The Assyrian Democratic Organization
MS. PLETKA: [In progress] –and we have with us today Rend Rahim Francke. She is a founding member and executive director of the Iraq Foundation, which is a nonprofit organization that promotes democracy and human rights in Iraq. We also have Emanual Kamber, who’s deputy chairman of the Central Council of the Iraqi National Council and a professor of physics at Western Michigan University–thank you for coming all this way. And last but not least we have Efraim Karsh, who is professor and head of the Mediterranean Studies Program at King’s College at the University of London. And one programmatic note, we were supposed to be joined by Salem Chalabi to discuss these issues as well. He has been detained somewhere in the Middle East, on the way back from northern Iraq. We regret that he’s not here today. But each of our presenters is going to speak for about 10 to 15 minutes, perhaps a little longer. And what we’ll do is have each of our presenters speak and then perhaps afterwards we can go to questions and answers. And with that, I’m going to turn to Rend. Thank you so much. MS. FRANCKE: Thank you very much, Dannie. I apologize for being late. I’m not a constitutional scholar, and so I approach this subject a little amateurishly. But I have looked at successive Iraqi constitutions and looked at other constitutions, and more importantly, perhaps, I’ve been immersed in Iraqi politics for the last 12 years and I know some of the problems that we face in Iraq. And I want to address those problems as they might be dealt with in a constitution. And actually, the first thing I thought about, and something I perhaps talked about here at AEI in October–but I certainly talked about it recently–is that Iraq is a country that needs a mission statement. What is Iraq about? In a sense, many countries are about something. Emphatically, the United States is about something. I can think of many of the democracies in Europe being about something. And I think Iraq, having, as it were, drifted the last 80 years, really needs to be about something. I recall the first the opening words of the American Constitution, which says “We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union.” The Constitution of the United States came as a late stage after the Articles of Confederation. The Articles of Confederation were obviously lacking and inadequate for the formation of a more perfect union, and so the Constitution in 1787–am I right?–the Constitutional Convention met. The overarching principle, the overarching drive behind the Constitution was in order to form the more perfect union which was lacking in the earlier framework. So I thought Iraq needs an overarching purpose; maybe not just one, but perhaps a number of overarching purposes that will guide constitution-making. And I identified a few–perhaps too many, but a lot of things kept coming to my mind. The two major ones that I think Iraq needs to think about in making a constitution, the two major missions, are in a sense not quite diametrically opposite but pull in different directions. But they’re both things that Iraq does not have and needs to have. One of them is to ensure that different ethnicities can coexist in peace, that no single group has an overriding power over the others, and that the interests of all the groups are in balance. This not only entails recognition of cultural rights and so on, but the notion of balance among the ethnic groups is extremely important. There should not be an overpowering of any ethnicity in any part of Iraq over any other ethnicity. And I include in that, for example, an overpowering of the Kurdish ethnicity over other minorities in northern Iraq or Iraqi Kurdistan. So, the notion of balance and co-equality of the ethnicities is an important issue. The other imperative is to create a sense of common Iraqi citizenship. This has certainly been lacking in Iraq, the sense of strong Iraqi identity, a strong citizenship of the individual vis-a-vis the state. This is not about groups. The second imperative that I have is not about group identities, group equality and so on; it is about the relationship of the citizen, of the individual to the state. We do not have a strong relationship between individual and state. The sense of citizenship is lacking. And a constitution has in some way to create that sense of citizenship. I have no idea how, but it has to be done. It could be done in a bill of rights, but I don’t think that’s sufficient. And I will perhaps go into a little bit of that if I have time. And the fourth requirement, also arising from Iraq’s history, is that we are a country that has been, not just for the last 35 years but for longer than that, we have had a tendency to fall under concentrated power. In other words, either an individual or a group of individuals has always been able to dominate Iraqi politics to the exclusion of other groups, other individuals, and so on. This did not just happen with Saddam Hussein. It certainly happened in the era of Abdul-Karim Qassim, who was called elazahim al aughad [ph], “the unitary leader,” and many other phrases of the sort. And certainly for five years he was the singular unitary leader of Iraq. Before that, I would suggest–and perhaps Professor Karsh may agree with me–that although there was more diversity, more sharing and so on, but Iraqi politics was dominated by a handful of individuals, particularly Nuri Said. And in fact, up until 1958 it was a game of musical chairs in which a number–a few politicians tried to steal that chair from Nuri Said, would succeed for short periods, but would fail in most other periods. So this pooling of power has to be broken and dissipated. These, I think, are the four principal guiding elements of a constitution. To come to the question of the distribution of power and the equality of the groups, we go back to the issue that Dannie mentioned earlier, which was the federalism, or federation. I’m not too hung up on words. It can be called federalism or it can be called something else. What we do need is a very strong devolution of power from the center. Iraqis and Dr. Emanual Kamber and I were involved in the Democratic Principles Working Group, which involved the report of the transition to democracy. He and I know that we had very serious debates about federalism within that working group. The perhaps single most important issue was should this be an ethnically based federation, ethnic religious federation, or should it be a geographic territorially based federation. And the ethnic/religious angle said, well, it should be Kurdish-Arab. It was then refined to Kurdish-Sunni-Shia. Most of the people in that working group said no, no, no, that’s not good. What that means is a ghettoization of the major population groups of Iraq. What we need is a regional geographically based federation. Even though we recognize it in some areas, in a lot of areas in Iraq, that geography will coincide with specific groups, population groups, but the principle is important. It has to be geographically based. Then, of course, we go into should it be five, six, seven, 18, et cetera. It doesn’t really matter; I don’t think that is important. But what we do need is to give people at the grassroots level much more power for running their own affairs. And that would include local assemblies, local councils, a local legislative capacity, a local capacity to levy taxes, to run police departments, and so on–something very much along the lines of the American state and county system.And when I talk about federation, I really don’t mean just a federation that is, again, top-heavy. I do mean that within each federated region there should be a further devolution of authority to the sub-regions within that big federated state. We have now a system of governorates, mohafa vat [ph]. Within each governorate there are–there are 18 governorates and there are 92 of what’s called qavah [ph]–county, if you want. So what I envisage is not only a devolution from Baghdad, the center, to the governorates, but a further devolution from the governorates to the qavah, or county level. I think also to maintain the federalist structure and to maintain the balance between the groups that I talked about, we must have a lower chamber and an upper chamber, as there is in the United States. And this upper chamber must have equal representation regardless of the size of the jurisdiction or the group. And I think this upper chamber should not only be representatives from the governorates or the federated provinces, but also have representatives of ethnic and religious minorities. This representation must be equal; in the upper chamber it has to be equal. When you come to the lower chamber, this is where we’re going to have electoral problems. There are a few, not many–I know at least of two–electoral proposals, papers written on a proposed electoral system in Iraq. One of them has been written by an Iraqi professor, Adeed Dawisha, who I very much hoped would be here with us. In the lower house, there will be the danger–and I know many, many Iraqis will argue for some system of proportional representation. And this scares me to death. This is a Lebanon-ization of the political system in Iraq. This kind of system has a way of getting entrenched, never being protean, never changing, eventually becoming totally unrepresentative and leading to what Lebanon was led to in 1975. I am opposed to this system of proportional representation, however with a caveat. There are some minority groups, and I’m thinking, for example, of perhaps not so much the Assyrians or the Turkoman, but I’m thinking of much smaller groups such as the Yazidis, such as the Sabaeans in Iraq, who are concentrated geographically but not in such large numbers that they could ever have representation in a parliament in wider electoral districts. We may consider some set-aside seats for these very small minority groups. Now, I know that the system is practiced in some countries, and I’m not quite sure where–it may be that in–I wonder if it’s practiced in Israel. I’m not at all sure. In Pakistan? Oh, dear. We’ll have to rethink that. Well, we take what is good and leave out what is not so good. But something like that may be workable. Do I have more time? Yeah. I talked about the rights of citizens. And of course I think a bill of rights should be at the heart of an Iraqi constitution. We talked, again, in this Democratic Principles Working Group about what kind of bill of rights. There was a general consensus that there was absolutely nothing wrong with the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, and that Iraq should