Europe seeks role in the political future of Iraq
The fall of Mosul opens a new chapter. On the back of its experience in the former Yugoslavia, the EU should seek to encourage the reconciliation process through medium to long-term diplomatic initiatives that can involve all local and central political and social institutions in order to avoid the risk of fragmentation that would fuel sectarianism And contrasts.
Milan (AsiaNews) - The reunification of Mosul by the heterogeneous military political coalition gathered in a common front against ISIS is certainly a major milestone in the struggle against the Islamic State (IS) and the dream of restoring a new caliphate imposed by the ideology of the jihadist terror of the militias led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
The political leadership of the Caliphate has been completely resized, especially after rumors of al-Baghdadi's death. But in the eyes of all the observers it is clear that the military campaign to overthrow the remaining IS forces occupying unimportant pockets of territory around the border between Syria and Iraq is definitely not over.
In particular, the hypothesis advocated by analysts that Daesh (Arabic acronym for the Islamic State), which is losing ground and physical control, will increasingly privilege the use of terrorist acts in an attempt to destabilize the member countries of the anti-IS coalition.
If the conquest of Mosul is therefore a sign of concrete hope towards the end of military hostilities that have unfortunately devastated the Land of the Two Rivers, Iraq, for decades as well as Syria and the Middle East victim of the "regime of jihadist terror", it is equally evident that a phase of extreme uncertainty is now opening up for the construction of a stable future of peace, security and respect for human rights in this geopolitical area and Iraq in particular.
The crucial point around all the political issues in defining the stable future of Iraq is very clear and complex: the peaceful sharing of ethnic, national, tribal, religious diversity that has always been a historical feature of the Iraqi state.
Rebuilding the state in the name of coexistence between the various identities that make up the soul of Iraq is of such strategic importance that it was the first declaration to be made by the Baghdad Prime Minister Abadi on his recent visit to Mosul. He declared it the best answer to the IS regime of terror is the ability of the different ethnic and religious identities to live together. The Patriarch of the Chaldean Church, Raphael Sako, launched an appeal, through AsiaNews, to the entire Iraqi people and to the Christian community in particular, to mature a "new awareness" capable of abandoning the fragmentation, divisions and oppositions that have fueled decades of civil war.
What are the possibilities for the future structure of the Iraqi state? And what concrete proposals can the international community and particularly Europe offer in facing this central challenge for the future of regional peace?
In 2011, US President Barack Obama announced the complete withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, with naïve optimism that the stabilization of an illusory status quo between the various ethnic, religious and national groups had been reached on the basis of the new Federal Constitution. Instead this sanctioned "cantonalization", that is, the division of the country into spheres of influence. In this way, they at least partially satisfied the wishes of autonomy of the three main ethnic-religious groups of the state - Sunni, Shiite and Kurd - without the conflicts exploding into open war and the country being dragged into civil war.
History has shown that this choice was completely wrong. It has favored the loss of national political unity, the fragmentation of political power at local level, without guaranteeing effective protection and equal rights for different ethnicities, nationalities and minority religious groups scattered, unevenly, within the territory. This has led to the aggressive management of power by parties of the dominant national and religious entities in the various provinces into which the country had been divided and the discrimination of other minority social groups, the principal cause of the civil war that ensued.
Several scholars have pointed out that this picture is well-known to European diplomacy, which has managed an equally dramatic analogious problem in the last two decades: the so-called "Balkanization" of the former Yugoslavia. Particularly in Bosnia-Herzegovina there was the unequal presence on the same territory of many religious groups, Muslim Bosniaks, Orthodox Serbs, and Catholic Croats. This has suggested to the European Chancellery the promotion of nation-building in Bosnia-Herzegovina, not formalizing the country's division into federal areas, depending on the majority of ethnic groups. Such subdivision would have caused discrimination and persecution of minorities in the name of a sectarian polarization of power. Instead, it encouraged a process of integration between the various entities at a local level, while strengthening the powers of the central government of Sarajevo in order to ensure unity of the state against the belligerent separatist temptations of the various groups.
The European Union (EU), strong from its experience in consolidating power in the Balkans, has on paper the best chance to promote a reconciliation process in Iraq that excludes the return of a political division of Iraq into several states, The name of a religious ethnic sectarianism that would re-ignite civil conflicts. According to various EU foreign policy analysts, this can be done through the promotion and management of permanent workplaces at the local level that can promote from the bottom-up mediation among the various interests of the identity groups within a single local political system. Thus it would be capable of representing and protecting all the various differences that characterize the history of Iraq, from the periphery to the capital. Likewise, the EU should take on the role of "sponsor" in involving a global workforce, foreign states, and international organizations with a specific interest in having a politics, economic and cultural presence in the Iraqi area.
The task of the EU would be to encourage the process of reconciliation through medium to long-term diplomatic initiatives that could involve all local and central political institutions, civil society representatives, various national and religious identity groups to enhance the significance of a culture of diversity that for decades has characterized the political system in Iraq, particularly in those areas that have undergone strong processes of extreme polarization of identity groups to the detriment of minorities.
Certainly, the nation-building process in Iraq will have no small amount of problems, but the Balkan experience, despite all of its limitations, proves that the dramatic antagonism of nationalisms and religious hatreds can be overcome, preventing them from becoming counter-productive within the state.
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20/10/2016 09:50
