ATMOSPHERE?:

Where Charter Is Least Of Worries: Local Issues Top List In Town in S. Iraq (Ellen Knickmeyer, 10/07/05, Washington Post)

In Muthanna, whose half-million residents are 97 percent Shiite Muslim and unswervingly loyal to their tribes, approval of the constitution in the Oct. 15 national referendum is a "foregone conclusion," Kubba noted.

The traditional fealty among Iraq's southern Shiites to the dictates of their tribal leaders, plus a strong sense that the constitution in general is a good thing for Iraq's newly empowered Shiite majority, makes support for the charter a lock. Only the strong opposition of Sunni Muslim Arabs -- a minority whose demands for the constitution went largely ignored in the "majority wins, minority loses" atmosphere of Iraq's new democracy -- makes defeat of the constitution a possibility.

The unveiling of the constitution in Samawah revealed just how unsophisticated, almost pre-political, the democracy is, and how loyal the majority is to the Shiite tribal, religious and political leaders steering Iraq.

Raysan Zayady, a sports jacket over his white dishdasha and sheer summer robe, was asked whether he would advise his tribe how to vote. "Of course," the sheik replied. "I have told my tribal people they will vote yes on the constitution."

Zayady had yet to read the draft constitution, although he clutched one of the newly distributed copies in his hand. "I don't have e-mail," he confessed.

The fact that Shiite politicians in Baghdad had signed off on the charter was good enough for Zayady -- and, he said, good enough for the 5,000 members of his tribe.

"We trust our political leaders to make a constitution that is for the good of the people," the sheik said.

Most of the voters in Muthanna, a province reached by a one-hour-plus helicopter flight from Baghdad over camel herds and palm groves, appear likely to vote without ever seeing one of the copies in the few boxes brought in Wednesday. And it's not clear whether those copies reflected any of the last-minute changes being made in continuing negotiations on the charter, as U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad presses Shiites and minority Kurds to come up with a charter more acceptable to Sunnis.

It's not that information isn't available here. Local television has devoted 10 minutes each morning to explaining individual aspects of the charter, residents said. Reasonably lively local newspapers have reported on the constitution as well, British military officials here said.

Tribal leaders said the basics are known: creation of a federal system of government that could give Shiites their own oil-rich region in the south as well as majority control of the central government in Baghdad. And, Zayady said, "victory over terrorism" -- an allusion to the Sunni Arabs, whose loss of the dominance they enjoyed under Saddam Hussein has fueled Iraq's insurgency.

But Baghdad and the insurgent attacks there seem remote from this homogenous region. Harry Fitzgerald, a political adviser to the British army commander, Col. Hugh Blackman, had to think for several seconds when asked when Muthanna last had a bombing. "June," he finally said.

Muthanna almost looks like another country, one without the black funeral banners for bombing victims that drape Baghdad or the concrete blast walls that make it a fortress.

That atmosphere is democracy.

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 7, 2005 8:15 AM