The end of Arab Iraq?

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Author: Salt, Jeremy
• Date: 22 March 2005

In October 2005 Iraqis voted on a constitution. The Kurds and Shi'a Muslims voted for it. But on the grounds that it could lead to the disintegration of Iraq as a unified state, most Arab Sunni Muslims voted against or boycotted the referendum. The vote fell just short of the two-thirds-majority vote against it required in three provinces for the constitution to fail (these provinces were predominantly Sunni Muslim, although the Turkmen minority did not like this constitution either). The document has the Bush administration's fingerprints all over it. Zalmay Khalilzad, the US ambassador, shuttled between Kurdish and Shi'a leaders in the last stages of the negotiating process to make sure they got the details right. Adecentralized Iraq certainly suits the interests of the United States and Israel, where the break-up of Iraq into ethno-religious 'statelets' has been on the wishlist for decades.

The constitution begins with a preamble that refers to the suffering of the people under the Ba'athist government, tying in 'the suffering of the people of the western region where the terrorists and their allies sought to take hostages and prevent the people from participating in the elections and the establishment of a society of peace and brotherhood'. (It was in this western district that the United States launched a series of land and air attacks in September, attacks Sunni leaders have said were designed to prevent people from voting in sufficient numbers to gain the two-thirds-majority vote against the constitution.)

Since the advent of the Ba'ath as the governing party in the 1960s, Iraq had been one of the few Arab countries with a secular constitution. The new constitution has a religious base. Iraq is situated in the Islamic world and Islam is described as the official religion of the state and 'a basic source of legislation'. No law can be passed 'that contradicts the undisputed rules of Islam'. The rights of women and minorities are guaranteed in other articles but when the 'undisputed rules of Islam' are treated as a basic source of law it is clear that these may well be threatened in practice, depending on who interprets the rules and where and how they are applied. Because Islamic law is unlikely to be applied in the Kurdish north but will almost certainly form the basis of any Shi'a regional government, it is evident that not all Iraqis will live under the same laws.

The previous constitution treated Iraq as having two nationalities, Kurdish and Arab. By inference anyone who was not Kurdish was Arab. The new constitution describes Iraq as a multiethnic, multi-religious country, with an Arab people who 'are part of the Arab nation'. The document makes numerous references to the various ethnic and religious 'components' of Iraqi society without defining 'Arab people' any further. By splitting the people up into these segregated layers, it seems to suggest that Iraqis who are Kurdish, Turkmen, Shi'a or Christian cannot...