extensive revisions and delays, the adviser said.
Three aspects of the constitution are in dispute.
As Human Rights Watch
notes:
"Equal rights for Iraqi women in marriage, inheritance, and their children's citizenship should not be left in jeopardy," said LaShawn R. Jefferson, executive director of the Women's Rights Division of Human Rights Watch. "The interim constitution should explicitly guarantee these rights."
The Iraqi interim constitution, officially known as the Temporary Administrative Law, will serve as the country's fundamental legal framework until a new permanent constitution is put in place by December 31, 2005. A copy of a draft interim constitution obtained by Human Rights Watch contains a provision prohibiting discrimination based on sex. However, it does not specifically guarantee equality between men and women in at least three critical areas where women in the Middle East have historically suffered discrimination:
The interim constitution offers no explicit guarantee that women will have equal rights to marry, within marriage, and at its dissolution.
It does not explicitly guarantee women the right to inherit on an equal basis with men.
It fails to guarantee Iraqi women married to non-Iraqis the right to confer citizenship to their children.
For the hard-liners in the Ali Sistani camp, however, concern is not over lack of constitutional protection for women but rather that the document goes too far in its guarantee of women's rights. In particular, they object to a clause that says the Iraqi parliament ideally should comprise 25% women.
In addition, the hard-liners are troubled by the shape of the presidency after elections are held. The interim constitution would establish an executive branch led by a president and two vice presidents. Conventional wisdom sees a Shiite in the presidency, with a Sunni and a Kurd in the vice presidencies. Ali Sistani's dissidents prefer a five-member presidency, which they expect would give Shiites a 3-2 executive majority.
Seen by most as the key sticking point is a clause demanded by the Kurds ...
that says a permanent constitution would not go into effect if two-thirds of the voters in any three provinces rejected it, even if the document receives a nationwide majority. Because the Kurds control three provinces in the north, the provision would effectively give the Kurds veto power over the constitution. The Kurds make up about 20 percent of Iraq's population.
The Kurds had sought the provision as a bargaining chip to prevent a Shiite majority from dictating the terms of the constitution. The five Shiites want the provision deleted.
Kurds cited by the
New York Times were extremely
angry in their denunciations ...
saying they suspected that the Shiites intended to strip the Kurds of their autonomy and then secure the support of a slim majority of the country's voters for the new constitution.
Iraqi officials said the negotiations on Friday became extraordinarily bitter, with some Kurdish members accusing the Shiites of harboring a greater loyalty to Iran, the Shiite-majority country next door that supported the Shiites in their struggle against Saddam Hussein.
"These five guys showed tonight that they are Iranians, not Iraqis, and that Sistani is an Iranian," a Kurdish official said. "They say they support all Iraqis, but they are forcing all of us to accept Shiite domination."
Despite repeated avowals that he would remain above the push and pull of politics and that he would keep Islam separate from the state, Ayatollah Sistani demonstrated anew his willingness to involve himself in political debates. But this appears to be the first time that he has interceded directly on behalf of the Shiite majority. His earlier calls for direct elections were a more indirect way to flex Shiite political power.
CPA spokesman Dan Senor put the best face on Friday's breakdown:
"Democracy is an inherently messy process."
If the IGC's prediction is correct, this dispute will all be papered over in a couple of days and we can move on to the next stage of chaos. What comes into sharper focus each day is that the situation in Iraq is going to get a lot messier than Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and the rest of the Neocon Fantasy Brigade were telling everybody a mere 13 months ago.