|
USA Shortsightedly Fostering Party-Slate Elections in Iraq
From The Washington Post, an opinion article by Michael Rubin, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and editor of the Middle East Quarterly.On June 30 ... a caretaker Iraqi government will run the country until elections in January. ... There are two ways to hold direct elections: by party slates, with each party gaining representation according to its portion of the vote, or by single-member constituencies, somewhat like our own congressional districts. On June 4 Carina Perelli, head of the U.N. electoral advisory team in Iraq, endorsed party slates. When I was a roving CPA political adviser, I lived outside the Green Zone and interacted not only with Iraqi politicians but also with ordinary people. Voting was the topic of conversations at teahouses and mosques. Islamist parties tended to favor a party-slate system. Advocates of an Iranian-style Islamic republic were blunt: "The first article in a democracy is the rule of the majority over the minority." .... Liberal Iraqis favor constituency-based elections. .... Older Iraqis also favor constituencies. Distrust of political parties is deeply rooted. One recent poll indicated that political parties have only a 3 percent favorability rating. Pensioners remember the 1960s as a time of pitched street battles between adherents of leftist and nationalist parties. Younger generations view parties through the lens of the Baath Party experience, in which employment depended on a party membership card. Distrust of parties extends to Iraqi Kurdistan, where I taught in the 2000-01 academic year. With few exceptions, my students associated local Kurdish parties with corruption, abuse of power and nepotism. ... Even Perelli, the U.N. official, acknowledged Iraqi ill feeling toward political parties. .... But at her news conference this month, Perelli explained her rationale for abandoning the accountability of single-member constituencies in favor of pursuing party-slate elections. "There are a lot of communities that have been broken and dispersed around Iraq," she said, "and these communities wanted to be able to accumulate their votes and to vote with like-minded people." .... With that one sentence, Perelli would set Iraq on the slippery slope to the failed Lebanese-style communal system. According to an Iraqi electoral commission member, Bremer agreed to a party-slate system to bypass the tricky question of who votes where, thereby trading Iraqâs long-term health for short-term expediency. .... The party-slate system will not bolster representation. Many Iraqis share ethnicity but not local interests. Tel Afar, a town of 160,000 east of Mosul, is 95 percent Shiite Turkmen. Its Turkish-speaking residents have little in common with Turkmen in Erbil or Kirkuk. The party-slate system might also undercut religious freedom. Christians, for example, represent less than 3 percent of Iraqâs population. They remain concentrated in towns such as Alqosh, Ainkawa and Duhok. Many Christians do not support parties such as the Assyrian Democratic Movement. Without district-based elections, they may find themselves without representation. Smaller religious communities that do not have their own political parties but who live in clustered districts may find themselves without political representation in the important constitutional process. .... Posted by: Mike Sylwester 2004-06-19 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=35881 |