simply adopt that as part of its constitutional framework. We did not have that declaration with us when we said that, so we might want to look at it, but certainly a very strong bill of rights is required in the constitution. However, if you look at the current Iraqi constitution–which, by the way, is a 1970 provisional constitution, but it is the one that is operative in Iraq–it has all kinds of nice clauses about protection of human rights, about prevention of torture, that torture is illegal. The question is how do you ensure that a bill of rights or indeed article of the constitution is actually respected by a government? There’s no assurance that a government will come into power that will respect this constitution. There aren’t very many good answers, because a truly democratic system, where people have rights and these rights are observed, is not just a top-down system. It is not a system that is simply put in place by a government through a constitution, through a bill of rights, through the court system. It is also a bottom-up system. It is only where the top-down and the bottom-up are of equal strength and value that government can be checked and, where it transgresses, there are voices that can stop it. So I think that ultimately for the protection of rights you have to have a strong civil society. But in terms of a constitution, in addition to a bill of rights, Iraq must have a supreme court. The report that we prepared–in fact, I was responsible for the section that talked about the need for a supreme court. And the supreme court has to have a dual function. Now, we may eventually think about splitting the supreme court, but there are two functions that are essential–or three. Sorry. They keep multiplying. One of them, of course, is arbitrating between the different agencies of a central government, or government; or arbitrating between different federated governments. The second one is to act as a court of appeal for individuals who have been wronged by a government agency. I’m not sure how this works. We suggested that the vehicle for this should be an office of an ombudsman, that is also established in the constitution, so that it is the responsibility of the office of the ombudsman to look into grievances and complaints and to refer them to this court system, to this court of appeal. But certainly there has to be a mechanism by which citizens have a vehicle for complaining and for redress. Now, I may be putting too much weight on a single institution and it may be that in the end one has to separate these institutions and have them as separate entities. But some constitutionally formed system of complaint, grievance, and redress has to be provided for. Finally, I thought a little more about the question of the pooling of power, and of course a federated system is one way of preventing that concentration of power in one city, one group, ultimately perhaps even in one individual. Iraqis who are going to be writing a constitution are going to have to think about, well, is it going to be a presidential system, is it going to be a parliamentary system, is it going to be a prime ministerial system, such as you have in Britain, for example, or indeed in France. A presidential system I think of as being the United States, although that’s–presidential system, sorry, is in France; prime minister is in Britain. I’m sorry. I’m really treading thin ice here because I’m not at all sure of my constitutional background. But I would argue that a presidential system is the last thing that Iraq wants, that you certainly–you may want to have a president, but this should be only a titular head of the state and not the head of the government. There’s a difference between the two. You might want to go with a system of a prime ministership and a cabinet, but again, I do worry about that because–I don’t remember, but from my study of Iraqi history, we had a situation in pre-1958 Iraq where the prime minister was extremely powerful and once he made an alliance with the court, which was most often the case–in fact, the court was very much the weaker party; the prime minister was often the stronger party. Between them, the prime minister and the king, or the regent, could dissolve–could and did dissolve parliament over and over and over again; whereas it was very unusual for parliament to have a vote of no confidence in the government and be able to throw out the government. I fear that a strong prime minister and a strong cabinet is going to overpower parliament and therefore, again, we will actually have power pooled in a group of three, one, maybe five people, to the detriment of the elected members of parliament. Thank you very much, and I hope we can have a good discussion. MR. KAMBER: Thank you, Rend. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I will actually talk on a totally different subject. I would like to emphasize mainly the problem of Assyrians. So first of all, I would like to thank the Institute for allowing me this opportunity to present the vision of our Assyrian people in a democratic post-Saddam Iraq. The Assyrians are also known as Chaldeans and Syriacs. Assyrians are the original inhabitants of today’s Iraq. Most of you are familiar with the numerous contributions made by the Assyrian nation to modern civilization. Some of you may not realize that there still exist today remnants of Assyrians living in their homeland. Since the fall of our last empire some 2,500 years ago, we have lived in the land of our forefathers with Arabs, Kurds, Persians, Turkomans, and others. Our people were among the first to accept Christianity, and over the centuries we have maintained our national identity, language, culture, and religion through great suffering and sacrifice. The Assyrian peoples are the indigenous Christian people of Mesopotamia. There are approximately 1.5 to 2 million Assyrians living in Iraq, and probably constitute the third-largest demographic population in the country. However, the Iraqi government does not officially recognize the Assyrians as a people or as a nation. The present constitution only recognizes Arabs and Kurds, referring to Assyrians as a Christian minority or Assyrian sect. Sometimes they also refer to the Assyrian people as Syriac-speaking people. On other occasions, they call us Christian, Arab-Christian, and Kurdish-Christian. The Assyrian people have long suffered because of their religious and cultural identity. They have been deprived of their home and have been victim to several massacres and other kinds of oppression over centuries. The Assyrians have been subjected to systematic attempts by the fascist regime to Arabize them. Recently, the Iraqi government has also forced the Assyrians, the Kurds, and the Turkomans to sign national correction forms that require them to renounce their national identities and declare themselves to be Arabs. Assyrians, who have suffered national and political persecution and other brutal aspects of the dictatorial regime were forced to leave their homeland and seek refuge in other countries. Today, a majority of American citizens of Iraqi descent are actually Assyrians. There are about 300,000 Assyrians living in America. What I mean by “Assyrian”–usually they call themselves by different names, like Chaldean and Syrian and so on. Assyrians have been in the United States for some time, but maintain their national aspiration and link of affection with their homeland. Assyrians in Iraq deserve specific attention because they are the oppressed among Iraqis, have been denied their human rights and equality, and suffering discrimination living as second-class citizens. We share the suffering of all Iraqis under Saddam’s dictator rules. Along with our Kurdish, Shiite, and Turkoman brothers, however, we are further oppressed because we are Christian. The Assyrian people in Iraq who have made great sacrifice in opposing the regime of Saddam Hussein will continue their struggle for a unified democratic and secular government that constitutes principles of democracy and human rights. Assyrian representatives of political organizations and Assyrian rights activists attended different Iraqi opposition meetings, or more recently, London meetings in December of last year. Assyrians participated–although they were under-represented–actively with all Iraqi patriotic and democratic forces toward the end result of creating a unified Iraqi national leadership to topple the regime of Saddam Hussein and establish a democratic regime that would allow our Assyrian people the opportunity to participate in the administration and political organization in Iraq. Nowadays there is much talk about changing the regime in Iraq, and especially the talk of Washington’s determination to end Saddam’s regime. Talk of such action becomes more serious, and attack is probably inevitable after the president’s speech on Wednesday, February 26, at this institute. Actually, the objective of the crisis is no longer regime change, but the liberation of the Iraqi people.How will the political and human rights concerns of the Assyrians factor into any future Iraqi political equation? In other words, would we be dealt with as Iraqis or would we be regarded as second-class citizens? Although the future of the political system in Iraq after the passing of the current dictatorship is the sole responsibility of the Iraqi people, we believe that an Iraq constituted on principles of democracy, respect for human rights, and recognition of legitimate national rights of all elements of its entire people, including our Assyrian people, will be a peaceful Iraq dedicated to stability and prosperity in the region and the world. Recently, the Kurdistan Democratic Party, KDP, drafted a new constitution for Iraq, calling for Iraq to become a united federal state called the United Republic of Iraq. According to this plan, Iraq would be comprised of two territories, or federated states–Rend mentioned, actually, about it–one in which the majority are Arabs, and the other the majority are Kurds. The proposed draft states that Iraq consists of mainly Arabs and Kurds and other minorities. The draft fails to mention Assyrians and Turkomans, and tries to put them under the word “minority,” or squeeze them under the word of “minority.” The proposal should stress that Iraq comprises many national or religious groups, including Arab, Kurds, Assyrians, Turkomans, Yizidis, Mendais [sp], Armenians, and so on. In addition, the draft actually fails to address the basic national rights of the Assyrian people. Federalism should not be for only one part of Iraq, but for the whole country. And it should not be only for the Kurds, but also for Shiites, Turkomans, and the Assyrians. Our objection to these and other issues within the draft does not mean that we reject the aspiration of the Kurdish people and their right to express the formula they envision to create Iraqi national unity. I should stress here that the Assyrians are represented in the local government and parliament of the Kurdish Autonomous Region of northern Iraq through the Assyrian Democratic Movement as a member of the Kurdistan Patriotic Front. Furthermore, the communique of the Iraqi opposition groups presented by Mr. Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, representative of the Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, and approved by all the Iraqi opposition groups–that’s what we call G-6–attending the Washington meeting with Vice President Cheney–in it Mr. al-Hakim says, “Our people are eager for a fair and elected government with participation of all Iraqi opposition segments from Arabs, Kurds, and Turkoman, from Sunni and Shia, and the rest of minorities.” Again, the Assyrians and the Christians of Iraq were ignored. It is thus to his credit that President Bush in his October 7th speech to the United Nations General Assembly formally addressed Iraqi oppression over the Assyrians. The existence of different identities and cultures may create practical problems and challenges in the near future unless a lot of attention is paid to ethnicity and the equation of diversity. To avoid minority conflict in the future, any government must have different autonomous regions within the context of an integrated and sovereign Iraqi state. This will guarantee the legitimate national and administrative rights for all Iraqi ethnic communities. This will be absolutely necessary to the security and survival of the Assyrians in Iraq–or Assyrians of Iraq. The establishment of such an Assyrian area would allow greater local Assyrian controls within an integrated sovereign Iraqi state. Such an Assyrian area would allow for political education or linguistic, religious, and cultural expression. In a questionnaire that was set up by the State Department for members of the Democratic Principles Working Group, which Rend mention about it, there were points concerning the advantages and disadvantages of a federal democratic republic. Most of the participants answered that federalism would abolish dictatorship, minimize central government, and consolidate Iraqi unity. As for the disadvantages of federalism, the answers centered on fears of minority conflict, possibility of separation, and possibility of intervention by neighboring countries. And today, the population of the Kurdish Autonomous Region of northern Iraq fear what they have achieved may be endangered not only by Saddam’s army, but also by neighboring states’ armed forces. I think it’s very important to protect them, in particular against the incursion from–interference from Iran and Turkey. Finally, the other important question was whether federal units should be defined ethnically, geographically, or by using a hybrid system. In our case–I mean the Assyrians–the federal units should be absolutely based on ethnicity–I don’t agree with you on that–because of the abnormal demographic situation of Assyrians in Iraq due to their displacement, which was enforced upon them by the Iraqi government. We don’t have really an area where the Assyrians are concentrated so we could have a geographic advantage of it. If federalism is not based on ethnicity, however, then Assyrians would support the establishment of a unified democratic, secular, pluralistic, and parliamentarian government. That would guarantee human rights and equality for all citizens irrespective of their ethnic background or religion–an Iraq that’s multi-ethnic and based on the rule of law, an Iraq that enjoys full sovereignty and territorial integrity. In addition, we demand that the future government of Iraq recognize the Assyrian nation constitutionally as one of the principal nations, or ethnic groups, within the political framework of the Republic of Iraq. Now, the League of Nations mandate countries agreed on Iraq admission in 1932, with reservations dealing mainly with the rights of minorities. The Iraqi government presented this report regarding minorities to the League, in which they guaranteed the right of all Iraqi citizens regardless of their race, religion, language, or nationality. None of this happened in reality. On the contrary, one year later, the new Iraqi government launched an anti-Assyrian campaign in which scores of Assyrian civilians were massacred–this was in 1933, August 1933–with their villages set on fire. The main problem of the indigenous Assyrian people is that they have not been accorded self-determination, a right that is expressed in the United Nations declaration on the rights of indigenous people. So who is going to serve guard and protect the Assyrian in post-Saddam Iraq? I think official constitutional recognition for the Assyrian people would be an important catalyst for democracy and human rights in Iraq. And without such an improvement, there will be no democracy at all. Assyrians wish to live in peace and prosperity and enjoy full equality with our Arab, Kurdish, and Turkoman brothers. In an atmosphere of mutual respect, Assyrians wish to contribute to development of greater tolerance and diversity in a sovereign, democratic, and secular Iraq. In conclusion, let me emphasize that division of Assyrian, Chaldean, and Syriac people in a post-Saddam democratic government among other things includes equality, human rights, constitutional recognition; representation in a democratic, secular, multi-ethnic government; the right to return to their homes and their lands; being allowed to practice and preserve their language, culture, and customs; to be free of political, religious persecution; and to be granted the same national rights of autonomy and self-determination afforded any other group within Iraq. Thank you. MR. KARSH: One of the advantages of being the last one is that many of the things that you want to say have already been said, so it allows you to be more concise. Still, I’ll try to emphasize a few major points. Like Mrs. Francke, I’m not a legal expert, so I won’t talk about the legal implications and aspects of constitutionalism, but rather the political conditions that make or break this idea. In the final account, the Soviet Union used to have a very nice constitution. I mean, if you look at it, there was no fundamental difference between it and the American constitution. And still, I think, the Soviet Union used to be quite different from what we have over here. And as was mentioned before, the Iraqi constitution, if you read it, you have to rub your eyes. You don’t really realize that it’s the constitution of the country that has been ruled by Saddam Hussein for quite some time. It basically allows everything–free speech, free elections, free gathering, and so on and so forth. So the issue is not the constitution; the issue is the political culture, the political atmosphere, the political conditions that are behind it. If we look at the Middle East, at the total record over the past 50 years or even one century, it’s not really conducive to a successful democracy–which is, I guess, why many people are quite skeptical of the idea. According to what we read in the press, the State Department doesn’t see democracy as such a good idea, the CIA doesn’t think democracy is such a good idea. And they would like to have Saddam replaced by a mini-Saddam or a new Saddam over there, not a general that will enforce law and order –I don’t know if law, but order–in Iraq. To tell you the truth, I’ve personally been quite skeptical about the prospects of democracy in the Middle East for quite some time. And we all know the various reasonings: the Middle East hasn’t gone through the prolonged processes that the Western world has gone of secularization, democratization; this is an area where physical naked force is the ultimate arbiter; and so on and so forth. However, I think to a large extent the 11 September atrocities should be a wake-up call because it says to us that basically this is a problem that is no longer endemic to the Middle East, but it can go and spill over to engulf basically the entire world. And of course you have its manifestations in other parts of the Middle East these very days. Now, therefore, I think we should try the alternative with all the trepidation that we have. Because if you look at Iraq, for example–and Iraq has been ruled by a succession of dictators for quite some time, and even the monarchy, as was noted before, was not particularly democratic–in the final account, the Iraqi people have been basically betrayed by its political elites. It has been oppressed, repressed, and the state of Iraq, as a state, has often been brought to the verge of disintegration. Saddam Hussein himself, who many people viewed for many years as the person who could guarantee Iraq’s territorial integrity, is the person who did more than anyone else to bring Iraq to the verge of disintegration. He did it in the ’70s, when he mishandled the events in Kurdistan and there was a major uprising there supported by Iran. He did it in 1980, when he invaded Iran. He did it 10 years later as a result of the invasion of Kuwait. And in between, of course, he alienated the Shiite majority. And if Saddam Hussein, who has unquestionably been the most savage–and, in a way, able–Iraqi tyrant, didn’t manage to keep the lid on Iraq’s simmering problems, so why do we think that another one would succeed? So I think even for this reason we should try to establish Iraq on a different system now. In order for democracy to have realistic or some chance of success in Iraq, I think there are a number of conditions. The most important one is to organize or to put the country on a different footing. Because I think that much of the blame for Iraq’s problems–or, for this matter, of the wider Middle East–is the way that it was organized after the First World War. And of course we all know the stories, how the Western powers divided the Ottoman Empire into supposedly–or not supposedly–artificial entities in accordance with their own imperial interests. The fact of the matter, however, is that they did divide the Middle East. But they didn’t go only, or even mainly, the way according to their self-serving interests, but they were manipulated to a large extent by the Arab elites that were active at the time, or more specifically by the Hashemite family. The Hashemite family, which is the family that originated in the Hadjas [ph], which is the area where Islam