Democracy and the Iraqi workers

Submitted by Anon on 12 January, 2005 - 5:59

There will be no working-class socialist presence in Iraq’s elections on 30 January — assuming that they do take place. The Worker-communist Party of Iraq is boycotting the elections. The Communist Party of Iraq is running, but under the banner of a “People’s Union” with a political platform limited to the “stage” of “building the democratic establishments for a united, pluralistic and federal Iraq”; and it says it is doing that only because Shia and Sunni Islamists refused to establish a broader coalition with the CP (Al-Sharq al-Awsat, 29 December, translated by BBC Monitoring Service).

The elections will be dominated by communal headcounts. The Dawa Party, the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), and others have formed a Shia grand coalition. Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army is not participating in the election, but is tacitly backing the Shia coalition. The two big Kurdish parties, the Kurdish Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, have another coalition.

Among Sunni Arabs there is more variety, but the turnout is likely to be very low. In many Sunni Arab areas the election commission may not be able to persuade anyone to staff polling stations, or go to whatever polling stations are open.

In the National Assembly election, coalitions and parties will get a share of the 275 assembly seats in proportion to their total vote across the whole of Iraq. This makes it likely that a lot of the 81 smaller lists will get at least a few seats, but the two big coalitions look likely to dominate.

The Shia parties are anxious for the elections. Since about 60% of the population is Shia, they reckon their coalition can become by far the biggest force in the National Assembly. Shia Muslims will gain a decisive voice in Iraq’s politics for the first time ever. All previous regimes there — including that of the Ottoman Empire, before Iraq was defined as a state — have been Sunni-dominated.

For the same reason, many Sunni Arabs fear the elections. The Kurdish parties — based on a Kurdish population which is mostly Sunni, but much more secular than many sections of the Arab population — are happy to see the old Sunni Arab elite relegated, but wary about the Shia parties’ desire for an Islamic state.

The Iraqi Islamic Party (Iraqi branch of the Muslim Brotherhood), which has been the Sunni-Arab-based party most cooperative with the USA, said on 27 December that it was not boycotting the elections but “withdrawing” from them because “the security situation does not make it possible for Sunnis to vote”. The IIP had said after the November attack on Fallujah that it would withdraw from the elections, but presented a list of candidates for the official opening of the election campaign on 15 December. It is not clear whether the new “withdrawal” means that the IIP candidates will be off the ballot papers.

But Sunni-Islamist and neo-Ba’thist bombings and assassinations — against US forces and Interim Government people, and also against Shias as Shias — are increasing, and likely to increase further in the run-up to 30 January.

On 27 December 2004 a suicide bomb attack on the SCIRI headquarters in Baghdad killed at least 13 people, and nearly killed its target, SCIRI leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim. So far SCIRI and other Shia-based militias, keen to see the election go ahead, have enforced a policy of not retaliating.

To reject the elections out of hand, as distinct from criticising, warning, and exposing limitations, seems wrong to me. A free and sovereign Iraq cannot be achieved without a political process which creates a more or less accepted political representation for the peoples of the country. Since it is impossible to have the democracy before the democracy, any elections to constitute a democratic political representation — or a half-democratic, or even quarter-democratic, one — must by definition be held without a previous, established, stable background of democratic political life.

Elections are not a cure-all. They can create no functioning democracy — not even a bourgeois democracy, a “pluto-democracy” — unless sufficient social and political preconditions exist in “civil society”. But it is impossible to create a democracy without some sort of elections. And even elections which are only marginally democratic can be an opportunity to promote the organisations and networks in civil society needed for functioning democracy.

The Worker-communist Party of Iraq calls for “bringing back civility to the society… freedom, security, and secular government”, without explaining who will achieve these things and how they will gain the political authority to achieve them. If a boycott of the 30 January elections had a plausible chance of forcing the US occupying forces to organise more democratic elections, it could be a sound tactic. But that seems unlikely.

The polls on 30 January will elect councils in 18 provinces; renew the Kurdish Parliament; and elect a National Assembly which will form yet another Interim Government, to formulate a definitive new constitution under which new elections are due to be held in December 2005, at which point the UN mandate of the US/UK occupying forces in Iraq is due to expire.

The 30 January elections have many procedural limitations — large deposits required from candidates; an unelected election commission, whose members have not even been named, having the right to exclude candidates; the new government being tied by a US-written interim constitution which enshrines the occupation authority’s privatisation decrees. But the bigger problem is the ruination into which Iraqi politics have been pushed by decades of Ba’thist totalitarianism, three wars, widespread pauperisation, and the US government’s arrogance, brutality and recklessness.

The US government’s insistence that reconstruction in Iraq must be by way of contracts handed out to mostly US-based multinationals, and privatisation, has left the country with well over 50% unemployment; a welter of corruption; and electricity and water supplies, hospitals, schools, and communications still not functioning properly. The mockery of “liberation from above” has nurtured the Islamist and neo-Ba’thist resistance militias; and they, in turn, have perpetuated the chaos. Then, of course, people turn to the mosques and to the gangsters and militias.

