Elections in Iraq are no replacement for national reconciliation, argues Hassan Abu Taleb* The Sharm El-Sheikh conference may have encouraged the emergence of at least some international and regional consensus but it did little for the national reconciliation on which Iraq's future hinges, and rather more so than on elections. Elections are, in the end, simply a procedure for leaders to be selected and regimes legitimised. They can be manipulated and rigged or they can be postponed, for six months or a year, as some Iraqi parties, including that of Iyad Allawi, have suggested. National reconciliation is a different story. Reconciliation is a continual process, a result of political interaction among all Iraq's political, intellectual and religious currents. Reconciliation represents a public consensus over the country's present and future, and it can occur with or without elections. Indeed, it would be hard to imagine elections being held in the absence of a minimum level of public consensus. Nor should we suppose that the turmoil through which Iraq is passing is about ending the ongoing violence, or even forcing occupation troops out of cities. The scene is much more complex than that. Reconciliation is the most crucial task Iraq faces though it was absent from the Sharm El-Sheikh agenda. Those gathered at the conference clearly saw elections as the most urgent task. In the final statement, though, the Sharm El-Sheikh gathering recommended that Iraq's interim government arrange a conference bringing together representatives from Iraq's political and civil society forces in order to set the stage for holding elections on 30 January. The aim of the recommendation was to consolidate Iraq's political process in accordance with UN Security Council Resolution 1546 and terminate the spiral of violence in the country. The Sharm El- Sheikh statement made a clear reference to what it called the "excessive use of force" by foreign, chiefly US, troops. That the Sharm El-Sheikh conference was preceded by controversy over the legitimacy of the current situation and the status of multinational forces hardly impacts on the two tasks in hand -- engineering a situation conducive to national reconciliation and the holding the elections in a fair and acceptable manner. That the conference envisaged a follow-up mechanism suggests that the participants are willing to get involved in Iraq's future course of events. Unfortunately the mechanism remained ill-defined. Does it simply involve conferring with key opposition figures, as Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari seemed to suggest? Ambiguity at this stage is far from helpful. Remarkably, Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Abul-Gheit stated at one point that Cairo's views on Iraq go far beyond the final statement of the Sharm El-Sheikh conference. Reconciliation involves more than a gathering of Iraq's political parties. Meetings between Iraqi officials and figures from the toppled regime will achieve very little in concrete terms. Nor is it the case that national reconciliation has across the board support. Many forces within Iraq believe that the priority is to forcibly rid the country of occupation rather than to engage in political debate. How should we approach Iraqi national reconciliation? The message sent by Iraqi opposition forces to the conference demanded a role for political opposition, but we don't know yet how to cater to such a demand. No scheme has emerged that looks capable of fostering a broadly-based reconciliation. Will it be enough to hold a conference for hundreds of political groups and civil society organisations? Who will supervise the processes of reconciliation? Who has the trust of all the parties concerned? How will decisions reached be implemented? How does the Sharm El-Sheikh conference fit into the picture? These are all questions that must be answered. There is very little time before the elections are scheduled to be held. Are the two months remaining sufficient to perform the tasks in hand? Does anyone imagine that the violence will come to an end just because a national conference is being arranged? Will such a conference impress religious militant groups that see themselves in an open-ended war with the US? Some Iraqi groups, including the party of Prime Minister Allawi, want the elections postponed for six months, allowing time for the security situation to improve. Something needs to be done, obviously. National reconciliation has to be taken seriously. And the occupation has to be ended according to a clear timetable. Unless this happens, the Iraqi state, whatever its new form, will be in trouble. * The writer is editor-in-chief of the annual Arab strategic Report issued by Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies.
