Does Iraq PM Allawi’s ‘non-sectarian’ government mean ‘Shiites only’?

Iraq’s outgoing Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi, who had a broadly positive relationship with the country’s Kurds, resigned in December amid mass protests in Baghdad and the Shiite-majority south. Young Iraqis are fed up with corruption, sectarianism, and the lack of public services – problems that long predate Abdul-Mahdi’s time in office and which stood little chance of being resolved in his mere year and a half in power.

Late last month, President Barham Salih gave Iraq’s political parties a deadline to choose Abdul-Mahdi’s successor, who would steer a caretaker government into new elections as soon as possible. Salih threatened to choose a successor himself if the parties failed to agree on one. 

On February 1, in a last minute compromise among the Shiite parties in Baghdad and Iran, Mohammed Tawfiq Allawi was given the nomination. Allawi served as minister of communications in the government of Nouri al-Maliki, but resigned in protest over corruption and Maliki’s interference in his ministry’s personnel. One might expect this to endear Allawi to the protesters and their demands for an end to nepotism, corruption, and sectarianism. 

It does not, unfortunately, and protesters in Baghdad and the south of Iraq appeared to immediately reject the new prime minister. Sajad Jiyad, director of the al-Bayan Centre in Baghdad, expressed the views of many when he told one media outlet that Allawi “represents the middle-class elite of Iraq’s Shias, who have become ministers and PMs since 2003 … From the outside looking in, he is the establishment. He does not look like somebody who is new.”

Middle East Eye and many protesters point out that Allawi is the cousin of another former prime minister, Ayad Allawi, two of his daughters are married to relatives of influential Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, and his family is related by marriage to Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. Such a person looks like the epitome of the establishment in post-2003, Shiite-dominated Iraq. 

If the dominant Shiite political parties in Baghdad truly had any interest in satisfying protesters’ demands for a non-sectarian, technocratic caretaker government, they could have done better than nominating another Shiite prime minister, an ex-Dawa party member, and a former minister from the Malaki administration. It unfortunately seems more likely that Iraq’s Shiite establishment parties, as well as Iran, remain more interested in using the protests as an excuse to solidify their hold on power at the expense of non-Shiite parties and individuals.

Prime Minister-designate Allawi is apparently on the verge of announcing his new cabinet. In the process of forming his government, Allawi apparently failed to consult with any Kurdish or Sunni parties. Perhaps he feels that doing so would make his new administration “sectarian”. Seeing as he was picked for the post of prime minister by a coterie of establishment Shiite parties, most of whom remain very much under the influence of Iran, this seems to give a new Iraqi meaning to “sectarian” in practice: non-Shiite. 

The current approach risks further alienating both the protesters in Baghdad and the south as well as Iraq’s non-Shiite communities. As Rudaw reported this week, Meeran Mohammed, a Kurdish MP in the Iraqi parliament, said that Kurds “are not convinced” by such an approach. “Kurds should not be dealt with based on this standard because Kurds are not part of the destruction wrought upon provinces of southern Iraq, and I believe it is impossible that a cabinet not supported by two important components of Iraq [Kurds and Sunnis] succeed,” he added. 

On Sunday, President of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) Masoud Barzani also met with one of Iraq’s most prominent Sunni Arab leaders to jointly express their concerns. Barzani and the Speaker of the Iraqi Parliament Mohammed al-Halbousi issued a joint statement in which they affirmed that “any future [Iraqi] government has to be representative of all components of Iraq and built upon the foundation of national partnership”.

Given the history of Iraq and the Middle East, both Halbousi and Barzani appear completely justified in signaling their concerns regarding the method and direction of changes currently occurring in Baghdad. Ignoring the Baghdad protesters’ actual demands, but using the unrest to further centralize power and cement Shiite dictatorial control over the country would constitute a classic and all too often successful stratagem. 

David Romano has been a Rudaw columnist since 2010. He holds the Thomas G. Strong Professor of Middle East Politics at Missouri State University and is the author of numerous publications on the Kurds and the Middle East. 

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rudaw.