| 19 June 2004 | Saturday | 30 Rabi-us-Saani 1425 |
More moral than legal
Reaping the bitter harvest: Iraq - how history's lessons were ignored - II
Laying aside their competing vanities, the United States and the Europe have at last agreed on a Security Council resolution that formally ends the American occupation of Iraq on June 30 and authorizes a US-led multinational force to share responsibility for keeping peace and security in the insurgency-ridden country.
Whether it was the rekindling of the spirit of war-time cooperation between the two sides of the Atlantic, witnessed recently at the 60th D-Day anniversary, with President Bush and his French counterpart, Jacques Chirac, standing side by side, or a sudden convergence of interests in the oil-rich Middle East, the fact remains that the compromise over the role of foreign troops in Iraq, after the hand-over of power, has made it possible for the luckless resource-rich Arab country to turn a corner and embark on building a better future for its people.
Recent developments have shown that almost all outsiders now, instead of deriding Washington as a meddlesome-menace to world security, want the Iraqi people to succeed in their efforts to regain sovereignty and put their country on the road to peace, stability, social, political and economic development.
Another happy change is that Iraq's Arab neighbours want to give the new interim government a fair chance to succeed. The Arab regimes know well that if Iraq continues to be unstable and chaotic, Islamic terror and militancy will cross their borders as well.
The chief sticking point, that had so far stood in the way of a compromise formula, was whether the Iraqis would have any control over the deployment of American-led forces. France and some other members of the Security Council wanted the interim government to have some kind of veto over military action by foreign troops.
When America made it clear that that was out of the question, although it was prepared to consult the interim government on military operations, a compromise was evolved. The resolution does not contain the word "veto", but it does affirm the Iraqi government's right to "close coordination and consultation", especially on "sensitive offensive operations".
This phrase has been added to avert the repeat of recent controversial operations like the siege of Najaf and Fallujah. The resolution authorizes the interim government to order foreign troops out of the country at any time.
Another important feature of the resolution is that it makes it clear that the mandate of the American-led forces will expire by the end of December 2005. Hopefully, by that time Iraq will have a new government and parliament, elected under a new constitution.
Perhaps the most important part of the resolution is that which bestows on the interim government full control over Iraq's natural resources including its huge oil reserves. But an international audit under the resolution is mandatory to check how the Iraqi oil revenues are being spent.
Even a cursory look at the composition of the interim government will show a careful balance in the conflicting ethnic and sectarian interests of the Iraqi polity - with a Sunni Muslim as president, a Shia in the more powerful post of prime minister and the Kurds being given important portfolios.
Interim prime minister Ayad Allawi, a long time Iraqi-Shia exile who was once an eager and prominent Baathist, working for one of the most fearsome security services of the Arab world, is facing an uphill task.
Under more normal circumstances his appointment would have caused a furore in his country. But now, security and economic reconstruction are the chief concerns of the Iraqi people who think that Allawi's robust and strong-arm approach as well as his intent to induct former Baathists and senior soldiers into the establishment might succeed in establishing peace and security in Iraq.
However, for the time being, suicide bombs are still exploding and bullets continue to threaten the lives of those who cooperate with the American-led forces. Allawi's immediate task will be to establish at least a semblance of peace in the country as the security threat is likely to increase manifold after the hand-over of power on June 30.
The militants in the Sunni-dominated Fallujah, who successfully fended off the Americans for weeks, have declared that they are now moving the battlefield to Baghdad. The militant Shia leader Muqtada al-Sadr has also expressed similar intentions.
Interestingly, the US is now trying to mollify him. Mr Bush, who branded him a thug a month ago, now says that the United States will not deny the firebrand a role in Iraqi politics. During a joint press conference in Washington with Afghan president Hamid Karzai on June 15, he left it to the interim Iraqi government to deal with Muqtada al-Sadr.
It is, however, too early to correctly assess the magnitude of the security problem after June 30 and the ability of the Allawi government to bring it under control.