started and also is part of what is today Saudi Arabia. The Hashemite family launched in the First World War what is commonly known as the Great Arab Revolt, despite the fact that it was not an Arab revolt because the vast majority of the Arabic-speaking people at the time didn’t participate in the revolt and were loyal to the Ottoman suzerain. However, after the war, the Hashemites managed to influence Britain to surrender to it vast territories of the defunct Ottoman Empire. And in fact, Britain established what came to be known as Jordan on behalf of one of the members of this family, Abdullah, Emir Abdullah, who later became King Abdullah. And it established Iraq on behalf of the younger brother of Abdullah, Faisal, who became Iraq’s first monarch. Now, after the war it wasn’t clear at all that Iraq was going to be established, because under the Ottoman, Iraq didn’t exist as a unified whole. There were, as we all know, three vilayets or provinces–Mosul, Basra, and Baghdad. And there was some talk after the war to establish two states, in fact–the southern part and the northern part–as independent states. Eventually, the British were pushed, you can say, or driven into the view of establishing one state. In fact, in May 1919, at the time that they already accepted the idea of unified Iraq, the British government decided to establish Iraq as a federal state comprising four provinces–the three that I mentioned before, Baghdad, Basra, and Mosul, and another one was the Euphrates. And then, if Kurdistan was to be included in Iraq–because at the time, it wasn’t decided that it would be–it would constitute a fifth province. However, these things were not to be, because Faisal, who had champions in London–most notably Lawrence of Arabia, and some others who were active in the Arab Revolt–managed to convince the British policy makers, first and foremost Winston Churchill, who became the secretary of state for colonies, to give Faisal–to establish Iraq as a unified state rather than a federal state and to give it basically to Faisal. And this is what happened. So in a way, there was a historical opportunity missed just because the British wanted to unify the country on behalf of a foreign ruler–because he was not an Iraqi–he came from the outside; he was not a Shiite–most of Iraqis are Shiites, about 60, 65 percent of them. He was a Sunni. And this was the Iraq that was established. So in a way, we have a historical parallel, and hopefully, we don’t repeat this mistake. And I think, like Mrs. Francke, and I guess the other speaker as well, that the solution to Iraq’s problems, the promise goes through federalism. Again, how do you define federalism? Is it to be regional, is it to be based on other factors? I mean, I think it’s quite difficult to make it purely regional, first because large parts of the population are concentrated in well defined areas. The Kurds are in the north, the Shiites are more or less in the south, and the Sunnis are between Baghdad and Kurdistan, by and large. Then, of course, you have the problem of smaller communities–this was mentioned before–like Assyrians, that are not regionally divided. So how do you ensure that they are not discriminated against? I think some solution should come in between, but I think we cannot ignore the ethnic-religious composition of Iraq. And I think democracy’s basically that you have the rule of the majority. And one of the problems of Iraq, of course, has been that it has been ruled by the minority of the Arab world–again, for this matter–for most of its existence. So if we have a federal democratic system, and I agree that it shouldn’t be presidential like the United States or France, because, you know, a strong person can–especially given the historical background, quite quickly subvert the system–also it happened in Germany 1933, for example–can subvert the system and establish a dictatorship. Which Napoleon did in France. I think it should be parliamentarian. I don’t have any problems with proportional representation. I think in the final account, the votes should represent the social, ethnic, religious, whatever composition of Iraq. And there is no way about this. And since Shiites are the majority and if there will be parties–one Shiite party, two Shiite parties–I guess they’ll eventually be the majority in parliament and they’ll establish the government. So the prime minister may be Shiite. But then, of course, others will help share in power–and this has to be ensured through the constitution and by other means–in proportion with their size. So the fact that, you know, you have a, let’s say a Shiite prime minister of Iraq– [tape change] –the minorities who want to share in power, this of course will be the main difference from the present regime. Plus, I think whether it’s on a regional basis or however it is defined, I think the various groups should have–and this is again part of democracy–the right to express themselves. You see, in many ways Iraq is very different from the United States. The United States is an immigration society. People come from all over the world, but they come with a view of becoming Americans. And even in the United States, of course, you have the various groups and the various ethnic minorities, whether it is the Afro-American or Arab-American or Italians or others. So you cannot really get around this. The Middle East in this respect is more like Europe. It’s–you have groups that are effectively nations. The Kurds are a nation. And by all standards of justice, historical justice or otherwise, they should have had their own independent states. They were promised those states, and the fact that they didn’t get it is because the Turks at the time–after the First World War, Mustafa Kamal Ataturk managed to turn the tables on the first post-war agreement and to deny them their statehood; and the fact that they are dispersed into several countries like Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran, where you have substantial Kurdish minorities, and they are opposed to it. They deserved a state, but they cannot have it. So what I think in a democratic state of Iraq, this would be a genuine part of the Iraqi system, which means that they’ll take part in the running of the country and at the same time they’ll have the right to their own distinct existence. They can speak their language, they can teach their language, you know, in the school system and so on and so forth. They can teach their history. They don’t have to have their history written for them by the Shiite majority or the Sunni minority. And the same applies to other small minorities that were mentioned here. So I think, in short, you have to have a federal system. I think you have to have power proportional to your part of the population, and you have to have shared power by all groups. The other thing which I think is not as important, and in many ways it’s even more difficult to achieve, is to build some kind of–what Mrs. Francke mentioned to you–Iraqi national identity. And I think here the problem–and there may be many people that disagree with me, I’m sure, on this issue–the problem goes back, again, to the First World War. You see, the idea that there is an Arab nation is a new idea. It didn’t exist before the First World War. Of course, there are a few people, a few intellectuals who wrote books about it, but on the whole there was no such identity until after the First World War. The Arabic-speaking population of the Ottoman Empire viewed themselves as Muslims. Always there was a small Christian minority, or otherwise, and subjects of the Ottoman Empire. They didn’t view themselves as Arab. Now, after the war–and the Hashemites, who wanted to substitute the whole empire for that of the Ottomans, they accepted the notion of an Arab nation: There is an Arab nation because all of us speak Arabic and because all of us are Muslim. But of course, you know, language–and we can discuss it later–is not enough to define a nation. It may be a necessary condition, but definitely it’s not a sufficient condition. Even a person like Lawrence of Arabia, who did more than anyone else to unify the Arab world, said that the notion of an Arab nation is just like the notion of the English-speaking nation. You know, you have people speaking English in Nigeria, in India. People who live in London don’t consider these people as part of the English nation. And the same applies to the Arab world. So you had under the Ottomans loyalty to the sultan at the same time you had local patriotism, people who were loyal to their city, to their village, to their tribe, maximum to the region. And then came the other–the Hashemites and the group of intellectuals who wanted the state established for them. They had the system to inculcate it to the masses. And then they said, look, this nation that you established is artificial. Iraq is artificial. It should be basically the unified–the Fertile Crescent. I mean, you know, Nuri Said that was mentioned before, with Faisal and King [inaudible] and others, you know, they pursued the notion of a unified Fertile Crescent. They were not happy with Iraq. Abdullah pursued the notion of Greater Syria. And therefore there was a dissonance. There was the reality of local patriotism that exile built. And there would have been an Iraqi nation more or less–might have been cohesive and hopefully could have been more democratic. But they inculcated to the people–and not only in Iraq, I mean, all over the Middle East. Because this notion spread–and then Nasser came in Egypt, and so on and so forth–that basically they are all members of the Arab nation, the Arab nation should unite. I mean, this is the notion of Baathism. What is the ideology of Baathism? The ideology of Baathism is basically that, you know, one Arab nation with eternal destiny. And therefore there is a mental dissonance. So the people in the Middle East are torn. They are neither fully fledged local patriots or members of a nation. They are not members of the Arab nation, because in the final account, no matter how hard you work, you cannot create something out of nothing. And in my view–and again, as I said, some people may oppose it–there is no Arab nation. And therefore I think one of the major things is, again, that Iraq rids itself of all these penalties. Because it’s only when the Iraqis can educate themselves that they’re all Iraqis that you can hope that, over the long-term, the differences between Shiites and Sunnis, Kurds, and others will be diluted and all of them will feel themselves members of one nation. If you fail to do this, I’m afraid democracy is not going to be successful in Iraq. Thank