Middle East Economic Survey
VOL. XLVII
No 49
6
The Political Scene (6 December 2004)
Iraq’s Sunnis and Kurds have asked for elections to be postponed but their demand has been refused by the country’s Shi'a majority. Marwan Barghuti has decided to run for the Palestinian presidency from his Israeli prison cell. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is seeking to restore his parliamentary majority by forming a coalition with the opposition Labour party. After some last minute haggling, Iran has placated the IAEA by suspending all uranium enrichment. Syria’s “unconditional” offer to resume peace talks may not be so unconditional after all. The Tehran meeting of Iraq’s neighbors has done little to enhance the security of Iraq’s borders.
Sunnis And Kurds Seek Postponement Of Iraqi Elections: Shi'as Differ
After a meeting convened by Sunni elder statesman 'Adnan Pachachi on 26 November, 17 Sunni and secular parties, including interim Prime Minister Ayad 'Allawi’s own Iraqi National Accord and the two main Kurdish parties, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), issued a statement calling for “a six-month postponement” of the 30 January deadline for the election of an assembly to write Iraq’s new constitution, saying that “unrest and terrorist acts, as well as insufficient preparations at the administrative, technical and political levels, necessitate the date be reconsidered.” However, the reaction from Iraq’s Shi'a majority was immediate and negative. A 27 November joint statement by 42 Shi'a parties, including the two largest, Da'wa and the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, declared that “the political parties which have signed this statement held a meeting to affirm their full commitment to elections being held on the set date without delay. Postponement is illegal and contradicts the interim constitution and Security Council resolution 1546.” Moreover on the same day Muhammad Husain al-Hakim, a spokesman for Marja΄iya ‒ the Shi'a religious leadership in Najaf, including Ayatollah 'Ali al-Sistani – said that “the Marja΄iya think a postponement of the elections would be unacceptable. The date of the elections can no longer be questioned, the issue has been decided.” Thereafter there were no further calls for postponement (indeed, the KDP and PUK, normally bitter rivals, announced on 1 December that they would run on the same list in the elections). So for the moment at least the question of postponing the elections has itself been postponed.
Barghuti Enters The Race
Jailed Palestinian leader Marwan Barghuti’s 1 December decision to throw his hat in the ring as an independent candidate in the 9 January Palestinian presidential election has turned what initially looked like a straightforward run for the office by the Fatah candidate, PLO Chairman Mahmud 'Abbas, into a much more complicated contest which could have consequences for current attempts to resume the peace process. Mr 'Abbas, one of the founders of Fatah, is a 69-year-old moderate who returned to the occupied territories from exile in Tunis with Yasir 'Arafat. Mr Barghuti, who is serving five life terms in an Israeli jail, is a 45-year-old from the West Bank – where he enjoys what is usually referred to as “grassroots” popularity ‒ and is decidedly more militant. In particular, Mr 'Abbas favors calling off the intifada in an attempt to resurrect peace talks whereas Mr Barghuti does not. (That being so, it might be thought that Fatah’s militant al-Aqsa Brigades, which have been responsible for numerous suicide bombings during the intifada, would back Mr Barghuti. But surprisingly, the Brigades have evidently decided to put party unity first, with a spokesman, Zakariya al-Zubaidi, saying of Mr Barghuti on 1 December that “we will not support him at all…we will not let anybody, no matter who, create any division or split in the Fatah movement.”) At the moment, no-one seems to know whether Mr Barghuti is capable of winning the election or not. But it is probably safe to predict that if he does, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon will seize on his victory as a pretext for continuing to refuse to talk to the Palestinians.
Sharon Seeks New Coalition With Labour
Elections may also be on the cards in Israel, where on 1 December Mr Sharon sacked his main coalition partner, the secular Shinui party, after it voted against his proposed 2005 budget, leaving the government with the support of only the 40 members of his own Likud party in the 120-seat Knesset. Mr Sharon was generally thought to have two options, either to bring the centrist Labour party and smaller religious parties into the government or hold new elections, and he swiftly indicated his preference for the former, saying on 2 December that he had “no choice but to officially attempt to broaden the coalition with the Labour party and the religious parties,” adding that “I intend to bring this step as soon as possible for approval to the Likud Central Committee to enable the establishment of a unity government.” Of course, it was the same hard-line Central Committee that prevented Mr Sharon from bringing Labour into the coalition as recently as August, but Mr Sharon is probably betting that the Likud hard-liners will prefer even an alliance with Labour to the uncertainties of a fresh election. And he may be right, since on 2 December the Committee’s chairman, Tzahi Hanegbi, sounded relatively benign when he said that “what the Central Committee will surely be asked to approve is affording the prime minister the possibility of conducting negotiations and incorporating additional parties, among them the Labour party as well as parties from our own camp.”
