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While
a united state is looking less viable by the day,
breaking the country up could cause havoc in the
region, PAUL KORING writes
WASHINGTON - The vexed struggle to craft a
workable constitution so a democratic Iraq can make
a clean break with its bloody past may be a heroic
but ultimately pointless exercise.
As Iraq's key figures from across its diverse
political, ethnic and religious groups struggle this
weekend to meet a Monday deadline already extended
once, there are growing fears that even the
cleverest constitution won't be able to paper over
the rifts cleaving a war-torn peoples.
The stakes are high -- not just U.S. President
George W. Bush's vision of a united Iraq as a
democratic beacon for the Arab world, but also the
hope of defusing the violent insurrection
threatening to plunge the country into civil war.
The final price may be Iraq itself. Partition lurks
on the horizon, perhaps disguised initially as a
loose confederation. That might bring peace, but it
could also destabilize the entire region, as Iran,
Turkey, Syria and Saudi Arabia jockey for advantage
in the debris of former Iraq.
Any constitution that sets the stage for partition,
or any disintegration of Iraq in the absence of a
constitution, would certainly be the death knell for
Mr. Bush's vow to keep the country whole.
For years, "unified" was the mantra in Washington's
Iraq policy. "The United States supports political
and economic liberty in a unified Iraq," Mr. Bush
told the United Nations in 2002.
But "unified" now looks as shaky as the President's
original premise for war and the long-faded hopes
that Iraqis would welcome U.S. invaders as
liberators.
Partition, once unthinkable in policy circles and
certainly unmentionable as the Bush administration
shifted from one failing postwar strategy to the
next, is increasingly being seen as a possible
outcome, both inside and outside Iraq.
Senior Shia clerics, probably the most powerful
voices in all Iraq, have suggested that the oil-rich
south, home to several of Islam's holiest cities and
the long-oppressed Shia majority, wants at least as
much autonomy as the Kurds, who have lived in a
semi-independent -- albeit unrecognized -- state
sprawled across the green and mountainous north for
more than a decade.
Iraq, forged by the British from the war-torn scrap
of the collapsed Ottoman empire, survived as a
single state only because of the iron fists of
monarchs and, in more recent decades, former
dictator Saddam Hussein.
Despite that, there is a fear that its
disintegration could trigger unpredictable
consequences for all of its uneasy neighbours --
Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and
Iraq. Some critics now say that the policy pledge of
trying to keep Iraq whole was always doomed. "Iraq
is the last, multiethnic state, left over from the
First World War," said Peter Galbraith, a former
U.S. ambassador with experience in both the Balkans
and Iraq.
"Democracy killed the Soviet Union, it killed
Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia and it will kill
Iraq," he said in an interview from Baghdad.
"A managed breakup is not easy, but it will be less
violent than a forced and unhappy union," said Mr.
Galbraith, now a senior diplomatic fellow at the
Washington-based Center for Arms Control.
Whether Iraqis solve the current constitutional
conundrum, the forces tearing the country apart may
be too strong for any document to contain.
A host of issues, ranging from whether the new Iraq
should be a republic or an "Islamic republic," to
the role, if any, of sharia law, bedevil drafters.
But the big issue is what price the Shia majority
and the already autonomous Kurds are willing pay to
placate the Sunni minority, who have lost the
75-year-domination of Iraq power structures.
The Sunnis have little leverage, save perhaps the
grim reality that they will remain the embittered
minority in which the insurgency thrives.
"Any finished document may be virtually
meaningless," said Ivan Eland, senior fellow and
director of the Center on Peace and Liberty at the
right-wing Independent Institute.
He doubts any document can prevent Iraq from coming
apart. Worse, he said, he believes the window for a
peaceful breakup has already closed. "It's too late
for a controlled partition," he said.
Others are less gloomy. But they also warn that a
decentralized, perhaps even confederal state is the
only hope for a stable Iraq.
"The paradox is the only way to keep the country
together is to make it as decentralized as
possible," said Leslie Gelb, president emeritus at
the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations.