you very much. MR. GERECHT: Hi, I’m Reuel Gerecht. And first I’d like to just thank the panel. And I would also–I’m just going to ask one question, take advantage of my position as moderator, and then I will throw the questions out to the floor. My question to the panel is how do you implement a constitutional federated system with the Iraqi army? I mean, the Iraqi army has been probably the most troublesome element in the Iraqi identity, without which it could not–the various dictators could not have actually reigned in Iraq. And how do you handle the fact that the Iraqi army, back all the way to the Ottoman period, was overwhelmingly, in the officer corps, Sunni? How do you deal with that problem? Do you have an affirmative action program for Shiites and Kurds and others? Or if you think that’s a bad idea–I think it probably is–how do you change a few hundred years of history? Thank you. MS. FRANCKE: Do I start? Not a few hundred years, no. Not quite. MR. GERECHT: No, actually with the Ottoman Empire, it is a few hundred years. MS. FRANCKE: It’s true there were Sunni officers in the Ottoman army from Iraq, if that’s what you’re referring to. MR. GERECHT: No, just the Ottoman elite and the–in the Ottoman army was all Sunni. It was a Sunni state. The Shiites were not part of the military apparatus. MS. FRANCKE: Well, you ask a very important question. The Iraqi army as a whole has to be rebuilt, really, from scratch. First of all, the officer corps that is now there in the upper echelons, especially the Republican Guard and so on, is, if not loyal to the regime, at least has been implicated in all kinds of human rights abuses and crimes. And therefore I imagine that I would–what I would like to see and I think should be done is that a certain layer of the top echelon of Iraqi officers have to be disbarred. They don’t have to be killed, they don’t have to be tried, but they should certainly be retired very quickly. The other important thing is a massive reeducation of the Iraqi army, and this is something that takes a very long time. Somebody has to undertake it. It is not going to happen overnight. It’s not true to say that just because Saddam is gone, this army is going to transform itself. You spoke about affirmative action. This has been in fact suggested by some Shiite, that we have to have affirmative action in the army. I agree with you it’s not such a good idea. You have to downsize the army, you have to depoliticize it, you have to make it an all-volunteer army and give up notions like drafting people and so on. And I think within the constitution there has to be some language about what the role of the army is. Again, that doesn’t guarantee, but at least you have to set up some yardsticks. You have to know when the army has transgressed against the constitution and so on. It is a difficult problem. There are no easy answers. But there are some guidelines that I think one can take. MR. GERECHT: Mr. Karsh. MR. KARSH: Yeah, I agree with much of what has been said. I think, first of all, you have to basically disband the army and build it from scratch, as was said here. But the fact of the matter is that this must be done at a time where you have American military presence in Iraq. I mean, this is one of the actors that we didn’t mention before, and this is one of the problems that you have today. Because whether you have American presence or whether you don’t have American military presence, I mean, you are running a major risk. I don’t think all of this can be done without American army being present in Iraq over a prolonged period of time. Because, you know, many people who lived in the army, they had the good life for too long. They are not going to give up that easily the positions of power. You have to disarm many people. I mean, the Middle East is an area where private weapons are quite widespread, and you may have to go to certain tribes in certain areas and disarm them and so on and so forth. So it means that you’ll have the Americans there. I agree the army should be much smaller, it should be volunteer. But still, it should represent overall the social composition of Iraq. Which means, in the final account–I don’t know how you do it, whether it’s through affirmative action or by other means–I mean, it will come to be that the Shiites will have a proportionate role to play in the military service just as you’ll have in other parts of the administration. There is no way around it. MR. KAMBER: I think with the Democratic Principles we discussed this point quite a bit, I mean, and at the end in the report there is about a few pages concerning how to democratize the army. And the idea wasn’t really to get rid totally of the army. To keep an army, as [inaudible] mentioned, that it should be really–consist of all Iraqis. And it should be a volunteer. So it should not be really based–and army in Iraq, it’s like you go to work. In Iraq–I mean, just like you go to work, it’s a position. It’s a living in Iraq, the army. It’s not like here, a professional army, you see. So to get rid of the whole army is going to take some time. But in the future, I really would love to see, just like what he mentioned, that it should be a volunteer and it should be no discrimination. It should be for all Iraqis. But it’s going to take some time. You cannot get rid of the army in the first month or two. But I think the American, or the Iraqis, they will need help on that point, really, to rebuild the army so that it will help to unify Iraq, not to really support only one group of Iraqi segments. MS. FRANCKE: Quick item. You need an army for security. And I think that in the future Iraqi security has to be part of a regional security system in which the United States plays a big role. That, I would imagine, is going to be a very important–I hope it’s going to be an important subject of discussion in a post-Saddam era. MR. GERECHT: Well, I just hope the American army can tell the difference between Sunnis and Shiites. All right, I’ll throw it open to the floor. First question to Harold. QUESTION: In listening to the three lecturers, one of the things which sort of turns on a red light, at least in my mind, is the declaration in London which declared Iraq a Muslim state–basically the religion of the state is Islam. And what we’re doing now is something new. It’s a brand-new thing. And here is a real chance to change things. I mean, if you define the state as a Muslim state, the question is that–Shiite or Sunni, all these things do is create problems. The question is that if we cannot come up with a solution–“we” meaning those of us who are involved with this, and certainly and most importantly it’s the Iraqi people–where this can be avoided, then it seems like we’re going to go down the same road that we’ve had up to now. I mean, I, frankly, strongly oppose a–that the state should protect the Assyrians, should protect the Sunni religious establishment. Is there a way–and I know we’re talking theoretically now, we’re not there now–where these religious institutions or ethnic whatevers are simply outside of the state? Or could you have a parliament which is part a representative totally of Iraqis as Iraqis, and the second, possibly, to have ethnic or religious interests? Because, you know, look, the amount of Assyrians leaving the country is quite high. What happens in the future if there are six Assyrians in the country? I’m not advocating that, please. I’m–but if you have these static things here, it creates very, very serious problems. MR. GERECHT: Who would like to take that one first? MR. KAMBER: Yeah, well– QUESTION: And I’m certainly not anti-Assyrian or anti-anybody. MR. KAMBER: That’s all right. Well, as an Assyrian, I will tell you I am not happy with the conclusion of the Iraqi meeting in London. I was one of the people there in the meeting. We don’t like to see the religious to be the dominant in a government, in a new government. We would like to have a secular government that would respect all the people regardless of their ethnicity and their religious background. But what will happen really depends on what the Americans are going to do and how they’re going to rebuild that country. That’s very important. And you can see–I mean, I talk about the ignore of the Iraqi opposition for their minorities. You can see that now, in Erbil, they actually established a, what they call it a Leadership Committee. There are six people in there. There is one, two, and three Shia; two Kurdish; and one Sunni. There is no Christian or Assyrian on that committee. So how are they going to represent all the segments of the Iraqis? I don’t understand it. And how are they going to really sit and rewrite the constitution of the country? So it is very important that–we hope that the Americans they will actually protect and safeguard the human rights of all Iraqi peoples. QUESTION: Can I make one small point? There is [off-microphone, inaudible]. MS. FRANCKE: You know, I, too, would like a secular state and I would like the constitution to talk about separation of church and state. If, however, that doesn’t happen and there is a statement that Iraq is a Muslim country–reflecting, after all, the vast majority–the important thing is to make sure that this does not go beyond the page of the constitution and has actually no repercussions in how the country is run. That’s the important thing. MR. KARSH: I fully agree. In fact, it’s part of what I wanted to say. But don’t forget that in the Middle East, you know, religion has constituted and still constitutes the linchpin of political order. I mean, Islam, unlike Christianity, has never separated between temporal and political power. And this is one of the major things that basically have to happen in order for democracy to succeed. So how you achieve it, I mean, it’s really an uphill struggle in many ways. I think, as was mentioned here, in the final account, I mean, no matter how you write it, you have to sit with that in fact there is a separation, in real life, in daily life. I read, by the way, the other day, Kanan Makiya, there was a big article about him in the New York Times the other day. And he said that–according to the reporter–that Iraq should be secular. I looked. It is reported as real in the handout, and he doesn’t say it. So you see they are very careful–you have to break a few taboos, you have to break the taboo of Arab nationalism and you have to break the Islamic sway over societies in the Middle East in establishing democracy. And you have to do it very carefully. QUESTION: Yeah, but Shiism has an answer to solve the separation of church and state, or religion and state, here. And that is that