Then there are his detractors who doubt if Allawi will make sincere efforts to make Iraq safe enough for the January election after which he and his cabinet are expected to be replaced by the newly elected government.
He may even delay the holding of a census on security grounds which is a prerequisite for the general election. But there is also a strong possibility that if he succeeds in bringing order and security to Iraq, he may become popular enough to be Iraq's first elected prime minister.
Though he will be formally sworn in on June 30, Allawi has already started flexing his muscles. He has issued a decree disbanding militias, but allowing the Kurdish regional government to keep its militia (peshmerga forces).
Under the "transitional administrative law", called TAL, a mini-constitution drafted by the Americans, sovereignty is vested in presidency and not in the parliament, and the interim prime minister can rule by decree provided all the three members of the presidency (a Sunni, a Shia and a Kurd) assent.
The Kurds have so far been strong backers of Allawi. But they have created an explosive situation by threatening to pull out of the government and boycott the January election.
They are unhappy because the Americans have appeased the Shia leaders by agreeing to omit the inclusion of TAL in the UN resolution on Iraq. The Kurds fear that the Shias, constituting 60 per cent of the population, are destined to win the January election, and once they do that they will scrap the TAL and remove those provisions which give federal rights and autonomy to the Kurds.
Allawi hopes to succeed in restoring law and order, peace and security in Iraq with the help of additional armed international help Mr Bush is keen for Nato to get involved but France is not interested. Since there is strong opposition in Iraq to having troops from its immediate neighbours, the option of having soldiers from Turkey, Kuwait, Jordan, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iran is also closed.
That is certain to increase pressure on such countries as Pakistan to send their troops to strengthen armed international presence in Iraq. And since Pakistan has become a non-Nato ally of the United States, Islamabad will be on the horns of a dilemma if it receives a request for troops from Washington, particularly when such a request is also backed by the United Nations and the interim government in Baghdad.
India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal are likely to be the other countries which may be approached to send troops to Iraq. With the exception of India, the countries of South Asia may not find it difficult to accede to the request. India's response, however, has been uncertain.
During his recent visit to Washington, External Affairs Minister Natwar Singh indicated that his country might contribute some troops to a UN protection force in Iraq. But after his government's communist allies expressed strong opposition to such a move, New Delhi has decided to rule out Indian troops for Iraq.
The writer is a former ambassador.
More moral than legal
I have placed before the nation an issue which is more moral than legal. My petition is not directed against any individual. Nor is it against any political party. I filed it two weeks before the Lok Sabha election results were out.
Let me begin from the beginning. Nearly two years ago - I was still a member of the Rajya Sabha - parliament brought about an amendment to change the law on residential requirement for a Rajya Sabha member. The old law laid down that a member should ordinarily be living in the state from where the assembly returned him or her.
The new law did away with the residential qualification. The word, 'state', was deleted and 'India' was inserted in its place. What it really means is that anyone from any state assembly can be elected to the Rajya Sabha.
The BJP-led government piloted the amendment. But the Congress and the BJP apparently came to an arrangement and decided to drop the residential requirement. The communists opposed the bill. So did a few independent members, including myself.
But it was passed. The bill did one thing more: it changed the system of secret ballot into an open ballot. State assembly members were stopped from indicating their preference of secrecy, as was the practice before. They were henceforth legally required to show the ballot paper to the party's authorized agent before exercising their right.
My petition challenges both the points. Take the residential requirement first. This is essential if the Rajya Sabha has to stay as the house of the council of states, as spelled out in the constitution.
How could an outsider represent the state, its feelings or aspirations? B.R. Ambedkar, father of the constitution, assured members - former President R Venkataraman was one of them - there was no doubt that the lower house was the house of the people and the upper house that of the states.
What Ambedkar and the Constituent Assembly members had in mind was a federal structure - India was a combination of states where the Union would handle common affairs and the states, both regional and local.
