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Doubts growing about the odds of an election
Concerns increasing over politics, security
Wednesday, September 29, 2004
BY BORZOU DARAGAHI
For the Star-Ledger
BAGHDAD -- With a hundred or so days remaining before tentatively scheduled elections to decide Iraq's future, no posters adorn the capital's streets and no names are being bandied about. There have been no debates scheduled, no candidate forums, no voter education guides.
Instead, Iraqis, American and Arab officials have raised deep doubts about whether legitimate elections can go forward.
"If elections take place in the current disorder, the best-organized faction will be the extremists," Jordan's King Abdullah II said in an interview published yesterday in the French daily Le Figaro. "The results will reflect this advantage of the extremists. In such a scenario, there will be no chance that the situation gets better."
Iraq's highest-ranking Shi'a cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, yesterday voiced doubt about the legitimacy of the elections, according to Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, leader of a Shi'a political party. The reclusive Iranian cleric "expressed concerns (that) the regulations and conditions set for the elections are unsuitable," Hakim told Iranian state radio.
Much is at stake in the election, which will anoint a 275-seat parliament with the authority to draw up a new Iraqi constitution. But so far there has been little of the buzz and excitement that confer legitimacy on an election. Instead, ordinary Iraqis and officials fear that violence could mar the balloting by keeping voters at home, or that the seven parties of mostly exiles to which the occupation authority handed de facto control of the country will consolidate their hold.
"The parties have been more worried about dividing the power among themselves than any outreach to the broader public," a senior American diplomat said on condition of anonymity. "They haven't felt much of a need to reach out to the public."
Those political parties -- first shooed by the United States into the now-disbanded Governing Council, and later approved by U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi for the interim government -- are seen by many as more concerned with backroom political deals than with stumping for votes.
That has meant that most Iraqis have little personal connection with the government and the political process meant to deliver them to democracy.
But there's also a sense among Iraqis that the government of Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, a former Ba'ath Party protégé and CIA operative who lived abroad for decades, may be out of touch with his own people, especially after his recent trip to Washington.
There he thanked America for what many Iraqis view as the botched occupation of their country.
"Allawi should have politely criticized the Americans for the occupation," said Mohamed Abdul Qader, 23, a student at Mustansiriya University. "That would have made him more popular with the people, because the Iraqi people would never thank the American people for this occupation."
Meanwhile, huge swaths of the Iraqi population remain not just alienated from the political process, but violently opposed to it. Iraq's poor southern Shi'as in Basra, Nasiriyah, Kut and the Baghdad slum of Sadr City appear to have gathered around firebrand preacher Muqtada al-Sadr, whose militia is engaged in nightly gunbattles with coalition forces.
The country's Sunni Arabs, dislodged from an elite status they've enjoyed since the Ottoman Empire, seethe with rage and move further toward political and religious extremism. "They realize they've been dealt out," said Sharif Ali bin Hussein, heir to the deposed Iraqi throne and the leader of a monarchist party.
Attempts to draw Sunnis into the electoral process have proven futile. "At the moment the Sunnis are very negative. They are not positively in favor of the political process at all," said Saad Qindeel, a leader of the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution of Iraq, one of the large Shi'a parties.
Doubts about whether the election will be fair have been heightened by the conduct of the authorities who oversaw the creation of the interim National Assembly. Many of the 1,000 or so participants have said the selection process was rigged to favor pro-government parties: the two parties of the Kurdish north, the two large Shi'a fundamentalist parties, the two secular parties backed by Washington interests and the Islamic Party of Iraq, a moderate Sunni group.
Iraqis worry that a similar dynamic is taking shape with the creation of a large list of candidates created by the seven parties. They fear that parties are trying to abuse the electoral process to ensure their political staying power. "I think we're being set up to have fraud on a large scale," said Hussein. "I think the government will be allowed to cheat."
Americans and Iraqis worry turnout will be low and the elections will be seen as illegitimate.
Ordinary Iraqi voters question whether the country's 150,000 foreign soldiers and 150,000 domestic security forces, who have been unable to stem waves of car bombings, rocket attacks, kidnappings and highway robbery throughout the country, will be able to protect hundreds of polling sites during an election.
If turnout is low and election results flawed because of violence, both the United States and the interim Iraqi government should be prepared to shoulder the blame, said Naseer Kamel Chaderji, a member of Iraq's National Assembly and a former member of the Governing Council.