the type of Shiism, for example, in Iraq–again, as you all said, is the majority–is that until the awaited imam reappears, all political rule is illegitimate. Therefore, it basically has to separate. Religion cannot be the basis of rule in Shiism. QUESTION: I’ll let that go, though I would just add Hakim Abdawa [ph] would disagree with you. I’ll pass it back to Patrick Clawson. QUESTION: Patrick Clawson from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Several of the speakers referred to the problem of ensuring that a diffusion of power that’s written into documents becomes reality and that power isn’t de facto recentralized. And I really didn’t hear very many suggestions about how to accomplish that, and would be interested in more of your thoughts about how to ensure that whatever diffusion of power is written into these political procedures is not undermined in practice. And in that light, I was surprised that there wasn’t more discussion about how it is that these–the transition to this new government occurs, in that I would have thought that, for instance, if the new governance are reconstituted and given de facto authority well before the national government emerges–so that the governance have a certain reality for a year or two before the national government appears–that that could make a difference. And certainly my understanding of the–meager as it is–of the experience with federalism around the world is that federalism works a lot better if it’s a group of entities that come together to form a central authority, rather than a central authority announcing, oh, by the way, we’re going to hand out power to all of you, which tends often not to work in practice. MR. GERECHT: Who’d like to take that first? MS. FRANCKE: Yeah, Patrick, in fact I was trying to think if there was any case, any country which started off as a centralized system and actually devolved. Britain, perhaps, is one that I can think of, but it did not go the way of federalism. But you’re right, mostly it is much looser entities that came together. In terms–I think it’s important also to distinguish between the administrative diffusion of authority and political diffusion of authority. Now, if you devolve–in a devolution, you devolve authority, administrative authority to the parts. And that can easily be done. They run their police force, they run their schools, and so on and so forth. But how do you–the question is how do you devolve political authority, and in fact can you devolve political authority except in the classic separation of powers that we look at–parliament, legislative, executive, et cetera? And I don’t have an answer. The administrative distribution of authority is really quite simple. It is the political that is going to represent problems. For example, to the extent that armies represent political clout–for example, the Kurds have said we want to retain our peshmerga not just as a police force, but as an army, or as part of the Iraqi army but under our command and our jurisdiction. Now, that is a political move. It is going to be much more difficult to figure out how to disperse political power as opposed to administrative. In other words, I don’t have an answer for you. MR. KARSH: I think it’s a 60-million question. I don’t think I know much more than Mrs. Francke, but I think in principle you should build up a nation, which means that regional institutions, some of them will have to go. So I think something like the peshmerga and other military militias–I don’t think they exist, really, under Saddam, but–the Kurds are a unique case, because they managed to break from Saddam’s grip. I think the peshmerga should be disbanded. I think the Kurds–and again, we come to the first question, it was about affirmative action in the army. I think the Kurds should become part of the Iraqi army. It should be a representative army, the army of the Iraqi nation, and they should become part of it. I think part of the thing that we have to break is this factionalism. This is–and again, it goes back one hundred years ago, because this factionalism existed when the Ottoman Empire collapsed. Rather than develop it into nationalism, they left them somewhere in between. You have to build up a nation. You have to–I think the parliamentarian system has to be–there has to be, I think, proportional elections, you have to establish parties, you have to have separation of powers, as was mentioned here. You have to ensure maybe things we are not talking about that work in democracy. You have to ensure in the constitution and some arrangements and through American presidents for several years that this parliamentarian system is not abused. Let’s say if you have one major Shiite party and it becomes a majority, establishes the government without the rest, how do you see to it that it doesn’t start suppressing the rest? Because until now, this is the political culture that they have had. So I think you have to put institutions in place and the structure, and you have to get it right. And then you have to remain there. I mean, Americans–and this is something I–this is my great fear, to be frank. I know, again, Kanan Makiya spoke against American military presence in Iraq. He thinks they can go, the Iraqi exiles will take over from Saddam, and the Americans can pull out. At least, he said so on one occasion. I don’t know if he thinks so to this very day. I think he lives in a fantasy land. I don’t think if the Iraqi exiles come–and if–a government will be established based on the Iraqi parliament and so on and so forth, the exiled parliament. They’ll need the Americans to shore up the regime, because otherwise they’ll be out of power very quickly, in my view. Now, the question is does the American administration, perhaps this administration, realize this? But you are not sure it will remain in power for the next four years, and you’re not sure, even if it remains in power, where the problems will start coming, arising. And they will. Because there will be violence in Iraq, and the American army would like to go here and there and to use force to ensure law and order–whether they can stay the course. And this is the main issue. If they can stay the course, then yes, I think once you put the structures in place, they can regularly start operating. If the Americans are going to pull out quickly, having established the structures but not nurtured them for a long enough time, it’s going to be a disaster. MS. FRANCKE: Actually, one way to distribute political power is something that exists in the American system. And that is that some decisions by the central government do not depend only on the institutions that are in Baghdad, but have to be approved by legislators in the federated regions. Now, the most obvious example of this that I can think of is the need, if you want to change the U.S. Constitution, to get–correct me if I’m wrong–two-thirds of the states to approve. And in Iraq, similarly, if we really want a devolution of political authority, then we are going to have to have some decisions that require a majority vote from the regions. I must, maybe, digress here a little bit and take issue with something that Professor Karsh said. And that is the question of majority rule. This frightens the hell out of me. Because we are so conditioned in Iraq–and, unfortunately, Americans are conditioned to think about Iraq–in terms of majorities being ethnic or religious majorities. We talk about a Shia majority or Kurdish majority in the north and Arab majority. This is not–if we want to build, if we truly are interested in building democracy in Iraq, we must begin to think about majorities in a completely different way. Not in terms of ethnicity or religion, but about a political majority. Why should political parties in Iraq, that arise in Iraq, be a Shia political party or a Sunni political party, or indeed a Kurdish political party? I think that is the antithesis of any hope for democracy that we might have. I do not wish to see the rule of the majority equating to the rule of the Arabs or to the rule of the Shia. I want the rule of the majority to be a political majority, which–and the important point about this is if you take it to mean national or religious, ethnic or religious majority, it can never change. But if you think of it as a particular political majority, then of course it can change, because this majority party one day can be overruled by a political party, another. Now, of course it requires far greater political maturity to achieve that. It is so much easier to fall back on primary identifications–I’m Arab, I’m Muslim, I’m Shiite, and so on. But that is not the way in which democracy is going to flourish. It has to be clear. It may be the easier way, but that’s not how democracy will flourish. MR. KARSH: No, I agree. I mean, this is a very important question and very interesting, and I think this will determine the success or failure of this exercise. But the problem is, again–as I said before–that we have 100 years missed. You know, these are lost, wasted 100 years in which Iraqis were not, you know, educated to develop a true Iraqi national identity. And this has to start now. But you cannot start running before you know how to walk. So of course, ideally, and eventually if we do it right, you know, yeah, of course. Why shouldn’t the Shiite go together with the Sunni and establish a party, and a Kurd or Assyrian, around an issue? I don’t know that they want to be socialists, they want to be capitalists, they want to be conservatives, democrats, republicans, whatever. Fine. I mean, this is ideally–and this, hopefully, it will come to it. But I don’t think it will come immediately. And in the short term the reality will be such that, you know, in the final account democracy represents the wish of the majority. Just very quickly about devolution, I think, again, we are running–in devolution we are running the risk of–you need to have devolution, you need to have, you know, as much power devolved to the various federations or federal units, but at the same time you have to be very careful that this devolution doesn’t turn into anarchy. Because, again, we don’t have this total tradition democracy. And the American example, I’m not sure it’s the right example, because the United States was to a large extent democratic from the outset. And even in the United States, it had to go through a civil war in order to enforce the union. So you see that in a way devolution–some people wanted devolution to go further and further and you had to go through the bloodiest exercise in American history in order to enforce the union. And obviously, you don’t want it in