News Analysis: Iraq Faces Prospect of 'Lebanonization'?

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Thursday, September 04, 2003

News Analysis: Iraq Faces Prospect of 'Lebanonization'?

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The 25-member Iraqi Governing Council (IGC), the executive authority selected by the Americans to administer Iraq during the transitional period, Monday appointed 25 ministers on sectarian and ethnical basis, to manage Iraq's day-to-day administrative affairs.

Such a step, coming soon after the selection on July 13 of the IGC itself, which was also chosen on sectarian and ethnical basis, made many Iraqis believe that multinational Iraq would be another Lebanon as far as the distribution of power is concerned.

In Lebanon, power is distributed on a sectarian basis according to which the president should always be a Maronite Christian, while the prime minister be a Sunni Muslim and the speaker of the parliament a Shiite Muslim.

Such a formula of government, coupled with foreign interference and other factors, resulted in a civil war in 1975-1990 that cost Lebanon dearly in men and materials.

Many Iraqis believe that such a formula, if copied in Iraq, would create a weak and decentralized country similar to Lebanon, although many others argue that such political system would provide an opportunity for Iraqi national and religious minorities to express their aspirations freely, rather than remain suppressed as was the case under the former Sunni-dominated regime of Saddam Hussein.

The majority of the 25-million Iraqi people are Muslims with less than 10 percent either Christian or from a number of other religious minorities.

However, the Muslims themselves are divided into a Shiite majority of almost 60 percent of the Iraqi population and of a Sunni minority.

At the national level, Iraqis are divided into a majority of Arabs numbering no less than 75 percent of the total population and of a Kurdish minority alongside a small Turkoman minority. These two minorities reside mainly in Northern Iraq.

Since the establishment of modern Iraqi state in 1921, the central government in Baghdad sought to rule the country in a centralized way, something that left the national and ethnical minorities struggling for a more equitable representation through decentralization to have their due share in government.

During Saddam's 24-year rule, anti-regime groups, both Arab andKurdish, seemed to have agreed on the principles of federalism as the favorable form of government for post-Saddam Iraq.

But such federalism can only be institutionalized after enacting a new democratic constitution endorsed through a UN-supervised referendum. However, due to the present turmoil in Iraq where lawlessness and insecurity are prevailing almost all over the country, holding such a referendum is unfeasible.

Observers believe that the majority of the Iraqi people may accept some sort of federalism, but they reject Lebanonization, which could turn Iraq into a fertile ground for schism and sectarian feuds.

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