Month: January 2011
More than the sun shines in Baghdad
It was cold and rainy in Baghdad yesterday–I mean 40s F and it seemed to rain every time I stepped inside, which was fortunate. Lots of mud. Not nice.
Today is a good deal brighter, sunnier and more representative of the political mood. People here feel things are looking up: they are hoping their “national partnership” government (Maliki 2) will be an improvement over Maliki 1, even if they are too realistic and experienced to expect much in the way of quick change. Checkpoints, and some of the 12-foot high T walls that protect so much in the Green Zone, are coming down. It will take time before it makes much of an impact, but there is even some street cleaning going on, and garbage pickup by men in uniform with reflective vests on.
Everyday life has gotten back to something like normal. The kids go off to school, the Minister of the Interior (which is how some people refer to a wife!) stays home, the breadwinners go off to do battle with public transport and massive traffic jams, caused by a flood of imported cars since the fall of Saddam Hussein. Police get some respect from ordinary people, if not from the wealthy and powerful. Ministry employees are being told they need to show up for work or lose their salaries. None of this will sound like much to people outside conflict zones, but it represents what I have come to recognize as the fondest dream of people inside conflict zones: to live a normal, violence-free existence.
Of course it is not trouble-free, or really even violence free. Yesterday a rocket or mortar fell in the road near the Al Rasheed Hotel, now closed for renovations. There are fewer “improvised explosive devices,” but there is a wave of (often not publicized) targeted killings of key members of the security forces with silencer-equipped pistols. No one seems to know who is behind the current violence. Ba’athists? Al Qaeda? Iran? They are labels chosen depending on the politics of the person you are talking to you rather than any hard information about the actual perpetrators, who however are a good deal less inclined to random killing than in the past. That is some comfort to ordinary people.
At this stage in a society emerging from conflict, corruption becomes a big issue. And so it has here in Iraq, where Maliki 2 is said to have given firm instructions to his cabinet to clean up. We’ll see how effective that will be, but the emergence of corruption as a big issue is a good sign. People complain less about corruption when mass murder is occurring several times a day.
The one politician with a lot to complain about these days, I imagine, is Iyad Allawi, who still sits outside the tent while all the main leaders of his Iraqiyya coalition have scurried inside to occupy much-coveted ministerial positions. There is little movement on the legislation that would create the National Council on Strategic Policies, the watchdog group he is slated to chair. Even the Iraqiyya-proposed version of the legislation includes an 80 per cent majority requirement for the Council’s decisions to be binding. That won’t be easy to get.
Meanwhile, the prime minister still controls the main security portfolios, though I understand that he yesterday named Sheikh Faleh Fayyadh, a distinguished associate of former prime minister Ibrahim Jaffari to the important position of minister of state for national security. Maliki also met today with Kuwait’s Prime Minister, Nasser al-Ahmed al-Subah, in Baghdad. That is more significant than it sounds, since Maliki has been critical of the Kuwaitis and tough-minded in seeking resolution of several difficult bilateral issues.
Normalizing Iraq’s relationships with mostly Sunni Arab neighbors is challenging for Maliki, who has been viewed negatively in Riyadh and other capitals. Kuwait would be a good start. Maliki is also hoping to convince the Arab League, whose secretary general was here the past few days, that it can hold its March meeting in Baghdad. The big challenge is logistics and facilities, which just don’t look adequate, but the Iraqis are capable of amazing things when they set their minds to it. The prime minister’s guest house, which I mentioned in a previous post, looks finished from the outside.
NOTE TO THE PRESS: please cite www.peacefare.net when quoting or reproducing this piece in any language.
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Bosnia still needs the U.S. as well as Europe
International Crisis Group, in a piece published today, urges a kind of unilateral coup by the EU to take over the lead international role in Bosnia:
European Union (EU) member states should make 2011 the year when the lead international role in Bosnia and Herzegovina shifts from the Office of the High Representative (OHR) to a reinforced EU delegation.
