Intelectuales y Académicos

Robo y democracia

Autor: Naomi Klein

Fecha: 10/2/2004

Fuente: The Guardian

Democracy and robbery
Washington wants to outsource Iraqi sovereignty, but its grip on the country is growing weaker

Naomi Klein

Monday February 09 2004
The Guardian


If you believe the White House, the future government of Iraq is being designed
in Iraq. If you believe the Iraqi people, however, it is being designed in the
White House. Technically, neither is true; Iraq's future government is being
engineered in an anonymous research park in suburban North Carolina.

On March 4 last year, with the military campaign just 15 days away, the United
States agency for international development asked three American firms to bid
for a unique job; after Iraq had been invaded and occupied, one company would be
charged with setting up 180 local and provincial town councils in the rubble.

This was newly imperial territory for firms that were more accustomed to the
friendly NGO-speak of "public-private partnerships", and two of the three
companies decided not to apply. The "local governance" contract, worth $167.9m
in the first year and up to $466m in total, went to the Research Triangle
Institute (RTI), a private non-profit-making body best known for its drug
research. None of its employees had been to Iraq in years.

At first, RTI's Iraq mission attracted little public attention. Next to
Bechtel's inability to turn the lights on, and Halliburton's wild overcharging,
RTI's "civil society" workshops seemed rather benign. No more. It now turns out
that the town councils RTI has been quietly setting up are the centrepiece of
Washington's plan to hand over power to appointed regional caucuses - a plan
that has been so widely rejected in Iraq, it could end up bringing the
occupation to its knees.

Last week, I visited the RTI vice-president Ronald W Johnson, the director of
the Iraq project, at the firm's offices near the North Carolina town of Durham
(down the block from IBM, around the corner from GlaxoSmithKline). Johnson
insists that his team is focused on the "nuts and bolts" and has nothing to do
with the epic battles over who will rule Iraq. "There really is not a Sunni way
to pick up the garbage versus a Shiite way," he tells me. Perhaps, but there is
a public and private way - and, according to a July report last July from the
Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), RTI is pushing the latter, establishing
"new neighbourhood waste collection systems" that "will be arranged through
privatised kerbside collection".

Nor are the councils that RTI has been setting up uncontroversial. On the same
day that Johnson and I were calmly discussing the finer points of local
democracy, the US-appointed regional council in Nasiriya, about 200 miles south
of Baghdad, was surrounded by gunmen and angry protesters. On January 28, as
many as 10,000 residents marched on the council offices demanding direct
elections and the immediate resignation of all the councillors, whom they
accused of being pawns of the occupying forces. The provincial governor called
in bodyguards with rocket- propelled grenade launchers and proceeded to flee
the building.

Poor old RTI; the appetite for democracy among Iraqis keeps racing ahead of the
plodding plans for "capacity building" that it drew up before the invasion. In
November, the Washington Post reported that when RTI's people arrived in the
province of Taji, armed with flowcharts and ready to set up local councils, they
discovered that "the Iraqi people formed their own representative councils in
this region months ago, and many of those were elected, not selected, as the
occupation is proposing". The Post quoted what one local man told a RTI
contractor: "We feel we are going backwards."

Johnson denies that the previous council was elected and says, moreover, that
RTI is only "assisting the Iraqis", not making decisions for them. Perhaps, but
it doesn't help that Johnson compares Iraq's councils to "a New England town
meeting" and quotes another RTI consultant, who observed that the challenges in
Iraq are "the same thing I dealt with in Houston". So is this Iraqi sovereignty
- conceived in Washington, outsourced to North Carolina, modelled on
Massachusetts and Houston and then imposed on Basra and Baghdad?

The United Nations, now that it has gone back to Iraq, must somehow carve out a
role for itself in all this mess. A good start, if it decides that direct
elections are impossible before the White House's deadline of June 30, would be
to demand that the deadline be scrapped. However, the UN will have to do more
than just monitor elections; it will have to stop a robbery in progress - the
American attempt to rob Iraq's future democracy of the power to make meaningful
decisions. And it all hinges on the powers of the transitional government.

Washington wants a transitional body in Iraq with the full powers of sovereign
government, able to lock in decisions that an elected government will inherit.
To that end, Paul Bremer's CPA is pushing ahead with its illegal free-market
reforms, counting on these changes being ratified by an Iraqi government that it
can control. For instance, on January 31 Bremer announced the awarding of the
first three licences for foreign banks to operate in Iraq. A week earlier, he
had sent members of the Iraqi Governing Council to the World Trade Organisation
(WTO) to request observer status - the first step to becoming a WTO member. And
Iraq's occupiers have just negotiated an $850m loan from the International
Monetary Fund, giving the lender its usual leverage to extract future economic
"adjustments".

In other countries that have recently made the transition to democracy - from
South Africa to the Philippines and Argentina - this transition between regimes
is precisely when the most devastating betrayals took place: backroom deals to
transfer illegitimate debts, commitments made to maintain "macro-economic
continuity". Again and again, newly liberated people arrive at the polls only to
discover that there is precious little left to vote for.

But in Iraq, it's not too late to block this process. The key is to confine the
mandate of any transitional government to matters directly related to elections:
the census, security, protection for women and minorities.

And here's the really surprising thing: it could actually happen. Why? Because
all Washington's reasons for going to war have evaporated; the only excuse left
is President Bush's deep desire to bring democracy to the Iraqi people. Of
course, this desire is as much a lie as the rest - but it is a lie that we can
use. We can harness Bush's weakness on Iraq to demand that the democracy lie
become a reality, that Iraq be truly sovereign: unshackled by debt, unencumbered
by inherited contracts, unscarred by American military bases, and with full
control over its resources, from oil to reparations.

Washington's hold on Iraq is growing weaker by the day, while the pro-democracy
forces inside the country grow stronger. Genuine democracy could come to Iraq,
not because Bush's war was right, but because it has been proven so desperately
wrong.


A version of this article first appeared in the Nation