By some measures, postwar Iraq is already three
nations. The Shia south, oil-rich home to the holy
cities of Karbala and Najaf, is a mostly calm region
secured by local militias largely loyal to powerful
clerics. It is also increasingly religious, shedding
the secular sheen that characterized Sunni rule from
the centre.
Nascent Kurdistan occupies the north, which has
survived since the end of the Persian Gulf war and
is now thriving as Kurds secure control of Kirkuk,
the northern oil capital. It is also mostly quiet,
secured by legions of seasoned peshmerga fighters.
Neither south nor north are yet close to happy,
functioning societies, but both are far better off
than in the years of Saddam Hussein's brutal
oppression.
Iraq is seized by violence only in the centre:
Baghdad, and the mostly Sunni towns to the west and
beyond in the vast, mostly unpopulated desert
stretching to Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. There,
more than 130,000 U.S. troops and a similar number
of newly created, not yet fully trained, Iraqi
police and soldiers are failing to quell an
insurgency.
In Baghdad, where Kurds, Sunnis and Shia have
intermingled for centuries, partition seems as
impossible as it did in Sarajevo. But as violence
increases -- more than 1,500 people in Baghdad died
violently last month -- a sad exodus is stripping
the capital of its multiethnic mix.
Many rich Shiites and Sunnis have already decamped,
some to neighbouring countries. No reliable figures
exist, but foreign observers also claim many Baghdad
Kurds have headed north.
Even those with the most at stake in seeing a
successful constitutional settlement and a
functioning federal Iraq aren't convinced that it
will work.
"Federalism is a way to integrate Iraqi Kurdistan
into Iraq," says Jalal Talabani, Iraq's current
President and a Kurd.
"If it works, great, and if Iraqi Kurds start
benefiting from the state of Iraq, then you'll
probably hear the nationalistic voices, the Kurdish
nationalistic voices, quieting down and actually be
happy being part of Iraq. But . . . if Kurds do not
benefit from the state of Iraq, then why should they
be condemned . . . to live in [it]?"
Even the most optimistic see a federal state as a
least-worst solution. The key tradeoff is whether
the Sunni minority accepts its fall from omnipotence
in exchange for decent living standards fuelled by
oil from the Shia-dominated south and
Kurdish-dominated north.
"If the Sunnis don't sign up to this dispensation .
. . they will be stuck with the status quo, or less,
in an oil-less, landlocked, Sunnistan of their own
making," Bartle Breese Bull, a historian with
extensive experience in Iraq, wrote earlier this
month in The Wall Street Journal.
Overshadowing the enormous difficulties of gluing
Iraq together are fears that the disintegration of
the country would trigger terrible and unpredictable
consequences.
Doomsayers fear an Iraqi breakup will roil an
already troubled region. The prospect that a Shia
statelet in the south would soon become allied with
-- perhaps even subsumed by -- the theocracy of
co-religionists in neighbouring Iran remains a major
worry for Washington and Saudi Arabia.
Meanwhile Turkey, Iran and Syria -- all with their
own restive Kurdish populations -- remain staunchly
opposed to an independent Kurdistan, although
whether one would ease, rather than foment,
secessionist sentiments in other countries is an
open question.
And an impoverished Sunnistan in the centre could
replace the Taliban-run Afghanistan as a locus and
training ground for Islamic radicals.
The counterargument is that an agreed separation
funded by shared oil revenue, rather than a messy,
violent divorce, might spawn three, functioning and
civil democracies in the Middle East, much as the
successor states in Yugoslavia have demonstrated
remarkable democratic and economic progress in the
decade since the guns were silenced.
Iraq divided
Negotiators in Iraq are trying to hammer out a
proposed constitution to meet a Monday deadline. But
talks have been hampered by lingering disagreements
over key issues. Perhaps most pressing is the extent
of autonomy that will be granted to the key ethnic
and religious groups in the country - Shiite,
Sunnite and Kurd.
ETHNIC GROUPS (as a percentage of total
population)
Shia Arab: 60%
Sunni Arab: 20%
Kurd: 15%
Other (Turkman, Assyrian): 5%
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