Here is a deliberately orchestrated Catch-22: If the minorities accept the legislation without a fight, they are locked into it indefinitely. While the law guarantees minimum representation, the minimum is kept small enough to have a negligible effect the outcome of most votes. Worse yet, setting that minimum also has the effect of installing a ceiling on their participation by codifying an "acceptable" degree of minority representation.
When the minority leaders complain about that ceiling now and in the future, jihadists will threaten and attack them for not knowing their place as dhimmis, as one will recall that the demand for adequate representation was one of the roots of the recent wave of violence against Christians in Mosul. And complaining carries the risk of other forms of reprisal as well, particularly with respect to future legislation.
"Iraqi minorities 'insulted' by new provincial assemblies law," by Leila Fadel for McClatchy Newspapers, November 3:
BAGHDAD — The Iraqi parliament approved legislation Monday that allocates six seats in provinces to small ethnic and religious communities in the upcoming provincial elections, but Christians, Yazidis and Shabaks asked for the law to be overturned on the grounds that they remained underrepresented.
A similar provision guaranteeing minority representation in provincial councils was taken out of the recent provincial elections law before it passed. This time, the parliament chose from three proposals and passed the one that gives religious or ethnic communities the least representation: one seat for Christians in each of three provinces — Baghdad , Nineveh and Basra — and one seat each for Yazidis, Sabeans and Shabaks in various provinces.
"They failed in the examination of democracy," said Yonadam Kanna, a Christian from the Assyrian Democratic Movement . "This was a result of the conflict between Kurds and Arabs."
Kanna was referring to Nineveh province, where Christians had hoped for three seats, Yazidis three seats and the Shabaks one seat. Arabs worry that the minorities could become extensions of the Kurdish parties that dominate the provincial council in the mostly Arab Sunni Muslim province.
"The Arab nationalists think that the minorities will side with the Kurds, which is not true," Kanna said. A United Nations proposal would have given the minorities a total of 12 seats, including three seats for Christians in Baghdad and one in the oil-rich city of Basra. Sabeans, a very small religious minority in the south, would have received one seat in Baghdad .
Instead, 106 legislators voted for the amendment that awarded six seats. Kurds, the minorities and legislators who follow radical Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada al Sadr voted for the U.N. proposal.
Kanna called the passage of the law an insult to minorities. By Monday night, representatives of the minority communities formally asked the presidency council to reject the legislation, Kanna said. Christians are estimated to represent about 3 percent of the Iraqi population, or about 800,000 people, but there are no clear census data in Iraq .
"Getting nothing is better than this insult," he said.
After the article that gave a quota of seats to minorities was removed from the provincial elections law, Christian and other minority communities across the country had protested.
Legislators who voted for the amendment Monday said that they'd voted for what they thought was fair.
"If we give seats for them and seats for the women, then why do we have our constitution and elections?" said Ali al Adeeb , a Shiite lawmaker from the Dawa party, explaining his choice for the smallest quota. "This will satisfy everyone."
As Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki opened an Islamic-Christian conference of religious leaders with praise for Iraq's multi-ethnic and religious community, the minority community worried that it would always lose to the majority.
"Iraq should remain the country that lives peacefully together among religions, ethnicities and sects," Maliki said. "We should benefit from the mixed populations that we have that give us the power, strength and steadiness to spread the culture of dialogue in the face of strife and challenges."
jihad is still in the hearts of that government it must hate all non muslims.
jihad is still in the hearts of that government it must hate all non muslims.
That's democracy, well worth fighting for wouldn't you say?
Religious quotas for seats are a stupid idea. It makes all parties become religious parties devoted to their particular sect and nothing else. Look at Lebanon. It has been a total failure there.
What they need to do is force all parties to have a strictly secular platform which doesn't include Islam, and to force all parties to include a certain proportion of minorities (and women) as equal members of that party.
Then they could have perfectly normal elections on the usual secular issues that dominate elections in civilised countries, instead of Islamic holy war on all the other sects of Islam and other religions.
Religion + politics = oil + water.