Even with a very poor quality of democracy, the elections could be a significant opportunity for socialists to rally support and help constitute a “third force” against both the US/UK occupiers and the Islamists. Constituent Assemblies — elected assemblies with powers to decide a new constitution — were a major demand in many 20th century struggles against colonial rule or dictatorships. Some of the most effective ever radical electioneering — by German Marxists between the 1870s and World War One — was done in conditions when the assemblies they were standing for had very limited powers (the Reichstag) or unequal voting rights for workers and the rich (the Prussian parliament), or the Marxist party itself was illegal (between 1878 and 1890).

To run working-class socialist candidates in the Iraqi elections would be hard. Three Sunni Islamist militias issued a death threat on 30 December against anyone taking part in the “dirty farce” of un-Islamic elections. Osama bin Laden has announced a similar threat.

In Shia-majority and Kurdish-majority areas the supervision of the polling stations will largely be in the hands of militias attached to the dominant political coalitions which have been incorporated into the Interim Government’s army and police. The US and UK occupation forces are unlikely to intervene to defend the rights of leftists harassed by the Shia Islamists or the Kurdish warlord parties. International observers are very reluctant to commit themselves to attend.

The Worker-communist Party of Iraq calls for a referendum on independence for the Kurdish part of Iraq (a demand also backed by a 1.7 million-strong non-party Kurdish petition presented to the UN in December), and denounces the elections as “a puppet show to legitimise the US policy in Iraq and the future Islamic nationalist government approved by the US”.

The US wants the elections to produce plausible results. Even if the USA’s rulers had not already been convinced of the unviability of direct colonial rule by decades of 20th century history, their experience since April 2003 would have left no doubt. The USA wants the elections to produce a government which is safely pro-US but can let US forces withdraw at least partially.

But a victory for the Sunni Islamists who denounce polling stations as “centres of atheism” or who, like Osama bin Laden, consider the procedure “pagan” because it does not recognise Islam as the sole source for legislation, would be more reactionary than anything the USA is likely to do.

And the USA did not invade Iraq in order to get an “Islamic nationalist government” there. The US neo-conservatives, intoxicated by their victory against the USSR in the Cold War and pixilated by the belief that the whole world really wants to be “Americanised” and any recalcitrants can quickly be bombed into compliance, thought they could easily get a congenial government in Iraq. They were wrong.

The USA’s chief favourites before April 2003 among Iraqi exile politicians, Iyad Allawi and Ahmed Chalabi, are now floundering. Allawi is running his own minor slate and hoping for a post-election deal. Chalabi has joined the Shia-Islamist coalition. A US official told the Financial Times (2 December) that the USA is now resigned to “a limited theocracy” as the least bad outcome it can plausibly get in Iraq. SCIRI wants rule by Islamic clerics on the Iranian model, and other elements in the Shia coalition differ only in wanting the clerics’ role in establishing an Islamic state to be one of instruction and influence rather than direct legal control. The probable democratic victors on 30 January want Iraq’s major political decisions to be taken not by democracy but by deduction from Islamic sacred texts or by direct decree of Islamic clerics.

The USA’s mechanism for keeping the theocracy “limited” will be to insist on a broad-based coalition government after the 30 January elections. But there is no guarantee it will remain limited; nor that the elections will carry sufficient credit for the government to be able to start damping down the Islamist bombings and assassinations.

One of the Shia coalition’s main political planks is the setting of a date for the withdrawal of US/UK forces. Chalabi, a man who encouraged the USA to invade in 2003, telling them their troops would be greeted with joy, now talks about how the USA “changed the liberation process into an occupation” (interview with Al-Sharqiyah TV, Baghdad, 26 December, as translated by the BBC Monitoring Service), and says getting a definite date for withdrawal must be “the first priority” of the new government.

Whether the US will withdraw even partially by the UN-set date of December 2005, or any time soon, is another matter. None of the major Iraqi parties has a sharply nationalist (let alone radical) economic programme, and the USA may be confident that IMF restrictions will keep Iraq fairly much geared into global-market economics. But the USA’s invasion was not just about economics. It was about world strategy, and having a reliable pro-US government as the new big power of the Gulf region.

The USA will be reluctant to withdraw for fear that any coalition government arrangements it can patch together will then unravel, pitching Iraq into a civil war from which a full-strength Islamic-clerical state on the Iranian model will emerge in control of the southern part of the country. And the new coalition government may well want US/UK military support against a continuing escalation of Sunni Islamist and neo-Ba’thist attacks.

Working-class opposition in Iraq has been squeezed and set back by the successive confrontations since April between US forces and Islamists. It has revived on the economic level, despite continuing attacks, like the shelling of the Transport and Communications Workers’ Union office in Baghdad by Islamists on 26-27 December.

350 trade unionists attended a successful conference of the Federation of Workers’ Councils and Unions in Basra at the end of November.

Basra power workers have threatened a strike for higher wages, and Nasiriyah power workers have struck. Soft-drinks workers in Baghdad have also been on strike for higher wages. In Kut, textile workers have been on strike for higher wages, despite four of them being wounded and eleven arrested by Interim government forces.

The future of democracy in Iraq depends on those organised workers — helped by support and solidarity from the international labour movement — gaining the clout and confidence to be able to develop a large political voice of their own.

By Martin Thomas

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