With scarce reference to coordinating with the United States or its future role, ICG claims Bosnia and Herzegovina has outgrown the OHR, the arbiter of Dayton agreement implementation, and will do just fine if current conditions for its abolition are dropped or finessed and the weight of the international community’s intervention is shifted to the question of EU membership, with no executive authority for the EU representative. Somehow conditions for EU membership will be much more effective, international community credibility in imposing conditions will not be reduced just because the last set is being ignored, and OHR can be left to tidy up its unfinished business and wither away.
I confess a serious temptation to support wholeheartedly ICG’s bold proposition. The Washington has too many issues on its shrinking plate today–getting rid of a few leftovers from the 1990s would be most welcome. Bosnia was never a vital U.S. interest. President Clinton’s intervention there in the 1995 was precipitated by an accumulation of secondary interests, combined with Senator Dole’s sharp criticism of the Administration for not intervening as it promised it would during the previous electoral campaign. Today, Bosnia lies way down the list of priorities. As a taxpayer, I would count Europe taking over as a big plus.
The trouble is that I doubt Europe can do it with anything like the forcefulness and clarity required, and nothing in the ICG report convinces me otherwise. The ICG report simply ignores Milorad Dodik’s many threats to take Republika Srpska (RS) in the direction of independence, as if they are not to be taken seriously (unless they present themselves in military guise, at which point the report seems confident the U.S. will join Turkey and the EU in preventing it from happening). The report treats the RS’s many acts of defiance as rightful and all attempts by the international community to block or blunt them, except the most discreet, as arbitrary, mistaken or unjustified. It is hard to imagine how the report would be much different if it had been written in Banja Luka, where RS’s masters call the tune.
The sad fact is that Europe and the U.S. need to act in close concert in Bosnia, where Europe’s voice is still weak and divided and the American voice is heard more loudly and clearly. A quick visit to Mostar, where the EU has achieved little since 1993, and to Brcko, where the U.S. has led a real effort at reintegration, would show what difference it makes.
My own worst fear is that Europe, left to its own confused devices, will begin to de facto negotiate EU membership separately with the RS, which will happily volunteer to implement the acquis communitaire without any help from Sarajevo. Already European ministers regularly call on Milorad Dodik in Banja Luka as if he is leading an independent state, something the Americans have generally tried to avoid. If Dodik can prevent formation of a government in Sarajevo for a few more months, as he likely can given his showing in the last election, he’ll be in a position to leave Sarajevo in the figurative dust when it comes to implementing European requirements.
I would not protest a well-coordinated move to shift more weight to a truly amped up EU Delegation, but that should include a plan for meeting the conditions for closure of the OHR (the ICG description of the current state of play on these makes interesting reading) as well as for strong American participation in the European effort. There is nothing unusual about this. The head of the International Civilian Office, who is also the EU representative in Kosovo, has a strong American deputy, and Americans have participated in many EU missions, starting to my knowledge with the European customs mission in Bosnia right after the war.
No effort that simply drops the Americans from the picture, or ignores the local political context as much as ICG’s does, will succeed. Bosnia still needs the U.S. as well as Europe.
NOTE TO THE PRESS: please cite www.peacefare.net when quoting or reproducing this piece in any language.
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From the mundane to the mundane
Made it to Baghdad without much adventure. Fourteen hour flight to Kuwait, four hour layover, Gryphon charter into Baghdad. No really good stories to tell from this trip. There is that moment when they turn off all the cabin lights–presumably to make it really hard for someone on the ground to see the aircraft–that a hush falls over the passengers and everyone waits calmly but expectantly for the wheels to touch down. And I’ll have to remember that United doesn’t want you to use the lounge in Kuwait on arrival, only on departure. Nice way to treat passengers who’ve just endured 14 hours on one of your aluminum cans!
Of course what you really want is for the trip in from the airport to be as dull as possible. Ours was, though we managed to get lost on the complicated and unmarked military side for 20 minutes before finding our way to the exit. From there to the first Green Zone checkpoint is no more than 10 minutes, after which there is a series of pro forma checkpoints whose purpose is perfectly unclear. One soldier wanted to see the Interior Ministry paper work for the PSD (personal security detail). I’m not complaining. As trips into war zones go, this one was close to perfect.