The constitution framers wanted to give enough weight to the states' say. Some even suggested that the number of seats for each state, big or small, should be equal on the lines of the US Senate. The suggestion was not accepted.
The Constituent Assembly, however, emphasized the importance of the upper house in the affairs of the country. In the constitution itself the primacy of states was kept in mind. The centre was an administrative point but could not ride roughshod over the federal structure - the essence of the polity.
My plea is that when parliament deleted the residential qualification for the Rajya Sabha member, it chipped away at the federal structure. The states' right to be represented in parliament was forfeited. The constitution was wronged both in letter and in spirit.
When the amendment bill was being discussed in parliament, the National Commission on the Review of the Constitution was sitting. It warned the government against such legislation which, according to the Commission, would affect the concept of federalism. The government still went ahead.
As the law stands today, all the 250 Rajya Sabha members, excluding the 12 nominated members, can be elected from one state or, for that matter, one city. A few leaders from the Congress and the BJP have argued that the law to drop the residential qualification was the product of a consensus. But the law passed on the basis of a consensus does not become a right law. The question is moral.
The nation's ethos is not a set of laws which political parties decide to pass on the basis of convenience. There is something called values. Once you trample upon them, you cease to have a distinction between what is right and what is wrong, what moral and what is immoral.
True, the two major parties joined hands to have the new bill. This was because they were always hard put to have in parliament the people who had either lost in elections or to be accommodated as ministers for their political clout.
In fact, the parties have been circumventing the domicile clause by asking their members to submit wrong rent receipts and bogus ration cards to prove their residence in that particular state.
A study of the Rajya Sabha membership for half a century, from 1952 to 2002, reveals that five per cent of the Rajya Sabha members did not belong to the state when they were elected.
This percentage increased to nine after 1989. It showed some hesitation on the part of political parties to get members elected from outside. The new law opens the floodgates.
No doubt, when a bill is passed by parliament and gets the president's assent, it becomes a law. But does it have any sanctity when it defeats the basic structure of the constitution? Should the residential requirement for a Rajya Sabha member, a basic qualification, be deleted because major political parties want to bring members through the back door?
The second point in my petition is the secrecy of voting. This is something basic for a democratic polity. Assembly is not an auction place where the show of hand will decide which party has got how many members.
Money will play a bigger role than before because the buyer is sure to check the votes before they are cast. Some members, who were irked by conscience, used to vote against the party candidate.
Now they would have to fall in line knowing that their disobedience might cost them the party membership. Strange, the election to the upper house in states continues to be on the old pattern, through a secret ballot.
Another question posed is: how can the court go into an amendment which has been duly passed by both the houses? This is true. The court intervenes only when it comes to believe that such a law goes against the basic structure of the constitution.
In its pronouncement in the Keshavanand Bharti case, the Supreme Court held that parliament had no power to change the basic structure of the constitution. Federalism was defined as one of the basic features. My petition was fixed for hearing on July 12.
I would not have gone to the court for a stay order if the chief election Commissioner had deferred the biennial election of the Rajya Sabha members. I did not challenge the election of 11 members to the house after the new law because all of them belonged to the state from where they were elected.
It is a fallacious argument by the commission that it had issued the notification by the time the court's stay order came. I had sent a letter to the commission requesting "it to defer elections till the disposal of my petition" along with a copy of my petition.
I again reminded the commission of the petition five days before the notification. But it did not pay any heed to my letters. Heavens wouldn't have fallen if elections had been postponed.
The commission should not have made it a prestige issue. Ideally, it should have requested the court for a day-to-day hearing for an early disposal of the petition because the points raised were germane to the character of the constitution.
The writer is a leading columnist based in New Delhi.
Reaping the bitter harvest: Iraq - how history's lessons were ignored - II
As the Iraqi scholar Ghassan Attiyah discovered, the British, once they were installed in Baghdad, decided in the winter of 1917 that Iraq would have to be governed and reconstructed by a "council" formed partly of British advisers "and partly of representative non-official members from among the inhabitants".
