From a letter received today from Canon Andrew White, a (true) Anglican peace worker (my own emphasis added - SL)...
Amongst the terrible hostage news in Iraq it has almost been forgotten in the UK that this is the week of Iraq’s most important elections for decades.
... well these are certainly the most dangerous elections in the world. Scores of people have already been killed who were involved in some way in the elections. The former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi has already had 11 of his parties candidates killed. At the other end of the spectrum young Christian men have been shot dead as they placed posters in place for the Assyrian Democratic Party.
Yet however much one tries to keep religion out of politics it still features prominently. The Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani had said he was going to keep out of the election after supporting the Iraqi Alliance last time. However he has told people to vote for religious candidates and he has allowed his face to appear on various candidates posters.
Despite the dangers involved Iraq is not short of parties or candidates. Two hundred and twenty six parties are standing with over 7000 candidates. Quite a list to choose from. Also electioneering has been intense. With it being too dangerous to take to the streets the price for advertising on TV has climbed to $3000 per minute. Un-requested text messages have been sent to the new Iraqi mobile phones. Many of Iraq’s 200+ newspapers have pushed their parties hard, half of them are owned by political parties. Amidst this great activity the shooting and killing has continued. Indeed in the past few weeks the violence and insurgency has increased.
Yet people will be turning out to vote in their masses, despite being a new phenomenon in Iraq democracy is taken seriously. What the West needs to realise though is that democracy here in the Middle East is a very different phenomena than in the USA or UK. We do not know yet if it will even work. The down side is that you can not predict who is going to win. Or even who will be Prime Minister.
It may well be people the West does not like. We just have to look at what recently happened after elections in Iran, the possible results in Gaza next month are equally worrying. When you look at the most stable countries in the region one is immediately drawn to Jordan and Morocco. Both in reality are not democracies but the benevolent dictatorship of their kingdoms. So we do not know what the results will be and it is likely to take several weeks before we precisely know who will lead the nation.
In a poll released in Iraq this week people stated that having a strong leader was the most important thing that the nation needed. They saw this requirement as being more important than even democracy. As Thomas L Friedman of the New York Times said jut after the war “Saddam ruled this nation with an Iron fist, we are trying to rule it with and Iron finger, and this isn’t Norway you know”. Iraq certainly needs strong leadership but it also needs benevolent leadership. For too long Iraqis have suffered the abuse of their leader, they now need to see strength and kindness and the two can go together
The election is overseen by the independent Electoral Commission of Iraq (IECI). They themselves only just know what they are doing. It was only a month ago they came to us at the Iraqi Institute of Peace and asked if we would run all the elections in Al Anbar (The Sunna Triangle) it involved taking on 6500 staff in just 10 days. Not quite the way you would expect elections to be organized, but here in Iraq nothing works like one would expect.
The advantage of the new Government will be that it will have time to begin to bring about real change. Since the war, Iraq has had three Governments in fewer than three years. Now at least it will have four years to try and begin to work things out. At its outset though it will be plagued by difficulties as it tries to come to terms with what is certain to be great diversity. The difficulty is that many of those elected will not just be political opponents, they will hate each other. What’s more they will not even all be nice people. There are certain to be elected some very dangerous individuals.
Democracy in Iraq is not the solution to all it problems. We now realise it will take years to work out. This may though just be the beginning of change, but even that will take time.
Canon Andrew White
CEO of the Foundation for Reconciliation in the Middle East
Anglican Priest in Iraq
International Director of the Iraqi Institute of Peace
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