Proposed Iraqi constitution(s) asking for trouble
Here’s something you won’t find anywhere else. (I googled.) These are the scanned copies of the proposed constitutions for Iraq, post-Saddam. Sami Abdul Rahman, the deputy prime minister (KDP) of the Kurdistan Regional Government, gave them to me after I interviewed him in his offices in the Parliament building in Arbil. He wrote them, and the KDP and PUK, in a rare show of public unity, have signed on. Even State, back in July, said the ideas were “interesting.”
There are two files, the proposed constitution for a Federal Republic of Iraq (3.0MB), heavily modeled on the United States Constitution, and the constitution for the Kurdish region (5.6MB). Sorry for the size of the files. I tried to make them as small as I could.
The first one maps out a plan that would divide the country into two regions: The Arabs would get the middle and southern regions along with the province of Nineveh (excepting regions that have Kurdish majorities) and the Kurds would get the provinces of Kirkuk, Suleimaniya, Arbil and Duhok, the districts of Aqra, Sheihkan and Sinjar and the sub-districts of Zimar (in Nineveh), Khaniqin and Mandali (Diyala) and Badra (in the province of Al-Wasit.) Unlike the U.S. Constitution, however, there is a state religion — Islam — and official languages (Kurdish in the Kurdish regions and Arabic in the other.)
There is a liberal collection of rights granted, but a worrisome dependence on “the law,” as in, “No one can be captured, detained, jailed, or searched except in circumstances defined in law.” This loophole is scattered throughout the document, subordinating the constitutions to whatever the regional or national legislatures want to write into the lawbooks. Instead of being the supreme law of the land, as in the United States, the constitutions instead provide justification for, say, the harsh rule of shar’ia, should Islamists gain control over the National Assembly.
And while “power is inherent in the people as they are the source of its legitmacy,” I worry that this draft is too weak to protect the people of Iraq (and particularly the Kurds) from democracy gone bad. Jeffersonian these documents ain’t.
There’s also a lot that will piss off the Turks, making the adoption of this charter less than likely. The Kurds blame much of Iraq’s (and by extension their own) misfortunes on the centralization of power in Iraq. This is exactly the problem in Turkey and while a few Turkish intellectuals have floated the idea of a federal structure in Turkey, that idea has about as much of a chance as Saddam does of winning another war and occupying Washington.
As the preamble says:
Centralization in government has lost its appeal even within simple and homogenous communities. It has especially lost its rationale for being resorted to in communities that are of a pluralist nature made up of various nationalities, religious groups and languages, such as the Iraqi [Ed: And Turkish] community. The high degree of centralization and the indifference of decision makers to the presence of the special characteristics of the Kurdish people are among the basic reasons for the Kurds being deprived of their legitimate rights under successive Iraqi governments, which came to power under both the monarchy and the republic. This style of restricting authority in t he centre and the unwillingness to share it with the Kurds on a practical basis, even after the March 11, 1970 autonomy agreement has been the hallmark of the role of the Iraqi state.
Well, yeah, and Saddam murdering innocent women and children with chemical weapons has also been a “hallmark of the role of the Iraqi state.” Harping on the evils centralization and the failure to recognize the special nature of Kurds — which is exactly what has been happening in Turkey since 1921 — is asking for trouble, if you ask me. Every criticism mentioned in the preamble against Iraq could equally be leveled at Turkey. (Except the Turks haven’t bombed villages with aflatoxin or other weapons of mass destruction.) And Turkey has been growling that any deal that leaves the Kurds with independence, either de facto or de jure, will be met with guns and tanks. And I have no idea what the United States, as the new regional powerbroker, would do if a NATO ally began operations in the area America claims as conquered territory.