"If voters don't show up to the polls, it shows our failure as leaders in providing them with a safe, secure place to cast their vote," he said
Concerns increasing over politics, security
Wednesday, September 29, 2004
BY BORZOU DARAGAHI
For the Star-Ledger
BAGHDAD -- With a hundred or so days remaining before tentatively scheduled elections to decide Iraq's future, no posters adorn the capital's streets and no names are being bandied about. There have been no debates scheduled, no candidate forums, no voter education guides.
Instead, Iraqis, American and Arab officials have raised deep doubts about whether legitimate elections can go forward.
"If elections take place in the current disorder, the best-organized faction will be the extremists," Jordan's King Abdullah II said in an interview published yesterday in the French daily Le Figaro. "The results will reflect this advantage of the extremists. In such a scenario, there will be no chance that the situation gets better."
Iraq's highest-ranking Shi'a cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, yesterday voiced doubt about the legitimacy of the elections, according to Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, leader of a Shi'a political party. The reclusive Iranian cleric "expressed concerns (that) the regulations and conditions set for the elections are unsuitable," Hakim told Iranian state radio.
Much is at stake in the election, which will anoint a 275-seat parliament with the authority to draw up a new Iraqi constitution. But so far there has been little of the buzz and excitement that confer legitimacy on an election. Instead, ordinary Iraqis and officials fear that violence could mar the balloting by keeping voters at home, or that the seven parties of mostly exiles to which the occupation authority handed de facto control of the country will consolidate their hold.
"The parties have been more worried about dividing the power among themselves than any outreach to the broader public," a senior American diplomat said on condition of anonymity. "They haven't felt much of a need to reach out to the public."
Those political parties -- first shooed by the United States into the now-disbanded Governing Council, and later approved by U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi for the interim government -- are seen by many as more concerned with backroom political deals than with stumping for votes.
That has meant that most Iraqis have little personal connection with the government and the political process meant to deliver them to democracy.
But there's also a sense among Iraqis that the government of Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, a former Ba'ath Party protégé and CIA operative who lived abroad for decades, may be out of touch with his own people, especially after his recent trip to Washington.
There he thanked America for what many Iraqis view as the botched occupation of their country.
"Allawi should have politely criticized the Americans for the occupation," said Mohamed Abdul Qader, 23, a student at Mustansiriya University. "That would have made him more popular with the people, because the Iraqi people would never thank the American people for this occupation."
Meanwhile, huge swaths of the Iraqi population remain not just alienated from the political process, but violently opposed to it. Iraq's poor southern Shi'as in Basra, Nasiriyah, Kut and the Baghdad slum of Sadr City appear to have gathered around firebrand preacher Muqtada al-Sadr, whose militia is engaged in nightly gunbattles with coalition forces.
The country's Sunni Arabs, dislodged from an elite status they've enjoyed since the Ottoman Empire, seethe with rage and move further toward political and religious extremism. "They realize they've been dealt out," said Sharif Ali bin Hussein, heir to the deposed Iraqi throne and the leader of a monarchist party.
Attempts to draw Sunnis into the electoral process have proven futile. "At the moment the Sunnis are very negative. They are not positively in favor of the political process at all," said Saad Qindeel, a leader of the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution of Iraq, one of the large Shi'a parties.
Doubts about whether the election will be fair have been heightened by the conduct of the authorities who oversaw the creation of the interim National Assembly. Many of the 1,000 or so participants have said the selection process was rigged to favor pro-government parties: the two parties of the Kurdish north, the two large Shi'a fundamentalist parties, the two secular parties backed by Washington interests and the Islamic Party of Iraq, a moderate Sunni group.
Iraqis worry that a similar dynamic is taking shape with the creation of a large list of candidates created by the seven parties. They fear that parties are trying to abuse the electoral process to ensure their political staying power. "I think we're being set up to have fraud on a large scale," said Hussein. "I think the government will be allowed to cheat."
Americans and Iraqis worry turnout will be low and the elections will be seen as illegitimate.
Ordinary Iraqi voters question whether the country's 150,000 foreign soldiers and 150,000 domestic security forces, who have been unable to stem waves of car bombings, rocket attacks, kidnappings and highway robbery throughout the country, will be able to protect hundreds of polling sites during an election.
If turnout is low and election results flawed because of violence, both the United States and the interim Iraqi government should be prepared to shoulder the blame, said Naseer Kamel Chaderji, a member of Iraq's National Assembly and a former member of the Governing Council.
"If voters don't show up to the polls, it shows our failure as leaders in providing them with a safe, secure place to cast their vote," he said