Charter Sets Iraq on a Path, Though Rocky

The constitution apparently endorsed by Iraq’s voters will bring them a long-term elected government that starting early next year can address the deep ethnic and sectarian differences that have helped fuel the nation’s insurgency. But the political road map offered by the document does not trace a clear path to peace.

Because the charter appears set to take effect despite a clear-cut “no” vote by minority Sunni Arabs, it risks inflaming the Sunni-led armed uprising against U.S.-led forces, Iraq’s Shiite Muslim majority and the independence-minded ethnic Kurds.

It also leaves unsettled explosive issues that many Iraqis worry could lead the country to fragmentation or full-scale civil war. Those issues, including the allocation of oil revenue, will take months for the next parliament, which will be elected in December, to hash out. Ultimately, those too may be settled over the objections of Sunni Muslims.

U.S. and Iraqi leaders welcomed unofficial returns Monday indicating a solid majority vote in favor of the charter. They called the high turnout of Sunnis, who had largely stayed away from the parliamentary election in January, a rejection of the insurgency in favor of civil politics. President Bush called it “a very hopeful day for peace.”

But the unconfirmed tallies reflected a divisive result that the administration and leaders of Iraq’s ruling Shiite-Kurdish coalition had struggled for weeks to avoid.

The “no” vote was reported as high as 97% in Sunni areas, whereas some Shiite Muslim and Kurdish areas reported approval of the charter by 90% or more in unofficial returns. Iraq’s election commission said Monday night that it was reviewing unusually high “yes” vote percentages in 12 Shiite and Kurdish provinces and that official returns would be delayed “a few days.”

The review was not expected to alter the overall “yes” majority.

Sunnis are about one-fifth of Iraq’s 26 million people. A majority of voters in three of four provinces with large Sunni populations rejected the charter. A two-thirds “no” vote in any three of the country’s 18 provinces would have been enough to defeat it. Opposition achieved that benchmark in Al Anbar and Salahuddin provinces but fell short in Nineveh, where about 55% rejected it, according to unofficial figures.

Those figures indicate that Iraqis are still far from a political reconciliation that would help the Bush administration start withdrawing the 140,000 U.S. troops from the country.

“I would have loved to have a landslide ‘yes’ -- a big fat ‘yes,’ ” said Mowaffak Rubaie, the government’s national security advisor. “But even when God authored the Koran, there was much disagreement.”

The constitution establishes Iraq as a parliamentary democracy with a weak central government and Islam as a principal source of its laws. Many Sunnis fear it will give rise to powerful, oil-rich mini-states in the Kurdish north and predominantly Shiite south, making permanent Sunnis’ loss of power after the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s Sunni-led, secular government.

What helped stave off the charter’s possible defeat was a compromise, brokered last week by U.S. diplomats, that makes amendments easier to introduce. That prompted a leading Sunni group, the Iraqi Islamic Party, to support a “yes” vote and swayed some voters in Nineveh province.

The referendum was a breakthrough for U.S. efforts to engage a wide array of Sunni parties in politics. A senior State Department official said he was hopeful that the next Iraqi government, which will sit for four years, would enjoy broader support than the transitional one that took power in April.

On Monday, even the National Dialogue Council and other Sunni groups that had campaigned for a “no” vote and denounced the returns as fraudulent joined in the scramble to organize candidate lists for the Dec. 15 ballot. The Iraqi Islamic Party, seeking an election alliance with some of the naysayers, asked for an extension of Friday’s deadline to register for the election.

Hassan Bazzaz, a Sunni party leader who teaches international relations at Baghdad University, said the heavy turnout of Sunni voters “has given their leaders more confidence in the political process, and this will keep all the Sunni parties in the game.”

But for how long? “The real question is not so much whether [the Sunnis] participate but whether that participation will help diminish the constituency of the insurgency,” said Nathan Brown, an Iraq specialist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.

And that, he added, will depend on how inclusive a government the new parliament names.

Former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, a secular Shiite, announced an election alliance of 13 small secular parties Monday and invited Sunni groups to join. But it is doubtful whether secular politicians can make inroads against the religious-based Shiite parties that dominate the current parliament and are more hostile to Sunnis. Many Shiite voters leaving the polls Saturday said they voted “yes” because their religious leaders had told them to.

The test of whether Iraqis can bridge their ethnic and sectarian divides will come early next year when the new parliament begins fleshing out the constitution’s vague provisions. Lawmakers must decide, for example, how to allocate oil resources, who has the power to tax and whether national courts can overrule local courts. They also must figure out how to balance religious and secular law and set the boundaries of the Kurdish region, which the charter gives a high degree of autonomy. At least 55 issues in the constitution, by one count, were put off for future debate with the phrase “And a law shall organize this.”

“It seems unlikely that most of these key issues can really be resolved before mid-2006,” said Anthony Cordesman, an Iraq specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “Throughout this period, insurgents will continue to try to block the political process and cause a civil war.”

Some Iraqis predict the insurgency will step up its attacks, “with the message that the political process is flawed and is designed by the Americans,” scholar and author Isam Khafaji said.

Even if Sunnis gain some power in parliament and win some concessions, few expect that to mollify Al Qaeda affiliates and senior loyalists of Hussein’s deposed army and Baath Party who lead the insurgency.

U.S. officials have been building up Iraqi security forces to take over the fight, but the effort has produced few Iraqi units capable of operating on their own. Meanwhile, Shiite and Kurdish communities have fielded sectarian militias to defend themselves against a national army they suspect has been infiltrated by insurgents, raising the prospect of broader ethnic and sectarian strife.

The new constitution will resolve none of those problems, but it sets the stage for a new effort after the December election.

“I would not want to say realistically that the referendum is going to deal a death blow to the insurgency,” said a Western official who has been closely monitoring the political process and spoke on condition of anonymity. “Grinding down the insurgency and undermining its political support is a long-term process.”

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Times staff writers Solomon Moore, Borzou Daragahi and Shamil Aziz in Baghdad, Louise Roug in Mosul, Iraq, and Tyler Marshall in Washington contributed to this report.