Iraq’s reforms may help it avoid Lebanon’s sectarian fate

Caught between sectarianism and tyranny, Iraq's prime minister has made a bold move. But is it the wrong choice, asks Faisal Al Yafai?

Iraqi soldiers mark the withdrawal of US troops from Iraqi cities and towns in 2009. The reforms passed by Iraq's parliament yesterday change one of the elements of the post-invasion settlement. (AFP Show more

Yesterday afternoon, Iraq’s parliament approved some of the most significant changes to the country’s political system since the 2003 invasion.

Most analysts have focused on the proposals of prime minister Haider Al Abadi that tackle corruption. But the reforms also have another aspect, one that has the potential to fundamentally change how democratic politics is done in Iraq. Whether that change will be for the better is as yet unknown.

Mr Al Abadi proposed removing the positions of the two vice-presidents and three deputy prime ministers. The two vice-presidents were meant to be shared between the Sunni and Shia communities (one and two respectively), and the three deputy prime ministers divided among Sunni, Shia and Kurdish communities. When it was first proposed, in the aftermath of the 2003 invasion, it was an inelegant solution to a problem of representation.

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Read more about the aftermath of the 2003 invasion:

■ Why Iraqi sectarianism is a persistent lie

■ What if the US had not invaded Iraq in 1991?

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Mr Al Abadi has also banned a quota system across ministries, which, again, had a sectarian element meant to placate various communities. He has replaced it with a committee to oversee appointments – chosen by him.

If the old system of allocating political positions based on religion sounds familiar, that is because it has been tried before, in Lebanon.

Lebanon’s confessional system, introduced after independence from France, allocates political posts to each of the main religious communities. The idea was to ensure that no faith group could dominate the others. The result has been a broad paralysis of the country’s politics.

Advocates of the Lebanese system claim, not implausibly, that it has at least kept the state together, even if it has also paralysed it politically. Instead of Lebanon splitting into geographical enclaves based on sect, the country has remained one entity. Indeed, given the pressures that Lebanon has been subject to, from Israel to the south and the Syrian civil war to the east, it has remained surprisingly cohesive.

But the effect on politics has been more insidious. The difficulty with politics with a confessional or sectarian cast is that it changes the relationship between the voter and politician.

Ideally, in a democratic system, individual voters choose politicians based on how their proposed policies affect them as individuals. Spread across a population, this method (ideally) ensures that the desires of the widest group of voters are accommodated.

But in a confessional system, this relationship is warped. Instead of deciding based on their individual circumstances, voters decide based on what is good for their sect or faith – or, even worse, they simply vote for the politician who comes from the same religious background as they do.

The result, as in Lebanon, is the partitioning of a country’s politics into silos. No politician can hope to appeal beyond their own, narrow base – and so they don’t try, instead appealing more and more narrowly to their sect. The result is that the identification of individuals with their faith becomes absolute. Instead of Christian or Muslim Lebanese identifying as citizens of a nation first, they identify as members of a religion.

The other danger of a political system based on sect is one that Iraq, above all, should be familiar with – the ability of neighbouring countries to extend their politics across borders. This is precisely what has happened in Iraq over the past decade.

By using its position as a leading Shia Muslim centre of scholarship, Iran was able to appeal to Iraqi Shia, leading to many of the most destructive policies and the alienating of Iraq's Sunni communities. The fracturing of Iraq as a nation has followed inexorably from the fracturing of the idea of Iraq as a nation. By removing the sectarian system, Mr Al Abadi hopes to begin to reclaim Iraq as an idea.

But the cure could be worse than the disease. In seeking to avoid paralysis and fragmentation, Mr Al Abadi may have created a system that allows the tyranny of a majority.

Iraq’s sectarian allocation was a reaction to the years of Sunni domination – perhaps Saddam domination would be more accurate – and the marginalisation of Iraqi’s majority Shia population.

By removing those checks and balances, the change to the sectarian system could in fact entrench sectarianism across the board. Indeed it puts too much power in the hands of Mr Al Abadi himself, who will decide who merits hiring and who deserves firing. His predecessor as prime minister, Nouri Al Maliki, also gathered to himself too much power to influence the ­sectarian mix of the country’s elite – with terrifying consequences.

Mr Al Abadi is not Nouri Al Maliki, and Iraq today is not Iraq in 2006, when Mr Al Maliki became prime minister. The barbarians of ISIL are not merely at the gate, they control large parts of the country. The dangers of sectarianism are not abstract, they are demonstrable.

A democratic political system is only as good as the politicians and the voters. It will be up to the latter to ensure that this change fixes a broken system and does not get manipulated by politics inside and outside the country.

It needs to work; Iraq has already lost too much.

On Twitter: @FaisalAlYafai