The big problem is that my cell phone isn’t working. I had T-mobile turn on international service last week and was assured everything would be fine. Not fine. It didn’t work in Kuwait and isn’t working here in Baghdad–it seems to know there is a signal out there but isn’t interested in having me use it. Bless the internet access where I am staying (note how I don’t say where that is), even if it is extraordinarily slow.
But what I’ve really got to focus on now is the Iraqis, and how we may be able to use the next few days to help them move ahead. The Iraqis call the government a “national partnership” that includes all the significant political blocks. They hope that means the use of politics rather than violence to settle conflict. They readily acknowledge the need to improve services, fight corruption, resolve Arab/Kurdish issues (Kirkuk and the disputed internal boundaries in general) and settle relations with their neighbors, by which Iraqis mean ending the neighbors’ interference in Iraq and gaining some measure of respect for Iraq’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. The Iraqis are also anxious, at least with Americans, to emphasize human rights, especially protection of their small Christian population, which has been under attack.
The real trick here is not about what the Iraqis say they want but about operationalizing their objectives, moving (as Qubad Talabani put it at a USIP meeting last week) from politics to policies and working out the mechanics of governing effectively. Iraq has lots of oil, but no oil policy, lots of agricultural potential but no agricultural policy, lots of security problems but no effective security policy.
Of course part of the problem is that this national partnership does not entirely trust its leader, Prime Minister Maliki. Some think the Parliament should be the main check on his power, or maybe the cabinet (that’s an odd idea in my view–ministers who nominally work for him should restrain him?). Others are looking to an Iyad Allawi-led, still-to-be-created National Council for Strategic Policies, whose mandate and powers will be a real test of whether we’ve got a partnership or not. Another test, as Sean Kane pointed out at the USIP event, is how lustration of former Ba’athists is handled: will the new Justice and Accountability Board find a better solution than the notorious de-Ba’athification Commission, which went overboard so far as to prevent Saleh Mutlaq–now a deputy prime minister–from running in the March elections?
It is not only Saleh Mutlaq in the new government–there are also Moqtada al Sadr’s people, who come from the other end of the religio-political spectrum, and who in turn find themselves in a government with (mostly secular) Kurds who want a long-term strategic relationship with the U.S. The Kurds of course like a Federal Iraq and wouldn’t be unhappy to see at least one more regional government formed, an idea that is anathema to others in the government even if some Anbaris are beginning to think about it. In policy terms, there are dozens of these contradictions within the government, and a lot of fractious pressures also from outside.
I suspect, but I’ll find out for sure this week, that Maliki views this fractious government as suiting his purposes well. None of its many components will be anxious to leave it, because it would not be clear whether they could get back in if Maliki falls. The majority is so large that Maliki can afford to lose the votes of one or another coalition on any given issue–in practice, his majority will be one of what the Europeans call “variable geometry.” Maliki is the linchpin for this game of variable geometry, a role he managed to play very well in the previous government.
So this may not be the prettiest of governments, and it is likely to have more than its share of crises over specific issues, but can it find ways forward that begin to exploit Iraq’s extraordinary endowments of people, resources and geography? Often national reconciliation is regarded as the prerequisite. It may sometimes more likely be the result. Can Iraqis find practical things they can do together–whether it is divide oil revenue, delegate more powers to the provinces or deliver more electricity–that bring tangible benefits and enable people to look past their differences to a better future?
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Repeating the allegations doesn’t make them true
Chuck Sudetic, whom I know and respect, in his Washington Post op/ed Saturday repeats Dick Marty’s allegations about high-level criminal activity in Kosovo in 1999-2000, this time without the important reservation that no forensic investigation has been conducted and no claims of guilt or innocence can be made. This is pretty rich, coming from the co-author of Carla Del Ponte’s memoir. Carla was the Hague Tribunal prosecutor who failed herself to mount a serious investigation of these allegations but nevertheless saw fit to include them, briefly, in the memoir.