Iraq. MR. : Just to your point about the American example, if you use it. Please note that the U.S. Constitution specifies that no military base can be built in any state without the approval of that state legislature, and reserves to the state governor, by constitution, the right to appoint the officers in the National Guard. So in the American Constitution, even the military was devolved. QUESTION: Max Singer, at the Hudson Institute. I think that there’s been a too-limited vocabulary of the choices a little bit. But before I explain what I mean by that, I want to note that in fact, the recent years, Saddam has been giving an education to Iraqis in Iraqi citizenship. I believe that he has united Iraqis against him, against the Baath, against totalitarianism, and produced a consciousness of a common Iraqi feeling, perhaps more than there was before. And that will be built on. The heart of federalism is that different political structures deal with and are responsible for different areas of responsibility, all within the same overall territory. And so one of the ways out of these dilemmas which have been so rightly described is to have different units elected and chosen in different ways, dealing with different problems. And there’s also a very fundamental check-and-balance or a division of authority, and that is between the government–any government–and the people: How much is the government going to decide and how much is going to be left for nongovernmental institutions. So that much of the influence of the traditional organizations, traditional ethnic and other groups, can be exerted nongovernmentally if the government leaves them freedom to do that. But I think the main under-recognized element in this discussion is the rule of law. That is the sweeping principle that can be used to protect a system. It requires that everybody–citizens, units of all different groups–recognize that if they want to preserve the system and they see that the system is designed to give them some adequate protection, the way they have to preserve the system is to insist on the rule of law. And if everybody comes together to support the law in any case of a dispute, rather than supporting the ethnic group or the particular issue or whatever it is, but the common recognition the law is supreme, that is the acid that cuts through many of the problems. You write a good system of laws to start with. The United States, by the way, is majority rule in some sense, but the way it works in practice, as is well known, is the principle of the concurrent majority, which means essentially that all groups have to be essentially unanimous to make major changes or institute major policies–although that’s not written down anywhere. That’s the way it works out because there are many sources of power and the rule of law so that a temporary narrow majority cannot make a revolution in the way people live. It’s also why one of the reasons why small groups do not have to have their own district in order to be expressed. In a complex political system, as any developed democracy is, if you have 5 percent of the people who stick together politically, they have very great power even if they don’t have a single elected representative. Or they can get an elected representative with much less than a majority in any district. So what you can’t do is to get all this power legislated in the structure of the system; what you have to do is see that the rule of law is there and that there is division of functions. MR. GERECHT: Okay, I’m not sure there was a question in there. I’ll move on. Back there? MS. FRANCKE: Let me understand you. When you say “property rights,” you mean as opposed to a socialist system? Okay. Iraq really was not much of a socialist system in terms of the fact that people could own businesses and so on; it was not a total socialist system. However, most major heavy industry and so on was in fact held by the government. There was no discussion of property rights because it was not seen as a threatened element in Iraq. And in fact, what is very interesting is that historically there has been a great resistance to socialism on the part of Muslim clerics because property rights are important in Islam. And so whenever a government has tried to encroach on that, there has been an outcry from the clerics. This is not to say that Saddam has not taken people’s property away, stripped them of citizenship, thrown them out of the country, appropriated property and assets, and so on. But it was not a focal point of the kind of things that we were discussing. Now, there were other areas that we did discuss that had to do with property, and that is the importance of property claims of people who have been either–were either internally displaced or have been forced into exile. Because all of those people left their property, those people are going to want to come back, claim property; there are going to be property disputes. Of course, the other thing is that there are other aspects of property that are not just tangible, not just houses and money. There are, for example, people’s writings, people’s authorship, people’s privacy. One can extend this idea of property much more broadly, and there it becomes very relevant to Iraq because it is those intangible aspects of property that are in fact the most inhibited. MR. KAMBER: There is another thing about property. It’s actually the government that used it more, as Rend mentioned, to Arabize certain areas in Iraq. Like in Kirkuk, they took over some properties which belonged to Assyrians, Turkomans, and Kurds, and the put some other families in there just to increase the Arab population. They similarly, close to the Mosul area, they actually Arabized a lot of these villages where they belong to Assyrians and other minorities. So, really, there isn’t any law. It’s up to the government. It can control anything they want in there. And they use that, actually, as an Arabization, a policy reason, to impose their own policy on certain areas or properties. MR. GERECHT: Another question from the audience? Right here? QUESTION: [Off-microphone, inaudible.]
MR. KAMBER: Well, I don’t want to see that, to be honest. And I never think that Iraq should be an Islamic state. Because if we want to have a democracy in Iraq, then we should have a rule of law, as he mentioned here. As a Christian, I don’t like, really, to see an Islamic rule in Iraq. Although, I mean, in Iran it’s a different nation, it’s not an Arab nation, so they apply that and they give some rights to minorities, but it is very limited. So we don’t know what will happen when they come and apply the sharia law in Iraq, where there are about 2 million Christians in Iraq. So what will happen? Are they going to close all these religious institutions or are they going to impose their different laws in there? So that’s why I wish that there will be a democracy in Iraq where everybody will be respected and have his own right, regardless of his ethnicity or religion. I think that’s very important for our survival in Iraq, to be honest. QUESTION: [Inaudible.]
MR. KAMBER: Yes, that’s what I support. I support, really, a democratic, secular government. I don’t support federalism or an Islamic law in Iraq. MR. KARSH: I don’t see why federalism is opposed, you know, to secularism. I mean, you have this country, for example. But it depends, again, how you define. I mean, personally I don’t think Iraq should be an Islamic state. But let’s say if it’s made, the constitution states that the religion of the state is Islam, the question is how far do you go from there? If this is as far as you go, I’m not happy about this, but, you know, okay, this is symbolic. But if you apply the sharia, like you say, so of course, then you are back to medieval times and then you don’t have democracy. You have this long debate among Middle East experts, you know–I didn’t get into it too much–you know, whether Islam is conducive to democracy or not. I don’t think it is, and I don’t think in any case, whether it’s Islam, Christianity, Judaism, I don’t think religion should be–politics and religion should be mixed. I think there should be separation between the two. So this will be an indication, which way Iraq is going. MR. GERECHT: Back there? QUESTION: Hello, my name is Scott Carpenter. I have a quick question about the Democratic Principles Working Group [inaudible]. One of the issues that comes to mind when we’re discussing constitutions is legitimacy. And there’s been a couple of comments about the State Department and CIA really not fully supporting the democratic mechanism in a post-conflict Iraq initially. When we talk about constitutions, however, there is a chicken-and-egg question. I mean, who elects whom to go to a constitutional assembly to create a constitution? How is legitimacy conferred on that process? And I’m wondering about the discussions within the Future of Iraq project. Thank you. MS. FRANCKE: Well, I knew that was going to come sometime. Okay. In other words, if you have a constituent assembly, what legitimacy does it have before elections have happened? Right? Okay. Well, when–let me go back again to American history when all these gentlemen met in Philadelphia in 1776, and again when they drafted the Articles and so on. But who conferred legitimacy? MR. : The states. MS. FRANCKE: Well, we could have legitimacy conferred from the governorates. And one of the things that we suggested in the report is that there should be early elections for–early local elections in Iraq. In other words, local elections do not need to wait for two to three years until you have national elections. But whatever you do–and we came up against this issue of legitimacy very quickly in this working group. And we decided, okay, what legitimacy does Saddam Hussein have now? None. What legitimacy does the national assembly in Iraq have now? Well, none. Therefore, we do not have–we’re not rivalling, we’re not coming in to break a legitimately constituted system. And therefore, if the constituent assembly has somewhat less traditional legitimacy than is expected, then that’s fine. We have revolutionary legitimacy. But definitely one of the ways was to go back to Iraqi jurists. We have a lot of Iraqi jurists who are judges and so on in Iraq who are competent. Those should be the nucleus of a constituent assembly; they have to be there. We also talked about representatives from major political parties, or from the political parties–forget “major.” We also talked about representatives from the various ethnic and religious groups. And we also talked about regional representatives from the governorates as a result of these