The copycat 2003 version of this "council" was, of course, the Interim Governing Council, supposedly the brainchild of Maude's American successor, Paul Bremer.
Later, the British thought they would like "a cabinet half of natives and half of British officials, behind which might be an administrative council, or some advisory body consisting entirely of prominent natives".
The traveller and scholar Gertrude Bell, who became "oriental secretary" to the British military occupation authority, had no doubts about Iraqi public opinion: "The stronger the hold we are able to keep here the better the inhabitants will be pleased... They can't conceive an independent Arab government. Nor, I confess, can I. There is no one here who could run it."
Again, this was far from the noble aspirations of Maude's proclamation issued V C 11 months earlier. Nor would the Iraqis have been surprised had they been told (which, of course, they were not) that Maude strongly opposed the very proclamation that appeared over his name, and which in fact had been written by Sir Mark Sykes - the very same Sykes who had drawn up the secret 1916 agreement with F. Georges-Picot for French and British control over much of the post-war Middle East.
But, by September 1919, even journalists were beginning to grasp that Britain's plans for Iraq were founded upon illusions. "I imagine," the correspondent for The Times wrote on September 23, "that the view held by many English people about Mesopotamia is that the local inhabitants will welcome us because we have saved them from the Turks, and that the country only needs developing to repay a large expenditure of English lives and English money.
Neither of these ideals will bear much examination... From the political point of view we are asking the Arab to exchange his pride and independence for a little Western civilization, the profits of which must be largely absorbed by the expenses of administration."
Within six months, Britain was fighting a military insurrection in Iraq and David Lloyd George, the prime minister, was facing calls for a military withdrawal. "Is it not for the benefit of the people of that country that it should be governed so as to enable them to develop this land which has been withered and shrivelled up by oppression? What would happen if we withdrew?" Lloyd George would not abandon Iraq to "anarchy and confusion".
By this stage, British officials in Baghdad were blaming the violence on "local political agitation, originated outside Iraq", suggesting that Syria might be involved.
Come again? Could history repeat itself so perfectly? For Lloyd George's "anarchy", read any statement from the American occupation power warning of "civil war" in the event of a western withdrawal. For Syria - well, read Syria.
At Wilson, the senior British official in Iraq in 1920, took a predictable line. "We cannot maintain our position... by a policy of conciliation of extremists. Having set our hand to the task of regenerating Mesopotamia, we must be prepared to furnish men and money... We must be prepared... to go very slowly with constitutional and democratic institutions."
There was fighting in the Shia town of Kufa and a British siege of Najaf after a British official was murdered. The British demanded "the unconditional surrender of the murderers and others concerned in the plot", and the leading Shia divine, Sayed Khadum Yazdi, abstained from supporting the rebellion and shut himself up in his house.
Eleven of the insurgents were executed. A local sheikh, Badr al-Rumaydh, became a target. "Badr must be killed or captured, and a relentless pursuit of the man till this object is obtained should be carried out," a British political officer wrote.
The British now realized that they had made one big political mistake. They had alienated a major political group in Iraq - the ex-Turkish Iraqi officials and officers. The ranks of the disaffected swelled. For Kufa 1920, read Kufa 2004. For Najaf 1920, read Najaf 2004. For Yazdi, read Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. For Badr, read Muqtada al-Sadr.
In 1920, another insurgency broke out in the area of Fallujah, where Sheikh Dhari killed a British officer, Colonel Leachman, and cut rail traffic between Fallujah and Baghdad.
The British advanced towards Fallujah and inflicted "heavy punishment" on the tribe. For Fallujah, of course, read Fallujah. And the location of the heavy punishment? Today it is known as Khan Dari - and it was the scene of the first killing of a US soldier by a roadside bomb in 2003.
