Much of the future of Iraq hinges on the upcoming legislative elections to be held in early March. The elections were originally scheduled for January but have been postponed because the Sunni, Shia and Kurdish power brokers could not agree on who could run for election. More than 511 candidates have been disqualified from running in a Shia dominated government (which is coincidentally reminiscent of the frequent massive disqualifications of presidential candidates in the other Shia country next door).
The reasons given or otherwise are that the banned candidates were too high up in Saddam’s former Baathist regime, or that they had links with insurgents in the past years when ethnic violence was at its highest.
This amounts to a witch hunt. A political witch hunt is when a group of people is systematically targeted by a majority through a combination of discrimination, imprisonment/interrogation, barring from positions of power, or defamation of character and public humiliation, for illegitimate reasons based on identity or ideology.
I believe that the security and ability to survive for a regime depends on its ability to generate an image of justice and legitimacy in the minds of the its relevant constituents.
Justice and Legitimacy are cognitive categories and while they are influenced by material conditions – the distribution of wealth, the efficiency of courts, the application of repressive and security instruments, the lawful transfers of power - they are abstract entities. The calculus of material factors determining whether or not such and such an arrangement is legitimate or just can sometimes leave a gap with the effective sentiments of justice and legitimacy within a population.
Indeed the nature of a state of justice or injustice and of legitimacy or illegitimacy within someone’s mind is often best studied by the poetic traditions studying the drama of personal relations rather than the scientific traditions looking at empirical material and economic statistics. The government of Iraq may have all intents of splitting the spoils of oil fairly between the different factions, but the perception of injustice in the interaction between the political actors could matter more in the end.
It all depends on "what’s the story" – what narrative or spin the constituents are putting on the material events. Ultimately, those perceptions can make the difference whether or not a group of people decides to take up arms against its government.
In this case, the widespread barring of former Baathists, who are of course all Sunnis, by the Shia dominated government on specious grounds will be perceived as an injustice against their group and will delegitimize the government after the elections. It will further create injustices by the resulting material lack of representation for Sunni interests within the government over the next electoral cycle.
Of course justice and legitimacy can be different looking at the same events depending on your constituency – and indeed, when two constituencies are opponents, they are always different. The Shias’ narrative is that former Baathists element were at the core of the horrendous sectarian violence that tore apart their country a few years ago. Baathists were the people who repressed them under Saddam too, and, by psychologically transposing their past suffering to the Sunni community as a whole, for centuries indeed.
The Shias are also suspicious of the Baathists credentials as great democrats. But this is all a mistake on the Shias' part and the burden of changing attitudes lies on their side.
Saddam is no more and the current political community of the Sunnis - which has for leaders former Baathists by the force of things, is different from the regime of yore. A political community is not a regime (understood here as the structure of government), no more than a regime is the authorities of the regime. Those are three different elements defining the nature of political systems and we cannot confound them. There is no reason why the former Baathists will not play by the new regime’s rules.
A lot is hanging in the balance. The cessation of out of control sectarian violence a couple of years ago was only permitted by a parallel robust political effort to integrate the country at the national level. The unraveling of the national political process could rekindle the devastating fires of the religious schism. Sunni participation in the political process is critical.
The burden of changing attitudes and to compromise is also on the Shias because they are the strongest faction. They are less likely to get up from the metaphorical negotiating table than their Sunni counterparts for whom this could very well be make or break.
Link: Political Turmoil Follows Barring of Hundreds from Iraq Ballot - NY Times
Photo Credit: AP through NY Times.
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