early–fairly early elections. We thought of the constituent assembly as a composite, in other words, fully recognizing that it had, you know, not 100 percent legitimacy, but not zero either–and certainly, one way or the other, more than Saddam has. MS. PLETKA: I’m sorry, I’m indulging myself by asking you a question I could easily ask you afterwards, but I wanted to hear you answer it publicly. You know, one of the things that people talk about in terms of federalism and in terms of trying devolve authority, and perhaps not even ethnically, is very abstract. And what we see not only here at the table today, but what we saw in Northern Iraq and what we’ve seen in London and in successive meetings of the Iraqi opposition are that minorities and even majorities are unwilling to give up their prerogatives, are unwilling to give up their militias, are unwilling to give up their sawhorses of decades, and are really not interested in becoming vested in an Iraqi state, whatever the definition of that state is. Mechanically speaking, it would appear that one of the tradeoffs to force them to become interested is to give them a share of that state. And you all have — [change tape] — benefits for your people [inaudible] whether it’s oil or it’s capitalism or it’s anything else. I wonder if you could just address that [inaudible]? MS. FRANCKE: I seem to be the scapegoat here, the sacrificial lamb. Are we speaking about the transitional period or are we speaking about a post-transition period? MS. PLETKA: [Inaudible] if they don’t hold out the prospect for that, then the stakes are very low if you do in fact cause trouble. MS. FRANCKE: I believe, and I’ve actually written this, that an essential ingredient in a successful transition is going to be the measure by which you give all these groups, however you define them, a stake in the center. You give them a vested interest in the survival and in the success of this project. Any group that is sidelined–as, for example, the Assyrians were in Salahadeen–have absolutely no interest in the success of the product. Now, how you do that is a different matter. But the principle of–and I go back to what I said earlier. There has to be something of a co-equal share. I do not want, for example, the Assyrians to come in as a minor unit in an overwhelmingly Shiite or Arab or whatever government composition. There has to be a much greater balance, even if the Assyrians or others are given a disproportionate role to play. People have to have an interest in the center. Now, there is a sign of hope in that I think some of the Kurdish political parties have recognized that they have been for the last 12 years–in fact, for the last umpteen years–been far too focused on their little Kurdish territory, on their little interest, and far too little focused on the power play in Baghdad. And some of them at least are now turning their attention to, well, okay, let’s get whatever we can, as much as we can for the Kurdish territory, but let us think about how big a role we can play in Baghdad. And I think this is an important transformation. This is what I mean by the groups feeling that they have a vested interest in the center. I don’t know, Dannie, if this answers your question a little bit. I don’t know what the mechanisms are, but certainly the principle, I think, is absolutely right. MR. KARSH: Yeah, but to a certain extent it contradicts what you said before, that basically it shouldn’t be based on ethnic, religious, or other. If you want to give the Kurds a stake in central power, so it means that you view them as Kurds and you treat them as Kurds. Which I think should be, in the short term or the middle term, because I don’t think you can transform the Iraqis into a nation-state in the sense that they lose their distinct identities before quite a long time. So, as I said before, I think there should be a federal arrangement in which the various groups will on the one hand receive a proportionate part of power–and again, if the–you know, I think it will be–it will come naturally through the elections as well, but even before we have elections, obviously you have to have affirmative action. I mean, the Shiites have been largely discriminated for 100 years or even before, like you said–the Ottoman Empire. So you have to let them feel that, you know–you know, most Iraqis are Shiites, so why should they be ruled by a minority regime? I mean, you know. So there should be affirmative action. You should see that there is a Shiite prime minister, I don’t know, Sunni foreign minister, Kurdish something else. Then you can, you know, give them stakes in the running of the country one way or another. But at the same time, I think you should ensure that at least for quite some time the Kurds are distinct identities. Because I think, for example, the Kurds or Assyrians or other will feel frightened if you come and said, oh, okay, as of now you are an Iraqi, you’re not an Assyrian, so forget about this, forget about that. I think it takes time. And you have to on the one hand let them feel separate and equal; at the same time, give them enough, sufficient incentive to play on the national scene. MR. KAMBER: On the subject of Iraqi opposition meetings and all of that, we are not happy. I mean, a lot of people were not happy as groups, as even women. I mean, there was only probably like .1 percent of women at that conference. So if the women are not going to have [inaudible] in the future of Iraq, how is there going to be democracy? Whether there is affirmative action for Shia or not, that’s another point which I don’t really like, to be honest. I think we have to be all partners in the business of the future of Iraq regardless of whatever ethnic group it is, whether it is majority or minority. I can read from what [inaudible] Chalabi says in Sulahadeen, which might be of interest. You see, he says here that Assyrians are the oldest people in Iraq. And then he says democracy is how to deal with the Assyrian question, because they are oppressed, and today they are in numbers more in diaspora than inside Iraq because of that. So how are you going to solve the Assyrian problem? There’s probably, like, at least 1 or 2 million Assyrians living in exile because of–since, like, 1932, when Iraq became a member of the League of Nations. So you need, really, to have respect for all these problems so that they can return to Iraq, they can–if they’re going to return to Iraq, as [inaudible] mentioned, how are they going to go back to their lands? How are they going to return back to their villages? Now they are occupied by Kurds. I mean, there’s a lot of problems we have to really talk about. And these cannot be talked–or represented, these problems, by having a group of three Shia and two Kurds and one Sunni on a leadership committee. You need to have people from all groups represented there so they can actually discuss their future in a democratic Iraq. MR. KARSH: No, that’s for sure, but it is–again we go back, democracy in the final account is representative of the ethos of the majority. If you look at Europe–today, of course, you have more interculturalism and so on and so forth, and you have some blending of values, but on the whole there are certain ethoses. And the fact is that Assyrians are going to remain minority. I mean, there is not–I mean, you know, even if the 2 million come back, they are still going to remain the minority in Iraq. And part of democracy is that minority are treated in a fair way. I mean, in this country you have numerous minorities–you have Jews, you have Muslims, you have others–and they are treated in a fair way. So why shouldn’t Assyrians be treated in a fair way? It doesn’t mean necessarily that you elect an Assyrian president tomorrow. On the other hand, it does not mean that there cannot be an Assyrian president. So there are certain realities on the ground. I think minorities should be given all the opportunities. And at times–I know, you know, affirmative action may not be a federal ideal in this forum, but sometimes, if you do it right, it can happen. MR. GERECHT: Okay, I think I’m going to close it up there. I want to thank again the panel for the discussion today, and I’d like to thank all the individuals who came. And once again, I’d like to thank Molly McHugh [sp] for her assistance here, because without it we would not have these panels. Thank you. [End of discussion.]
Proceedings:
Then I came up with a third need. Iraq is a country which has systematically, especially over the last 35 years, but really for a much longer period of its history–we have to be honest about that–has completely trampled on the rights–well, that’s the wrong way of putting it–has not recognized that groups and individuals have rights. If there are rights, they’re not God-given, they’re not intrinsic rights. There are those rights that are conferred from time to time by a government but also withheld or withdrawn from time to time by a government. It is essential for a constitution to declare that these rights are intrinsic, that they are inalienable–in the language of American constitution-making–and that it is not up to a government to withhold or to deny or rescind those rights. This is an important element.
The third function of the supreme court is for any party, whether it’s a state institution, a federated government, or individuals or groups of individuals, to be able to go to the supreme court to contest legislation that is unconstitutional. You have this in the United States all the time. People do challenge the constitutionality of laws.
As to the number of units that should be established in a federal state, it was suggested from two up to 18 units, as Rend remembered, be created.
QUESTION: I think the sine qua non of the American system is property rights. And certainly when you talk about rule of law, you can’t talk about that without property rights. And I’m wondering if there’s been much constitutional discussion of that and, beyond that, transitioning from a Stalinist system to an open economy.
There will be equality to all, there will be equal opportunities. But still, life is what it is. And, you know, we have equality, but still we haven’t had a black president in this country and it may be some time before it will be–and even if there will be one, so still you don’t mean that all blacks will be necessarily equal. And if you look at England, for example, where I’ve been living for 15 years now, the situation for blacks is much worse than in the United States. You don’t even see a university professor that is black, let alone a future prime minister.
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