Yeah.............. see, there's a problem with "establishing" democracy. A seed will not sprout on barren ground. Iraq has never had a democratic tradition of any sort. There is absolutely no religious tolerance to be found after the Muslims conquered the country.
NeverAMuslim is right, Iraq needs a secular constitution. Whether it ever gets one remains to be seen.
If by the word "indigenous" one means those who were there first, the indigenous population of Iraq consisted of Christians, Jews, and other ancient sects, such as the Mandeans and the Yazidis. Islam, and the Arab invaders, came later. This is obliquely recognized even by some Arab Muslims in Iraq, when they go into their entirely pointless rhapsody about Iraq being the "cradle of civilization" -- as if this somehow could make up for what has happened in the last few decades, or century, or millennium.
In the 1920s one-third of Baghdad's population was Jewish. They contributed greatly to the city's prosperity and to the level of civilization. The British, however, left in 1932, and by 1941 there was the Farhud, a mass pogrom (June 1-2, 1941)in which hysterical Arab mobs enjoyed themselves, thinking up creative ways to kill Jews -- such as tying them to the tram tracks, then watching gleefully as they were run over. With the establishment of Israel, and the subsequent mass attacks on Jews, practically the entire Jewish population left.
And then there are the Christians. How many of those today in Iraq who call themselves Muslims are in fact merely the descendants of the Assyrian or Chaldo-Assyrian Christians, just as the Muslims of India, Paksitan, and Bangladesh are merely the descendants of Hindus (Buddhists, Jains, you name it) who were either forcibly converted to Islam, that is threatened with death, or converted in order to escape the horror of humiliation, degradation, and permanent physical insecurity that was the lot of Hindus and other non-Muslims under Muslim rule?
In 1932 the British left, having extracted from the local Arabs -- to whom, after all, they had turned over a country, one the British themselves had created out of three former Ottoman vilayets (Mosul, Baghdad, Basra)-- a promise to behave. That meant: leave the Christains be. Within six months of the British departure, the Arab Muslims slaughtered 100,000 Assyrians. And Christians are being killed again, across the land, from Basra in the south (by Shi'a) to Mosul in the north (by Sunnis), and in Baghdad by both Sunnis and Shi'a.
The Yazidis? They harm no one. But it is they who suffered the single worse attack by Muslim terrorists, with 450 killed, and yet that particular attack appears to have gone, since it was first reported, unremarked.
The Mandeans? Half of them left Iraq long ago, the remaining half try to hold on to ancient libraries, some of which have been destroyed by Arab Muslims, and nothing is said of this, though we are told endlessly all about how "the Americans" are responsible for the looting, by Iraqi Muslims indifferent to any non-Muslim heritage, to the treasures (non-Muslim, of course) of the Iraqi museum.
Maliki may really believe -- god knows what some of these people belive, in their dream world where Iraq is such a wonderful, advanced state (J. B. Kelly used to mock the pretensions of the Iraqis, always prating about their "educated middle class" because they had a museum -- founded by Gertrude Bell -- and a tiny orchestra, that, mainly with Christian players, and a few other things that made them think Iraq was practically Periclean Athens, or Elizabethan England, when it was merely, by comparison with the primitive Arabs of the Gulf, just a bit more impressive, perhaps at the level of a backwards Albania.
Of all the horrible mistakes made by the Bush Administration ("ROP" mindset, failure to secure our borders, Dubai Ports, Harriet Myers Supreme Court nomination, etc.) NONE is more onerous than having our military men and women sacrifice there lives to establish this piece of sh*t government.
I am sure (especially with Barry Hussein as our POTUS), the government of Iraq will eventually look not much different than any other shariah dominated government in the middle east, and any Jews, Christians, and other non muslims remaining will be in daily fear for their lives.
That we could take on the foolhardy task of nation building in the land of Islam, with all the cost in blood and treasure, and NOT insist on a true secular democracy, with equal rights for all, is an abomination.
In time I have no doubt the family and friends of our gallant fallen soldiers will ask, "What did they give their lives for?"