You Can't Hurry Democracy
by Swanee Hunt, Scripps Howard News Service
November 24, 2024

It was the perfect Kodak moment. The first person to vote in the Afghanistan presidential elections was Moqadasa Sidiqi, a 19-year-old student. Women in Afghanistan went from wearing burqas to casting ballots in just under three years.

Now we're looking for a matching picture of all-inclusive, democratic success in Iraq. But with elections set for January 30, 2005, we may be asking too much too soon.

"We will not be ready for elections in January," says Ala Talabani, co-founder of Women for a Free Iraq and the Iraqi Women's High Council. Like many Iraqi and international experts, Ala knows that lack of security will seriously hinder elections. Already, minority Sunni insurgents threaten to disrupt the elections because they feel they will not get proper representation.

"There's no way they'll be able to provide security for the polling stations, so how can we expect people to line up?" Ala asks. Without enough time to prepare, she predicts, the election will go strictly along ethnic and religious lines. "Back to where we started from," she says, her friendly face growing weary at the thought.

She's remembering her life as a Kurd under Saddam Hussein, whose brutal regime was based on ethnic division. Ala has twice seen her home burned to the ground, lost two jobs because she refused to join Saddam's Baath party, and fled Iraq several times with her family.

But it's not just the ethnic issues that worry Ala. It's gender too. Iraqi women will be under-represented if elections go forward too soon. Although women make up 55 percent of the population, and every third name listed for the new parties is supposed to be a woman, time is needed to recruit women candidates. In villages, guided by "tribal culture," as Ala puts it, women are often uneducated. "We need to hold workshops to explain what democracy means and include women in the process or we'll have men voting for their families and the women will be left out again," Ala says vehemently.

These very women, Ala believes, could build bridges between ethnic groups. Organizing conferences from every religious group in Iraq, Ala found that these women united on many important issues, from the campaign for 25 percent representation of women in the National Assembly to the forming of an Iraqi Women's High Council.

Acknowledging that certain parts of Iraq are too unstable to participate in elections, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has said that an imperfect election is better than no election at all. But that's an easy answer. There is a third option, of course, and that is a delayed election, with the fuller participation of a more informed electorate in a more secure process.

"It's critical we get the first election right," Ala says. "This new General Assembly will write the constitution that will govern the country for generations. It will decide if women's rights are guaranteed in Iraqi law."

The precedent for delayed elections comes from Afghanistan, touted as the model for Iraq. Presidential elections in Afghanistan were postponed from June to October of this year, and parliamentary elections have been postponed until next spring. At the time of the postponement, the United Nations said that election officials, security forces, and candidates in Afghanistan were ill prepared for the massive task of registering up to 10.5 million people. But the violence in Afghanistan is minimal, compared to the car bombings, sniper attacks, and kidnappings in Iraq. And modern Iraq, unlike Afghanistan, has no history of democracy. "We need time to be educated about democratic representation and the platforms of the new parties that are forming," insists Ala.

A rushed election could mean not only the loss of a truly democratic experience in Iraq, but something much more serious. "If the elections aren't done right," Ala says, "Iraq will deteriorate into civil war." Equally ominous, the country might come to be controlled by religious extremists similar to those in Iran. She believes that with just a six- to eight-month delay, the people of Iraq would be much better prepared. After the hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of dead and wounded soldiers America has committed to Iraq, half a year doesn't seem too long to wait to get it right.

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