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| Author: | Lionel Beehner |
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May 25, 2006
With Iraq's first permanent government nearly in place, a number of significant challenges remain alongside the overarching need to improve security. Chief among them is curbing corruption, which has infiltrated many of Iraq's main ministries. Another priority is providing basic services like heating oil, electricity, and potable water. Iraqi leaders will also meet to amend the constitution, something experts say is likely to be difficult—and perhaps fruitless—given the distrust among Iraq's ethnic and religious groups as well as the cumbersome process required to amend the text. "The next six months will be truly critical for Iraq," U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad told the Associated Press.
Amending the constitution, experts say. Iraq's parliament will have up to four months—beginning May 3, when parliament first convened—to make amendments to the constitution. That is allowed under an agreement reached last fall to prevent Sunnis from pulling out of the constitution-drafting process; the deal enabled negotiators to defer final answers to tough issues like revenue sharing, regional power-sharing, and de-Baathification. Experts say the divisions within Iraq's ethnic and religious communities, as highlighted by the drawn-out process to pick a cabinet, portend highly contentious negotiations ahead. "It's going to be a very messy process," says Phebe Marr, senior fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace. Others say the procedures in place for amending the constitution will not allow for any major adjustments to the document. "Given the high bar to overcome, it's going to be the most anodyne kind of things," says Gregory Gause, a Middle East expert at the University of Vermont. "And it only will happen if Washington carries water for the Sunnis."
According to Article 140 of the constitution, parliament must form a committee to propose a package of constitutional amendments. The parliament must then vote on the amendments as a package, not individually, and requires a simple majority. If passed, the bloc of amendments needs to win approval from the public in a nationwide poll, similar to the contentious and close referendum held on the constitution last October. "[The system's] structured so that the constitution will not develop significant changes," says Nathan Brown, an expert on Islamic law at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
All of which raises concerns that some Sunni factions, should they fail to achieve their objectives on issues like revenue sharing, may pull out of the political process. Some experts suggest that meaningful change should come through the legislative process, not through amendments. Brown points to roughly eighty areas where the constitution allows for enabling laws to "fill in the blanks." Marr says these gaps may favor Sunnis. "If you can move gradually, maybe that's a better way to go," she says. However, Brown says that passing major legislation in parliament will be nearly impossible for Sunnis without the backing of Kurds.
Most disagreements stem from the text's ambiguous wording, which is open to interpretation, experts say. "The constitution is like Swiss cheese," Marr says. Minority Sunnis voted overwhelmingly to reject the document last October, but say they were promised that key clauses of the text could be amended after the formation of a government regarding a range of issues. Among the issues still to be addressed are:
"One hopes the combination of new blood at the top, international financial institutions, and American pressure will get people to do the right thing," says Gregory Gause.
Part of the problem is a lack of oversight, Sepp says. Only the ministries of defense and interior have international advisers. Sepp says many ministers have rejected the offer of outside advice as interference, likely in the interest of protecting their own profiteering. Maliki has said rooting out corruption will be one of his government's top priorities. Of the roughly 3,000 corruption cases before Iraq's Commission on Public Integrity, only 780 have gone to court; of those, just a dozen have reached a verdict, the Los Angeles Times reports. "You've got to get a handle on the big corruption," Gause says. "One hopes the combination of new blood at the top, international financial institutions, and American pressure will get people to do the right thing and rat out the bad guys." Sepp says tougher sentences, including the death penalty, may be required to curb Iraqis from accepting bribes, pointing to other countries like Indonesia and China that have employed similar tactics.
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