The proposal would curtail some of the provisions of the Justice and Accountability Commission, more commonly known as Iraq's debaathification law, which was originally drafted to exclude elements of the Saddam Hussein regime from post-U.S. invasion politics. Under the new law, government and bureaucratic positions long occupied by Iraq's Sunni minorities were available for the country's Shiite majority. The law also denied lower-level but experienced government workers the opportunity to help rebuild Iraq.
Individuals not blacklisted under the current version would be eligible to re-enter political life. Local-level Baath Party branch chiefs would no longer be banned from political and governmental positions, and pension payments would be instituted for Hussein's personal paramilitary force, the Fedayeen Saddam.
Political Engagement
The Sunni-led civil war against Syrian President Bashar al Assad has spread into Iraq. The spillover has forced al-Maliki to respond to his country's own discontented Sunni population, which so far has staged largely peaceful protests. He has made several concessions to the Sunnis in an attempt to keep their demonstrations peaceful and help prevent more moderate Sunni opposition from joining jihadist fighters against the Iraqi state.
Some of those concessions include the release of hundreds of female prisoners, raising the salaries of Sunni Arab militia councils loyal to Baghdad and promising to redistribute budgetary surpluses to the Iraqi population. Elections in Anbar and Nineveh provinces, once delayed indefinitely, are now being delayed for only about a month. Although large-scale demonstrations have been scaling down, the political pressures of Sunni demands remain.
Notably, Sunnis are not Iraq's only social demographic unhappy with post-Saddam Iraq. Since the beginning of the year, Iraq's Kurdish and Shiite political centers have also tried to increase their pressure on the government to extract concessions. Iraq's northern-based Kurdistan Regional Government sought to increase budgetary allowances for foreign companies operating Kurdish oil fields and to secure federal funds to pay the pensions of peshmerga fighters. In this instance, al-Maliki was able to partner with Iraq's Sunnis to limit Kurdish ambitions. However, the move resulted in Iraqi Kurdish members of parliament largely boycotting parliament in recent weeks.
This draft law is the latest in a series of attempted reforms since 2006 to the Justice and Accountability Commission meant to placate Sunnis. The proposed amendments to the debaathification law are also facing strong opposition from al-Maliki's own Shiite political base, especially from those associated with his Shiite rival Muqtada al-Sadr's al-Ahrar bloc. Many of those in his camp continue to view the law as a safeguard against rising Sunni power that risks the gains made by both Shia and Kurds since the collapse of Saddam's pro-Sunni Arab state.
The strong Shiite opposition — and likely the Kurdish opposition — to the Cabinet's proposed changes to the law means the proposal probably will not pass in its current form. And even though it represents a check on the rising demands of Iraq's Sunnis, the debate also underscores the growing divisiveness of Iraq's sectarian political sensibilities, especially in the wake of the Syrian conflict. Even though the reforms are unlikely to pass — and even if they pass, they are unlikely to halt Sunni demands entirely — the process still reflects a desire by many Sunni Arabs to engage al-Maliki's government politically rather than violently.
