This being Baghdad, many of the business-suited delegates invited to Wednesday’s town hall meeting were packing heat.
But in the spirit of democracy that the American sponsors of the event wished to promote, the delegates checked their pistols at the door.
The event, in the ballroom of the dreary and prisonlike Palestine Hotel, was billed as an exercise in grass-roots democracy, a chance for citizens to be heard and to express opinions and concerns directly to leaders.
Similar town hall meetings have been held in Basra and Mosul, and more are being planned throughout Iraq. The idea, according to the American organizers, is “to engage citizens from all ethnic, religious and cultural backgrounds in the discussion and planning for the transition to Iraq’s sovereignty.”
Iraqis, of course, are new to town hall democracy. So the Americans handed them the script.
The program included a free lunch, and everyone was asked to take an assigned seat at tables set up as if for a wedding reception.
The main attraction of the Baghdad meeting was Adnan Pachachi, the octogenarian president of the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council. He and the other panelists swept into the hall guarded by a small militia of heavily armed paramilitary bodyguards.
The opening speeches–six of them–were long. The most interesting speaker was Samir Shakir Mahmoud , a member of the Governing Council whose bio says his family traces its lineage to the Prophet Muhammad. Mahmoud said if Iraq is to become a modern country, it no longer could depend on tribal codes to define and protect individual rights; it needed a modern legal code.
All the speakers hewed closely to the American plan for transferring sovereignty to the Iraqis by July 1. The plan calls for a series of regional caucuses that would choose delegates to a national assembly that, in turn, would pick the leaders of a new government. The plan specifically rejects direct elections, citing the absence of voter rolls and the country’s precarious security situation.
Most Iraqis seem to prefer direct elections. Certainly, the long-repressed Shiites, who make up about 60 percent of the electorate, do. But one speaker warned that premature elections would plunge the country into Yugoslavia-style ethnic strife.
Town hall meetings are supposed to be freewheeling affairs, with citizens speaking up about what is on their mind. But in this highly scripted version, each table was assigned a particular question.
Question No. 3: “What role shall women have in a free Iraq, including leadership and governing roles?”
According to the instructions, “Each table will agree on the best answer to the question they are assigned. After the discussion and agreement on the answers, each table will select one of their members to report the final agreements of the table team.”
In many respects, these town hall meetings are to democracy what the bunkered existence of Americans in the Green Zone is to real life in Baghdad.
Iraqis are not unsophisticated, and these days the streets are buzzing with real grass-roots politics. The best places to listen are in the mosques and tribal gatherings that have been Iraq’s town hall meetings since time immemorial.
Here are the questions Iraqis are asking: Why can’t the Americans provide security? If we have so much oil, how come we’re so poor? Where can I get a job?
At Wednesday’s town hall meeting, the Americans offered a kind of democracy lite. The Iraqis listened politely, applauded on cue, and when it was over, they collected their guns at the door and returned to the real Iraq.