In desperation, the British needed "to complete the facade of the Arab government". And so, with Winston Churchill's enthusiastic support, the British gave the throne of Iraq to the Hashemite King Faisal, the son of Sherif Hussein, a consolation prize for the man the French had just thrown out of Damascus. Paris was having no kings in its own mandated territory of Syria.
Henceforth, the British government - deprived of reconstruction funds by an international recession, and confronted by an increasingly unwilling soldiery, which had fought during the 1914-18 war and was waiting for demobilization - would rely on air power to impose its wishes.
There are no kings to impose on Iraq today (the former Crown Prince Hassan of Jordan pulled his hat out of the ring just before the invasion), so we have installed Iyad Allawi, the former CIA "asset", as prime minister in the hope that he can provide the same sovereign wallpaper as Faisal once did. Our soldiers can hide out in the desert, hopefully unattacked, unless they are needed to shore up the tottering power of our present-day "Faisal".
And so we come to the immediate future of Iraq. How are we to "control" Iraq while claiming that we have handed over "full sovereignty"? Again, the archives come to our rescue.
The Royal Air Force, again with Churchill's support, bombed rebellious villages and dissident tribesmen in Iraq. Churchill urged the employment of mustard gas, which had been used against Shia rebels in 1920.
Squadron leader Arthur Harris, later marshal of the Royal Air Force and the man who perfected the firestorm destruction of Hamburg, Dresden and other great German cities in the Second World War, was employed to refine the bombing of Iraqi insurgents.
The RAF found, he wrote much later, "that by burning down their reed-hutted villages, after we'd warned them to get out, we put them to the maximum amount of inconvenience, without physical hurt [sic], and they soon stopped their raiding and looting..."
This was what, in its emasculation of the English language, the Pentagon would now call "war lite". But the bombing was not as surgical as Harris's official biographer would suggest. In 1924, he had admitted that "they [the Arabs and Kurds] now know what real bombing means, in casualties and damage; they know that within 45 minutes a full-sized village can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured".
T.E. Lawrence - Lawrence of Arabia - remarked in a 1920 letter to The Observer that "it is odd that we do not use poison gas on these occasions". Air Commodore Lionel Charlton was so appalled at the casualties inflicted on innocent villagers that he resigned his post as senior air staff officer, Iraq, because he could no longer "maintain the policy of intimidation by bomb".
He had visited an Iraqi hospital to find it full of wounded tribesmen. After the RAF had bombed the Kurdish rebel city of Sulaymaniyah, Charlton "knew the crowded life of these settlements and pictured with horror the arrival of a bomb, without warning, in the midst of a market gathering or in the bazaar quarter. Men, women and children would suffer equally."
Already, we have seen the use of almost indiscriminate air power by the American forces in Iraq: the destruction of homes in "dissident" villages, the bombing of mosques where weapons are allegedly concealed, the slaughter-by-air-strike of "terrorists" near the Syrian border, who turned out to be a wedding party. Much the same policy has been adopted in the already abandoned "democracy" of Afghanistan.
As for the soldiers, we couldn't ship the corpses home in the heat of the Middle East 80 years ago, so we buried them in the great North Wall Cemetery in Baghdad, where they lie to this day, most of them in their late teens and twenties. We didn't hide their coffins. Their last resting place is still there for all to see today, opposite the ruins of the suicide-bombed Turkish embassy.
As for the gravestone of Samuel Martin, it stood for years in the British war cemetery in Basra with the following inscription: "In Memory of Private Samuel Martin 24384, 8th Bn, Cheshire Regiment who died on Sunday 9 April 1916. Private Martin, son of George and Sarah Martin, of the Beech Tree Inn, Barnton, Northwich, Cheshire."
In the gales of shellfire that swept Basra during the 1980-88 war with Iran, the cemetery was destroyed and looted and many gravestones shattered beyond repair. When I visited the cemetery in the chaotic months after the Anglo-American invasion of 2003, I found wild dogs roaming between the broken headstones. Even the brass fittings of the central memorial had been stolen. Sic transit gloria. - (c) The Independent