There are many forces, argues Muwaffaq Rifai*, seeking to Lebanonise Iraq

April 21, 2005 - Throughout their modern history the Iraqi people have never experienced what we might term sectarian geography or denominational politics. Since its establishment in the early 20th century the Iraqi state -- regardless of the political hue of its successive regimes until the fall of Saddam Hussein -- did not regard its citizens in terms of their religious or ethnic affiliations but rather in terms of the degree of their loyalty to or conformity with the state, and in terms of the degree to which they might be adversely influenced by neighbouring powers. Terms such as the Shia south, the Sunni centre and the like, heard so frequently today, reflect only the determination of outside powers to partition Iraq.

True, the south is currently inhabited by a majority Shia population and the centre by a majority of Sunnis. But such demographics never overrode the feeling shared by all Iraqis that they are one people. We all recall the no-flight zones the US invented, along some fictional latitudinal demarcations, both within easy reach of American bases in Turkey and the Gulf. The purpose of these no-flight zones -- or so the Americans claimed -- was to protect the Kurds in the north and the Shia in the south. At the same time, in Baghdad, a million Kurds and Shia mingled easily and anonymously with the rest of the capital's Arab and Sunni inhabitants. There was no American aerial cover to protect them and they were as vulnerable as everyone else to the aerial bombardments that the Americans unleashed regularly on the centre.

During the second Gulf War the Iraqi regime came under attack for persecuting the Shia. The architects of this propaganda campaign felt it was inadequate to vilify a single regime and claimed this persecution applied to all regimes since the founding of the modern Iraqi state. Soon one began to hear of a decades-long systematic oppression of a Shia majority by a Sunni minority.

Although there are no reliable statistics, Iraq has a clear Sunni majority if Arabs and Kurds are combined. Not that such a fact makes any difference to those forces bent on partitioning Iraq. They have categorised the Kurds as a separate national identity so that they can speak of an Arab Sunni minority dominating a Shia majority.

Today, two years after the demolition of the modern Arab state, we are supposedly seeing the creation of a liberal, if not secularist, democratic nation under which all citizens are equal before the law regardless of their religious, ethnic or ideological affiliations. How odd, then, that there should be all this emphasis on the principle of a denominational quota system for government.

Certainly the new constitution, in form and substance, should provide guarantees against a reversion to any form of exclusion from government of religious or ethnic groups. But government by a system of interdenominational trade-offs and balances inhibits the development of a unified nation state. Moreover, not only will it lay the groundwork for the partition of Iraq itself; the phenomenon will spill over beyond Iraq's borders. Calls issuing almost daily from Gulf countries urging the restructuring of their governments in accordance with denominational formulas raise the spectre of the sectarian cantonisation of the Middle East.

It is only natural, in light of the foregoing, that Iraq's neighbours feel suspicious of, and even hostile to, the current political process in Iraq. Iraq is straining under the ravages of armed operations of a certain stripe, most of which take their cue from beyond Iraq's borders though the primary victims are always the Iraqi people. I fear that if certain parties remain adamant in applying the principle of denominational quotas these operations will grow in scale and scope until the extremism, violence and instability we see in Iraq today encompasses the entire region.

Meanwhile, Iran is flagrantly meddling in the political process in a bid to turn mounting sectarian tensions in Iraq to the advantage of Tehran's strategic ambitions and long-cherished imperial dreams. Nor is Iran the only country to have suddenly discovered an appetite for Lebanonising Iraq. The recent behaviour of sectarian minorities in some of Iraq's Arab neighbours suggests just how contagious this type of plague is.

The more Iraq, and the region, is rocked by instability the more difficult it will become to sustain a system of interdenominational give-and- take. We have already seen how difficult it was for the various parties to agree over the creation of a government and select the president, vice- presidents, the speaker and deputy speakers of the National Assembly. The results, finally reached last week, were not so much a product of an open process of consensus reaching as of patchwork deals. As such they are likely to prove fragile.

Arrangements concluded in this fashion will not curb the trend towards the sectarian cantonisation of Iraq, nor are they an alternative to an effective framework for sectarian balances. Such balances do not exist under the current formula, not least because, for many reasons, Sunni political and religious authorities have so far refused to participate in the political process.

Existing imbalances will only become more glaring the longer Sunnis cling to their current stance, the consequence of which will be an escalation in tensions that will defy the efforts of responsible persons on both sides to prevent them from propelling the country towards a full-scale civil war. I stress "full-scale" because a sectarian civil war of this nature will be impossible to contain within the borders of Iraq.

What is taking place in Iraq at present is an attempt on the part of one religious denomination to monopolise power in the name of the majority. In so doing it is playing the very dangerous game, exploiting a climate that is extremely charged because of the instability of the security situation in order to distort political balances in its favour.

A prime example of this was the insistence that National Assembly elections proceed as scheduled, which effectively deprived many people of the right to vote, given the inability of central government to protect them from the militias that control some cities and that were bent on keeping voters away from the ballot boxes.

Under such fraught and inequitable conditions it will be impossible for nationalist and liberal parties to reach out to the Iraqi people in the hope of gaining a sufficient following to become effective rivals in the forthcoming elections or even to have an impact through a referendum on the shape of the constitution. As a result the Islamist trend, with all its influence, power, machinery and methods of mobilising the traditional-minded Iraqi people will dominate the polls for a long time to come.

* The writer is editor-in-chief of the Baghdad- based Al-Manara newspaper