Sectarianism's last frontier?

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There's a certain inevitability about Iraq. Many people here think their lot is preordained.

Indeed, there's a wistful Arabic story that tells of a servant sent to the market only to return terrified. He tells his employer that he encountered the angel of Death, who made a threatening gesture toward him. The servant begs his master to lend him a horse and he will ride to Samarra, 100 kilometres away, so Death will not find him.

After watching his servant ride off in a cloud of dust, the merchant goes to the market and asks the angel of Death why she threatened his servant. Death replies that she was only surprised to see him in Baghdad, for she has an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.

Forty-one-year-old Mohammed, a barber in Mosul, knows just what she means. Mohammed says he is very worried for his first child, whom his wife is now carrying. His own life, Mohammed says, has been, like that of most Iraqis, full of pain, and he doesn't want his child to experience such terrible things.

"But what can I do?" he asks. "It is my destiny."

Mohammed disdains the democracy Iraq has been giving birth to and finds no solace in it. "The politicians are all dishonest," he said this week. "They are only in it for themselves."

WORST FEARS CONFIRMED

The barber uttered those prescient words just a day before a suspicious delay in tallying of votes from Sunday's election. The situation led many to charge that large-scale fraud was being perpetrated. This election, only the second time Iraqis have voted for a national parliament, was intended to set Iraq on a new course, free of the sectarianism that plagued much of the last administration.

Instead, it has only confirmed Mohammed's worst fears.

If Iraqis are ever to reconcile, they desperately need a working example of good government. Most people have only known three decades of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship, seven years of U.S. occupation and a savage sectarian war.

Mosul, Iraq's third-largest city, is the last frontier of that sectarian strife. Here, in the northwestern corner of the country, closest to Europe, Kurdish militiamen rule over districts that Kurdish leaders claim belong to their region of Kurdistan. They say that peshmerga will deny access to those areas, even to the elected governor, until Kurds receive a share of the provincial administration based on the percentage of votes Kurds garnered in last year's provincial election.

It is a concept, often practised in this part of the world, known as muhasasa. But the administration of Governor Atheel Najayfi, elected as a majority, flatly refuses to share. So the two sides are at loggerheads, with heavily armed troops based throughout the city amid frequent violence, including assassination and bombings.

Can these two groups - Arab and Kurd - ever be expected to reconcile?

Even those parts of the country that no longer suffer from direct conflict feel as if violence could flare up at any moment.

It wasn't that long ago that Sunni and Shia militias carried out brutal ethnic cleansing of their formerly mixed neighbourhoods in Baghdad. Indeed, the fighting stopped only when the two groups were completely removed from each other.

SEPARATION ISN'T RECONCILIATION

You can separate them, it seems, but how do you get them to reconcile? Will it take the trifurcation of the country into Shia, Sunni and Kurdish states to achieve harmony?

While some political leaders have talked the good talk about reconciliation and ending sectarianism, they have walked in the opposite direction.

Both Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite, and Ammar al-Hakim, the leader of the Iraqi National Alliance, a list led by two Shia parties, stressed in their election campaigns the need to reach out to the Sunni side of the street, to wave the national flag and to put aside their sectarian pasts.

But it was these same two men who made past membership in the Baath Party an issue in the campaign, launching a McCarthyesque witch hunt that ended up excluding several elected officials from running again. While there were people in the Baath Party, henchmen to Saddam Hussein, who might be charged with humanitarian crimes, most members were average people who took out membership just to keep their jobs.

Worse than punishing these people, was the fact that the "never again" campaign against "Baathists" really amounted to a campaign against all Sunnis, since most members of the Baath were of that sect.

Similarly, when Sunni politicians have raised the spectre of an Iranian takeover of Iraq, most every Shiite in the country was made to feel it was him or her to which the criticisms, and threats, were levelled.

Only one major politician, Ayad Allawi, a Shia former provisional prime minister who had been appointed by the Americans, was successful in assembling a joint Shia-Sunni list in this election. But his success in tearing down the walls between Sunni and Shia politicians was only partial. With his four partners at the helm of the Iraqiya party all being Sunni, the party became a repository for the Sunni vote and generated a much lower percentage of Shia votes.

The very act of reconciliation has, itself, a sectarian nature.

As Mr. Maliki attempts to form a coalition in the next few weeks, he will likely find himself leaning toward like-minded Shia religious parties of the Iraqi National Alliance (INA) who make no secret of their relationship to Iran. Should he succeed in forming a government dominated by his own Dawa party and the Hakim and Muqtada al-Sadr parties of the INA, Iraq will once more be presenting a sectarian face to its people.

As for Mr. Allawi, he may be a Shiite, but he carries with him a Sunni agenda. As he attempts to form a coalition government in the next few weeks, he will find that just bringing together people of disparate viewpoints does not itself constitute compromise. That requires the forging of a common policy platform. And even Mr. Allawi's party doesn't have one.

His list is a combination of secular Shiites, religious Sunnis and arch-nationalists. What happens when he attempts to marry this diverse Iraqiya party with the fundamentalist Shia INA and with a separatist Kurdish list?

Will the only thing the members have in common be a hankering to be in power, perhaps to enjoy its spoils?

The problem is that each sectarian group within a multiplicitous coalition has its own exclusionist demands. It's the kind of thing that often plagues Israeli coalition governments, with smaller, more extreme parties often pushing the government into more strident positions if it is to remain in office.

Is Ammar al-Hakim really shuffling off his Iranian background and rhetoric when he's waving the Iraqi flag at rallies? Or does his rhetoric mask an exclusionist pro-Iran agenda? The man was raised entirely in Iran and, despite his cherubic face, is close to Iranian hard-liners. Does he actually want what he used to advocate: an Iranian-style Islamic republic? If so, can he really be coupled fruitfully with a Sunni-leaning Iraqiya party? Or will people simply confuse proximity with agreement?

In an Iraqiya coalition, to take another example, which will triumph: the Arab arch-nationalists who demand a strong central government and are not about to cede any territory around Mosul or oil-rich Kirkuk to the Kurdistan Regional Government, or Kurdish nationalists who say they won't rest until they have liberated their territory and been allowed to have their own oil-development policy and their own army?

Can these two points of view reach compromise? Not according to Masoud Barzani, president of the Kurdistan Regional Government, who insists large parts of the province of Ninewah, which includes Mosul, and all of the city of Kirkuk belong to the Kurds.

Ninewah Governor Najayfi says it's the parties who can't reach agreement, rather than the people. He may have a point, and there may be change coming if a new Kurdish party, Goran, finishes with several seats. Or does the governor's language merely conceal an exclusionist agenda? Would he compromise an inch?

If the two groups can't possibly be expected to reconcile on those fundamental points, should they be part of the same coalition, for the sake of national unity?

IRAQ'S 'MESSY END'?

Or has the time come to set Iraq free from the concept of sharing power in a sectarian kind of way, free from muhasasa? Perhaps now there has to be a strong opposition to go with a strong majority government, and the idea of "national unity" has to take on new meaning.

Can it be that good government, based on the idea that the project undertaken by the people is to build an Iraq of all its people, can provide something most Iraqis can believe in?

Peter Galbraith, a former U.S. diplomat, in his book The End of Iraq, concludes that Iraq's sectarian strife "is the messy end of a country that never worked as a voluntary union and that brought misery to most of its people most of the time."

In Baghdad and other mixed Sunni-Shia areas, he says, "there is no solution, at least in the foreseeable future."

It falls to the next government of Iraq to heed the warning, or it will find that it too has an appointment in Samarra.