Published: October 18, 2005
Iraqi Referendum "Great Day" for Democracy - State Department
Goal must be a "unified, democratic, pluralistic, federal" Iraq
A senior Bush administration official says the constitutional referendum that took place in Iraq October 15 was a "great day" for democracy and the Iraqi people and "a very bad day for the terrorists who tried to disrupt the voting."
James Jeffrey, senior advisor to the secretary of state and coordinator for Iraq, said approximately 1 million more voters cast ballots in the referendum than in the elections for a transitional Iraqi government January 30.
"In particular we saw a much stronger turnout of Sunni voters -- in Fallujah alone, a hundred thousand. And in the Baghdad area, the Mosul area, Diyala, Tikrit, in most areas, other than the western Anbar province, we saw a very, very strong turnout. That is a huge difference and a strategic difference from January of 2005," Jeffrey said.
The official said the referendum will contribute to an Iraq that is "unified, democratic, pluralistic, and federal," as called for by the United Nations Security Council. He said the four adjectives must be lumped together and cannot be separated with regard to Iraq.
"All four of them fit together. There are some people who like 'democratic,' and they don't like the others. There are many people who like 'united,' but they don't like 'federal'," he said.
Jeffrey, who served at the U.S. mission in Baghdad from June 2004 to June 2005, said that the number of attacks that occurred during the referendum was down by two-thirds compared to the comparable figure for January 30, although insurgent attacks have risen by some 20 percent during the past eight or nine months.
"So it's a good-news story specifically in terms of this; thus it was a bad day for the terrorists," Jeffrey said. He said that Iraq still faces an active insurgency that will have to be dealt with militarily and through the political process.
Jeffrey said the success of the referendum would not have a direct bearing on any decision to withdraw U.S. troops deployed in Iraq. He said that depends on the capacity of Iraqi security forces and the ability of local authorities in Iraq to maintain order. But he said the success of the political process is another element in the strategy to defeat the insurgents.
He said the U.S. government hopes and believes that the political process will involve the bulk of the indigenous Iraqi insurgents and isolate what he called "the true terrorists," many of whom he said have come from other countries.
The next step on Iraq's path to democracy is the elections scheduled for December 15. If the proposed constitution is approved, then voters will elect a new permanent parliament, Jeffrey said. If the proposed constitution is rejected, then voters will elect another body of representatives whose task will be to draft another constitution, he said.
He said the highly vocal disagreements expressed by Iraqi political groups are natural, in light of the repression that took place for decades, especially under Saddam Hussein.
"This is not necessarily a bad sign that people are speaking out, that they're expressing their desires and their concerns and their fears," Jeffrey said. "What I would say is ... that these fears and divisions were always there."
He said as the democratic process unfolds in Iraq, the next Iraqi parliament will have four months to amend the constitution to address Sunni leaders' concerns about the division of power in a federalist system. Two months later, any proposed revisions to the document will be submitted to the voters in another referendum.
He said the U.S. government contends that political pluralism might offer the only path to stability in Iraq and other countries in the region, outside of extreme oppression.
"We try to present our arguments that a pluralistic, regional system is not necessarily antagonistic to unity, but rather, it may be the only way, absent the kind of industrial-strength oppression we saw under Saddam, to hold a country together. And that's the issue that is before everybody in the Middle East," Jeffrey said.
See also the transcript of Jeffrey's briefing.
Source: U.S. Department of State
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