It would be easy to think that Sunday's election in Iraq will be a mere matter of pitting three distinct religious or ethnic groups against each other: Sunnis, Shi'ites and Kurds. However, things were never that simple or clear-cut in Iraq's past, and nor are they now, despite the increasing accentuation of religious and ethnic identities in the final years of Saddam Hussein's rule and in the period since then.

Iraq is the product of British colonialism, created in 1920 on the ruins of Turkey's Ottoman Empire, which came crashing down at the end of World War I. Three former Ottoman wilayas or provinces - Basra in the south, Baghdad in the centre, and Mosul in the north - were bundled together in a rather artificial creation: the state of Iraq. Basra province was mainly populated by Arab tribes, longstanding converts to the Shi'a branch of Islam. Mosul province had a very large Kurdish population, and Baghdad province was mainly Sunni. However, the capital city Baghdad itself also had a very mixed population, including a large and thriving Jewish community.

A Sunni monarch

The British installed a Sunni king whose family came from Mecca in what is now Saudi Arabia. The country was held together by an army recruited from mainly Sunni officers who previously served with the Ottoman Imperial Army, but had become Arab Nationalists seeking independence from the Turkish

The British Colonial Army was always at hand to help the fledgling Iraqi Army to put down any threat, the most serious of which came right at the beginning, in 1920. The Shi'ites, under the leadership of their ayatollahs, rose up against the blatant British effort to impose the rule of a pro-British Sunni minority on the Shi'ite majority.

The Shi'ite revolt was violently repressed, leaving the Shi'ites as a group politically sidelined right up until the present day. This has certainly had a great influence on how they define themselves in Iraq, but that identity has never been solely determined by the Shi'a faith. As happened in much of the region, modernisation led to secularisation and the rise of competing anti-colonialist ideologies: Arab nationalism and its offshoot, Baathism, but also Communism, Socialism and even Western style Liberalism. This, of course, affected Shi'ites as well as Sunnis and - perhaps to a lesser extent - the Kurds too.

Not just religion

In the 1950s, for example, Shi'ites flocked in droves to the Iraqi Communist Party, to the despair of the conservative ayatollahs who were only too willing to work with other anti-communist forces in Iraq - Sunni Baathists or others - to fight this threat. In other words, the Shi'ites cannot be defined in purely religious terms. The fact that someone is a Shi'ite does not mean they are necessarily a religious conservative: they can equally well be a communist or a liberal democrat. Nor should one forget that there have been many 'mixed' marriages in the big cities. In many cases, there are no clear-cut identities. The same holds true for the Kurds although, in their case, the sense of a distinct ethnic identity is perhaps more pronounced.

What might well happen in other societies is that all these different identities would co-exist or fade away under the influence of secularisation and widely diverging political choices among members of the same ethnic or religious group. But under the dictatorial one-party rule of Saddam Hussein, all opportunities for secular, non-religious politics were ruthlessly suppressed. You can't close the mosques, however, and so the ayatollahs - with representatives in every village to perform religious rites or collect money for the poor - have regained a lot of the influence they lost as a result of modernisation and urbanisation. And as Shi'a religious forces have organised politically, so this has also helped the Sunni clerics to remind the Sunnis of their religious identity and threatened minority status in the new Iraq.

The Kurds don't need a reminder of their identity. With his bombing, gassing and forced relocation of Kurds, Saddam Hussein took care of that. In the current climate of violence, the countervailing influence of secular parties, such as the communists or the liberal democrats - including Adnan Pachachi's Independent Democrats - cannot fully exercise itself. That would take time and, moreover, things such as meetings, discussion platforms, party premises, etc., all of which are very easy targets for the insurgents.

Disproportionate

As a result, the influence of the religious vote in the case of the Shi'ites, and the ethnic vote in the case of the Kurds, could be much larger than the real weight of these factors in society. Add to this the expected boycott by most of the Sunni population, and you get a parliament that will be far less inclusive than required for a body which is due to draft Iraq's new constitution and thus map out its political system for the years to come.

By Bertus Hendriks
Radio Netherlands