Iraq: boycott the elections; end the occupation!
16 January 2005

US and British plans for Iraqi elections on 30 January suffered a serious setback at the end of last month when the major Sunni party, the Iraqi Islamic Party, withdrew from the contest, in protest at the continuing violence of the occupation. The Islamists rightly scorned American suggestions that a widespread boycott of the ballot in the Arab Sunni areas could be remedied by the appointment of Sunni representatives.

Indeed, the very idea that a nation can hold free and fair elections when cities are being bombed, citizens arbitrarily arrested, and prisoners tortured is laughable. No matter what the result, the polls will not and cannot pacify the country. Nevertheless, the imperialists and their allies in Iyad Allawi's government will press ahead for two reasons. First, because they have no alternative; second, because their main aim is to split the Iraqi population along religious and ethnic lines.

The forthcoming Iraqi elections reveal the growing danger of sectarian civil war in Iraq. The US, conscious of their failure to establish any significant base in Iraqi society, hopes to use the elections to co-opt the Shi'ite majority population in support of the colonial occupation and in the process isolate the country's Sunni minority and with it the resistance.

Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the Iraqi Shi'ite's most influential religious leader, has sought to mobilise the community before the vote, seeing it as the best opportunity for long oppressed Shi'ites to gain the power that reflects their majority status.

Sistani has declared voting a duty, and a committee formed under his auspices has set up the United Iraqi Alliance, expected to be the front-runner among 100 groups and individuals competing in the campaign.

The Shi'ite imams cite the experience of the British occupation in 1919, to explain their participation. A Shi'ite rebellion against the colonialists and boycott of the subsequent elections led to the co-option of the Sunnis, who remained in power even after the British withdrawal until the fall of Saddam. However, this historic precedent should serve as a warning not an aspiration; replacing one co-opted group with another will only cement Iraq's status as an imperialist client state.

Unlike the mainstream clergy, Moqtada al-Sadr, the leader of the Mahdi army, which led an uprising against the US earlier this year, remains ambivalent about the vote. Moqtada al-Sadr, the son of Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Sadiq Sadr who was assassinated in 1999, controls Sadr City, a massive suburb of Baghdad, through a network of patronage and unofficial welfare provision.

His position at the head of a movement based on Baghdad's urban poor poses both a risk and an opportunity for him. He has to be cautious about embracing the US electoral plans for fear of alienating his base, but means he can use this base to negotiate his terms for entering the government.

Sadr boycotted the recent pre-electoral council meeting established by the US after complaining about the mechanisms under which the meeting was called. But his inconsistency shows exactly why even the most "radical" imams provide no alternative for the Iraqi working class and poor. Sadr will not pursue the fight against the US to the end. While condemning civil strife and sectarianism, he will not throw his militia into the struggle to remove the occupiers.

Unlike the Shi'ites, the leaders of the Sunnis, now excluded from power by the US and fearing domination by both the imperialists and the Shi'ite majority population backed by Iran, have demanded a boycott of the election. They have threatened to attack polling stations, candidates and voters.

Although the resistance consists, in the main, of random acts of rebellion in the form of do-it-yourself armed struggle, organised groups dominated by Islamist and nationalist ideologies make the danger of sectarianism stronger by the day. While some of the sectarian attacks undertaken against Shi'ite targets are correctly attributed to CIA dirty tricks (it is widely believed in the Arab press that the kidnapping and killing of Margaret Hassan was the work of Allawi's security forces as were earlier attacks on Shi'ite mosques) it is also probable that some of them are the work of fanatics bent on civil war.

Indeed what else do we expect when there is no working class alternative to the Islamist and nationalist fighters? Some on the Iraqi left such as the Worker Communist Party of Iraq remain stubbornly aloof to the independence struggle, condemning both sides equally at a time when rampant unemployment, anarchic chaos and despair are driving whole cities into armed struggle against the US/UK occupiers. While the Iraqi Communist Party is actually in the government.

The socialist alternative will not arise spontaneously; it needs to be fought for in every realm of the struggle - including by arms. In fact, the existence of any peaceful activity is entirely dependent on the willingness and ability of the left to organise its own self-defence. In a country at war, peaceful activity will only be tolerated as long as it poses no threat. If the Iraqi left want to achieve anything, they cannot leave the organisation of a working class militia to some future date when things have settled down. By then it'll be way too late.

It is urgent that the working class come to the head of the national liberation struggle to expel the colonialist occupation. This must include leading a boycott of the elections. The left cannot limit itself to peaceful demonstrations, protests against unemployment and privatisation, and work in the unions, important as all this is. It must expose the emptiness of Islamic rhetoric: that the way of Sharia law leads not to the liberation of the Iraqi people but to an accommodation with the US liberators and their agents like Sistani.

It must attempt to unite the chaotic network of independent cells, which makes up the largely spontaneous resistance fighters, combine them with the unions and unemployed organisations to build a new revolutionary party of the working class.

The heroic work of the Southern Oil Company Union can become a platform for this project. The Socu has now broken from the ICP-dominated Federation and merged with eight other unions to form the Basra Oil Union, the largest single union in Iraq. The Socu has successfully raised wages from 69,000 dinar to 102,000; it boycotted supplies to occupation forces in solidarity with besieged Najaf in August; it has expelled Ba'athists and foreign contractors in preparation for the impending struggle against privatisation.

But the Socu leaders are in danger of drawing the wrong lessons from the malign influence of the ICP by projecting an apolitical, non-party future role for the unions. Such a syndicalist outlook would be a disaster for the working class, as it would leave the field of struggle for political power to various bourgeois and middle class forces, none of which would secure democratic and economic rights for workers, women and youth.

If the working class is not to find itself subject to another semi-disguised dictatorship, or pitted against itself in a sectarian civil war, then it needs its own party to fight for a socialist solution to the burning democratic, economic and security questions facing Iraq today.