Democracy in Iraq - The History of Democracy in Iraq

The History of Democracy in Iraq

In the book American Hegemony: Preventive war, Iraq and Imposing Democracy, political scholar D. J. Caraley refers to the period between 1974 and 1990 in world politics, as a “global democratic revolution”. He goes on to say that "more than thirty countries in Southern Europe, Latin America, East Asia, and Eastern Europe shifted from authoritarian to democratic systems of government". However, because Iraq's history began as a dependent British territory, made out of three imperial districts at the time of the downfall of the Ottoman Empire, Middle East scholar D. Smith argues that 'though there were elections as early as 1925 – Iraq has never been a democracy. Real power has always been in the hands of other states, various army fractions or, for 35 years from 1968 to 2003, the Ba‘ath Party,' and Iraq has thus not been a part of this "global democratic revolution". However, it has to be noted that Iraq is not the only country within Western Asia where democratic developments have been slow. Indeed, 'although most Middle Eastern regimes hold periodic presidential, national and local elections, relatively few of the states of the region have well-developed functioning democratic political systems.'

In the book Over-stating the Arab State: Politics and Society in the Middle East (2001), Middle East Scholar N. N. Ayubi argues that ‘to speak about democratization in relation to Iraq, and however much one may stretch the meaning of this term, seems almost to border on ridiculous.’ Nevertheless, Ayubi notes that ‘the lack of any serious movement towards democracy …still warrant explanation.’ Ayubi continues, with an argument that the most noticeable example of what can be perceived as a move towards a more democratic Iraq occurred in 1988 when ‘President Saddam Hussein announced a general pardon of all political prisoners and promised a democratic multi-party system.’ This meant that non-Ba‘thists were allowed to stand for election when the Iraqi population voted to elect a new National Assembly in April 1989. Moreover, the Iraqi media, which had previously been the subject of a great deal of censorship, were suddenly publishing quite critical items. Nonetheless, Ayubi states that ‘it is not entirely clear why Saddam had decided to take this much vaunted democratization detour.’ However, Ayubi suggests that these gestures could have been ‘targeted at the West in an attempt to improve the image of the country’s human rights record in the aftermath of the horrendous atrocities committed by the Iraqi regime in Halabja and elsewhere as the Iran-Iraq war was coming to an end.’

The above examples illustrate, as Ayubi argued, the most prominent examples of democratization of the Iraqi state prior to the US led invasion of Iraq in 2003. Unfortunately, ‘the absence of statistics, and the general difficulty of access to Iraq means that it is not possible to carry out the kind of broad analysis of …for the more recent past.’

The US invaded Iraq in 2003 and in 2006 Saddam Hussein was hung for the ‘genocidal Anfal-campaign of the late 1980s, a campaign that included extensive use of poison gas on Kurdish villagers’ in northern Iraq. For more details on this and the contemporary political situation in Iraq see Iraq and Politics of Iraq.