Marty’s report, Chuck says, does not attack Kosovo’s legitimacy, but as is now well known Marty himself took a strong stand against Kosovo independence, on legal grounds that have now been vitiated in their entirety by the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice. Are we to believe, as Chuck claims, that the Marty report “draws upon Albanian eyewitnesses and insiders as well as Western intelligence and police agencies, and not upon the Albanians’ foe, the government of Serbia”? There are clear signs in the Marty report of information coming from Serbia, whether directly or through those Western intelligence and police agencies.
I repeat what I have said previously: I do not know the truth or falsity of the allegations, precisely because no serious forensic investigation has been conducted. That is what is needed, complete with the latest scientific techniques as well as witness protection, which Chuck rightly calls for.
He is also correct in one other important respect: these allegations, even if true, are no grounds for calling into question Kosovo’s legitimacy as an independent state. Does anyone think Croatia less legitimate as a state because its former prime minister now stands accused of corruption? Or that Serbia should not be independent because it was led for many years by a president accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity? Those who have tried to open up this line of attack are doing their own cause a serious disservice, and making it difficult for both Pristina and Tirana to do what they should, namely cooperate fully with a serious investigation.
Chuck exaggerates American responsibility in this matter, referring repeatedly to the United States and its diplomats as if only what they say goes. But Washington and Brussels together can and should exert the pressure needed to get a serious investigation under way, with full cooperation from Pristina, Tirana and Belgrade.
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Better inside the tent
The return this week of firebrand political/religious/militia leader Moqtada al Sadr to Baghdad is a major event for Iraqi politics. Matt Duss offers a fine summary of Sadr’s significance at the Wonk Room. To make a long story short, Sadr left Iraq more than three years ago for religious studies in Qom (and likely also Tehran) in order to gain at least a minimal claim as heir to his father’s and father-in-law’s religious prestige, as well as the title of ayatollah. During his time away, Iraq’s frighteningly violent Shia/Sunni violence ended, in part because Prime Minister Maliki ordered Iraqi security forces into action against Sadr’s militia, the Mehdi Army, in both Basra and Baghdad.
But enmity is not forever. Sadr’s political movement won 40 seats in the Iraqi parliament last March, threw its political support behind a second mandate for Maliki at a critical moment in the fall, and now occupies eight ministerial posts in the recently confirmed second Maliki government. Sadr has played his political cards well.
He is a notoriously erratic person, but so far his return seems clearly targeted on maintaining and increasing his political weight, rather than returning to any kind of violent insurgency. He and his people are talking up Iraqi nationalism and the Iraqi state, talking down the occupation and the Americans (and insisting they leave Iraq by the agreed deadline of December 31) and warning that they will be watching the government’s performance in delivering services to the poor, who in the Shia parts of Iraq are enthusiasts for Sadr. The fondest hope of those of us who watch Iraq is that disputes will be settled nonviolently in the parliament and provincial councils as well as the courts, not to mention our hope that the people of Iraq will get better services. If Sadr remains on his current path, the news is definitively good.
But what, you may ask, of the charges against Sadr for the murder of his archrival Abdul Majid al Khoei in 2003? No one should forget it, that is for sure, and the Khoei family won’t allow us to. This is one of those difficult cases where justice and peace diverge: accountability would require an arrest and trial; peace requires restraint. Until sufficient evidence can be brought before an Iraqi court, and a trial conducted in an atmosphere conducive to finding the truth and acting on it, I am afraid accountability will have to wait. Surely Maliki has had to guarantee that Sadr would not be arrested on his return to Baghdad, and the fact that the Americans can no longer arrest anyone without Iraqi government cooperation gives that guarantee credibility. And it is still possible that Maliki will find it necessary to give the Sadrists one of the security portfolios in his new government–several key positions remain in caretaker status.