Iran Agrees To Suspend Enrichment
After a seemingly instinctive last-minute round of bazaar haggling, Iran at last finalized its nuclear agreement with the EU3 (Britain, France and Germany) on 28 November by dispatching a letter to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) withdrawing its request to exempt 20 centrifuges from a freeze of nuclear fuel cycle activities and accepting full suspension of all uranium enrichment. That cleared the way for the IAEA board to adopt a resolution on 29 November welcoming the enrichment suspension “as a voluntary confidence building measure” (rather than a legally binding commitment) and containing no mention of referring Iran’s case to the UN Security Council, prompting Iranian President Mohammad Khatami to declare that “the resolution …was a definite defeat for our enemies” (and US IAEA envoy Jackie Sanders to say that “the US reserves all its options with respect to Security Council consideration of the Iranian nuclear weapons program”). For the moment, therefore, it appears that the issue of Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program has been moved off the front burner, but officials in both Washington and Tehran made it very clear that it was unlikely to stay there for long.
At the State Department, spokesman Richard Boucher said on 29 November “they have now agreed to a full suspension, including testing and development. All right, we’ll see if they do it. If they do violate it, or, in the pure skeptic’s view, when they violate it, it will be reported and that will be the basis for further action.” In Tehran the next day, national security adviser Hasan Rowhani warned that the suspension of enrichment activities might be of short duration and hinted it could depend on the progress of negotiations with the EU3 on the quid pro quo – trade agreements, the transfer of nuclear technology and help on security issues. “Contrary to what the Americans pretend,” Mr Rowhani told a press conference, “the Islamic republic has not renounced the nuclear fuel cycle, will never renounce it and will use it. The suspension will only last as long as the negotiations. It should be a question of months and not years.”
Syria’s Unconditional Offer
It turns out that last week’s reported offer by Syria to reopen negotiations with Israel unconditionally may not be so unconditional after all. It is true that after Syrian President Bashar al-Asad met with his Egyptian counterpart, Husni Mubarak, on 30 November, Egyptian presidential spokesman Majid 'Abd al-Fattah affirmed that “Syria has made very large concessions in announcing it would return to negotiations without any preconditions, ” while UN envoy Terje Roed Larsen – who relayed the original offer – said on the same day that “there is a genuine hand of peace that is being stretched out from Damascus… that hand of peace should be grabbed immediately.” However, also on the same day the official Syrian news agency Sana reported that Mr Asad had said that “the negotiations should resume at the point where they broke off in January 2000” and quoted an unnamed official source as emphasizing that “the Syrian position is fixed vis-à-vis the resumption of peace talks and building on what has been accomplished.” Whether this represented a change in the Syrian position is open to question, but if it did, it might be a reaction to Israel setting a few preconditions of its own – last week Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom rejected Syria’s advances (if that is what they were) by saying that no talks were possible while Syria “allows terrorism to be conducted on their territory.” And after Mr Sharon said on 2 December that he would be willing to meet with Mr Asad under “certain conditions,” Syrian Foreign Minister Faruq al-Shara' compounded the confusion by declaring that “we have proposed a resumption of negotiations without conditions. I now notice the Israeli prime minister is setting conditions on Syria, and that is unacceptable.”
Iraq’s Neighbors Meet In Tehran
The two-day Tehran meeting of the interior ministers of Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Syria, Turkey, Jordan and Egypt that ended on 1 December – a follow-up to last week’s international conference on Iraq in Sharm al-Shaikh – was notable chiefly for the exchange of recriminations between Iraq and Iran as to who is responsible for the current violence in Iraq and a communiqué that was long on expressions of good will but short on measures to translate that good will into action. This “stressed the sovereignty, political independence, territorial integrity and national unity of Iraq as well as the right of the people of Iraq to a secure and stable life” and expressed the ministers’ “readiness to assist in the electoral process.” But on the central issue of border security – the raison d’etre of the conference – the best the statement could manage was to emphasize “the need for the enhancement of mutual cooperation” without specifying how this is to be done. And since Iran’s only concrete offer to Iraq, to help train and equip police and border guards, was rejected out of hand by the Iraqis (as the Iranians presumably knew it would be), it cannot be said that the Tehran meeting did much to enhance the security of Iraq’s porous borders.
Charles Snow