November 24, 2004 -- IGNORING advice from some friends and rejecting pres sure from many foes, Iraq's interim government has decided to hold the country's first-ever free elections on Jan. 30. Voters will choose a constituent assembly, a Kurdish regional assembly and local assemblies for the nation's 18 provinces.
The decision was announced on the eve of an international conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, on the future of Iraq. At least some participants had hinted that one of their objectives at the conference was to get the elections postponed until "suitable conditions" for holding them were in place. Leading the call was France, still sulking over the demise of its once-cherished ally Saddam Hussein.
Last week in London, President Jacques Chirac admitted that getting rid of Saddam "may well have been good idea" — then added a big "but" about the wisdom of early elections in Iraq. His argument for delay was based on the claim that he wanted "broader participation" in the elections. Russia and a few Arab states also used the phrase as a code word for derailing the democratic process.
The camp of Saddam nostalgics, including Chirac and U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, have done all they could to derail Iraq's elections. They even portrayed the hostage-takers and head-choppers who terrorize parts of Iraq as "la resistance" and insisted that they should have a place in shaping the future of the country. French Foreign Minister Michel Barnier spent weeks trying to get the so-called "resistance" into the Sharm el-Sheikh conference.
The nostalgics had, of course, prayed and worked for President Bush's defeat in the U.S. election. In Iraq, the "Islamic Army" gang of terrorists had announced last August that it was the duty of all true believers to ensure Bush's defeat and to prevent the holding of Iraqi elections.
With Bush re-elected, chances of sabotaging Iraq's elections vanished. But the nostalgics would not give up that easily. Their next tactic was to call for postponement in hopes that Iraq would be plunged into civil war and chaos — proving that they had been right in opposing intervention in Iraq.
The tactic failed because the new Iraqi leadership is genuinely convinced that the only way to put the country on a different course is to involve the mass of the people in decision-making. And that means holding elections.
According to Abdul-Hussein al-Hindawi, a respected jurist who heads Iraq's independent election commission, 126 parties (out of 198 applicants) have registered to take part in the elections. The only requirement was that a party collect the signatures of 500 registered voters.
The list of approved parties reveals the widest spectrum of ideologies and programs: more than a dozen Islamist groups, and as many communist ones — plus two dozen moderate and left-of-center groups, along with conservative, liberal, nationalist and social-democratic outfits. The only label absent is that of the Ba'ath Party, the once popular national-socialist movement that became an instrument for Saddam's despotic power.
Paul Bremer, the American diplomat who headed the Coalition Provisional Authority until the formal end of the occupation last June, dissolved the Ba'ath Party last year. At the time, many of us believed that the ban was neither necessary nor politically useful: Free Iraq did not need to fear a fascist party that had long lost its popular base. Banning Ba'ath, on the other hand, could grant it an undeserved "martyr" status. The independent election commission understood this fact and decided to allow at least eight Ba'athist groups to field lists of candidates under different labels.
By sticking to the election timetable, the new Iraqi leaders have once again shown that they will not let terrorists dictate the course of events — just as they last June resisted intense pressure to postpone the formal end of occupation and the formation of an interim government. A series of spectacular terrorist attacks made June the bloodiest month since liberation. But the transfer of power took place, nonetheless.
With the date of elections now fixed, expect the terrorist campaign to work toward a new crescendo. Also expect Saddam nostalgics to do all they can to disrupt or discredit the process.
New Iraq has enough self-confidence to cope with such threats. But other, more serious dangers exist. It is in coping with those dangers that the ability of new Iraq to build a better life for itself will be tested.
Chief among these dangers is the temptation for those now in power to bend the rules, if not actually cheat, to arrange the results of the elections in their own favor. Having lived under successive despotic regimes since its creation as a state in 1921, Iraq lacks a culture of freedom and pluralism, and respect for the rule of law. Thus it would be foolish to assume that interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi and his colleagues are democrats who put principle above personal considerations.
An election does not consist solely of putting ballots in a box. No election could be free without a proper campaign of information, debate and discussion. This is why it is important that all the parties and groups standing in this election have adequate access to the heavy media that the government still controls. It is also important that those now in power do not use the state's resources in support of their parties' campaign.
The outside world must do whatever is needed to make sure Iraq's elections are free and fair. This requires dispatching a large number of monitors and observers.
Iraq's election commission has issued a blanket invitation to all those who wish to come and help monitor. Special invitations went to the United Nations, the European Union, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the non-aligned movement, the Arab League, the Organization of the Islamic Conference and more than a dozen non-governmental groups. Yet almost all of those invited have so far responded with a mixture of faked interest and cooked-up excuses for not playing a part.
All those interested in bringing democracy to Iraq should spend the next few months urging the widest possible international participation in monitoring the Jan. 30 elections. The U.S. Congress and the parliaments of the other major democracies should take a lead by sending their own monitoring teams.
Iraq and its friends must also be on guard against attempts by various foreign powers to influence the elections through illegal means. Iran, for one, is channeling vast sums of money to half a dozen parties campaigning on sectarian Islamist platforms. Syria is promoting a couple of crypto-Ba'athist groups, while Turkey is investing in an openly ethnicist Turcoman outfit. Several oil-rich Gulf states are writing fat checks for a few Sunni fundamentalist groups.
Meanwhile, the parties in the govern
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