It is important before condemning Maliki’s political pragmatism to realize that Sadr is not just an individual. Scion of a leading religious family, he leads a substantial political movement with deep roots in Iraqi Shia-dom (not to mention those 40 seats in parliament). I’d be the last to excuse murder because of that, but the Iraqi state and justice system will have to be far stronger than it is today before it reckons with Sadr’s alleged accountability in the murder of Khoei, not to mention the many less well known Iraqis who died at the hands of the Mehdi Army. If ever Sadr presents a real threat to Maliki, I have no doubt what the pragmatic prime minister is capable of. But for the moment, even from an American perspective it is better to have Moqtada inside the tent peeing out.
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A woolen, not a velvet, divorce
Tomorrow is the first voting day of the South Sudan independence referendum, which ends on January 15. Registration seems to have gone reasonably well, people are returning in substantial numbers to the South to vote, and Sudanese President Bashir has visited Juba, the South’s capital, and said the right things about accepting the results. It is universally anticipated that the vote will go heavily for independence, which will occur six months hence in accordance with the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement.
But this will be no “velvet” divorce between consenting and cooperating capitals. There are still many issues to be resolved: demarcation of the north/south border, holding of the Abyei region referendum, division of oil and oil revenue as well as debts and water rights, citizenship rights for northerners in the South and southerners in the North, traditional grazing rights for nomadic pastoralists…the list goes on. There are also problems that are likely to arise within the South, rife with local disputes, and within the North, some of whose politicians will see separation of the Christian and traditionalist South as allowing the mostly Muslim North to take a distinctly more Islamist direction.
So this is likely to be a bit rougher than Czechoslovakia, but nowhere near as rough as Serbia/Kosovo, where more than two years after independence Belgrade is unwilling to recognize the breakaway state. Belgrade and Pristina haven’t even begun to deal with the many practical issues they need to resolve–at least Khartoum and Juba have begun discussions under the aegis of former South African President Mbeki. A woolen divorce, at best, not a velvet one.
Of course a lot more could still go wrong. The most likely problems seem to be South/South violence, violence against southerners in the North or northerners in the South, conflict over Abyei and other border areas, or failure to agree on oil, which has to flow from the South through the North in order to get to market. The South by any standard is a weak state with little real control over its territory or capacity to delivery even rudimentary services to its population. The North is significantly stronger, but its writ does not run much outside the Nile riverine population, it faces an active insurgency in Darfur, and its president has been indicted by the International Criminal Court.
Let’s give credit, however, to those who have at least avoided a crisis in the past few months. The U.S. Government laid out a clear menu of carrots for the North and has also restrained its southern allies, who have patiently sat out abuse and air attacks in Abyei so as not to upset the referendum process. The Chinese appear to have used their long-standing influence with the North and their new-found clout with the South to convince both that getting the oil investments they need requires maintaining stability. The UN has redeployed its forces in the South towards the new country’s northern border, and the U.S.–working closely with other countries and international organizations–is amping up its assistance throughout the South.
Credit, if stability holds for the next week and beyond, above all should go to the leaderships in Khartoum and Juba, but not because they are good guys. While neither has been willing or able in the last six years to “make unity attractive,” both seem to understand that peace will serve their purposes better than renewed war. The South will gain the independence President Salva Kiir has always wanted, with ample dollops of foreign aid to ease the transition. The North will lose a part of the country it hasn’t really controlled for decades and gain a good deal more leeway to pursue its Islamic vocation. Bashir may well also imagine that behaving well will gain him some measure of immunity from the ICC indictment, as well as some relief from U.S. and other sanctions.
One note for those who believe the U.S. can only influence world events with military intervention, a category that includes many who favor it as well as many who oppose it. Look ma: no troops. It is too early to declare success, but if success is to be declared it will have been achieved without the instrument that too many people think is the only effective one. Diplomacy is messy–who wants to see Bashir continue in power and gain credit simply for avoiding creation of a crisis? It is also risky–things could easily come apart before independence. But if a crisis has been postponed for six, or twelve, or eighteen months, that is a big plus, one we should all applaud and try to sustain.
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