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Last month the big
challenge was to encourage Sunni Arabs to vote in
Iraq's parliamentary election. They did, in
hearteningly high numbers. Now the challenge is to
convince the Sunnis that the results, giving them
only a modest minority of seats, reflect not
systematic fraud, but the fact that Sunni Arabs make
up only a modest minority - roughly 20 percent - of
Iraq's population.
Convincing them has been no easy task, despite
declarations by United Nations and other neutral
observers that the elections were fair, credible and
transparent. This page has emphasized the need for
Iraq's majority Shiites and their Kurdish allies to
be more inclusive in dealing with the Sunni Arab
minority. But the other side of that coin is that
the Sunnis themselves need to accept that in
democracies, majorities rule, and that the special
privileges they enjoyed under a succession of
Sunni-dominated regimes are not a birthright.
Sunni Arabs have disproportionately dominated Iraq's
political elite since even before the modern Iraqi
state was created after World War I. The Ottoman
Turks favored their fellow Sunnis. The British
worked through a Sunni family they installed on the
Iraqi throne.
The Baathist dictatorship was Sunni-led and, under
Saddam Hussein, mercilessly persecuted Shiites and
Kurds. It persecuted many Sunnis as well, but as a
group they were favored with more than their share
of scarce economic resources. Many Sunnis came to
believe, and still believe, that they are not a
minority at all and account for as much as half the
Iraqi population.
The new political power of the long-oppressed
Shiites and Kurds is proving very hard for many of
Iraq's Sunni Arabs to accept. But until they can, it
will be hard for them to find their legitimate place
in a new democratic order.
Only the Iraqis themselves can come together in a
new national compact. Their willingness to do so in
the near future is likely to depend to a large
degree on how deftly America wields its enormous
political influence during the next few weeks of
political and constitutional bargaining.
Washington needs simultaneously to press the Shiites
and Kurds to take a far more inclusive approach
toward the Sunnis than they have over the past year
and to press the Sunnis to accept the legitimacy of
the latest election results. The Sunnis need to
bargain more realistically and less menacingly for
their fair share of power. They must recognize that
they cannot continue to keep one foot in the
insurgency and the other in the political process.
The chances of weaning armed jihadists and diehard
Saddam Hussein loyalists from the insurgency any
time soon are probably small. But what matters more
to Iraq's future stability is whether Sunni Arabs
who have taken up arms over local grievances can be
brought to recognize that the most effective way to
deal with those issues is through peaceful politics,
not armed insurgency.
Sunni Arabs have every right to insist that Shiite
militias not be allowed to terrorize Sunnis, that
Shiite-run police ministries not torture Sunni
prisoners and that the Sunni middle class not be
excluded from the army, the professions and politics
through discriminatory anti-Baathist laws. They are
right to demand that oil revenues, Iraq's main
source of national wealth, be fairly shared by all
provinces, not hoarded by the Shiite- and
Kurdish-controlled provinces in which most known
deposits are located.
But the Sunnis have no legitimate claim to hold on
to the special privileges lavished on them by past
undemocratic regimes. And they surely have no right
to invoke their loss of political dominance as an
excuse for violence against government institutions
and Shiite and Kurdish Iraqis.
www.nytimes.com
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