USA Today
Dec 29 2004
With Iraq vote in a month, every day crucial to success
By Steven Komarow, USA TODAY
BAGHDAD – The white bed sheet, punctured and strung between a tree
and a utility pole, carries just a few words of hand-painted Arabic
script. “Every vote is more precious than gold,” it says – common
words in a normal election campaign.
But White House political guru Karl Rove would abandon his TV ad
budget for the power in this banner and thousands more like it.
It’s not just words but a fatwa, a decree, from Grand Ayatollah Ali
al-Sistani, spiritual leader of Iraq’s majority Shiite Muslims. Vote,
it says, or you have shirked your religious duty.
Forget blue states and red states. Allegiances in Iraq are in a
completely different league. In a country where Shiite Arabs are 60%
of the population – three times that of the next largest religious or
ethnic group – a slate of Shiite Muslim candidates associated with
Sistani is virtually certain to win control of Iraq’s new national
assembly in elections scheduled for Jan. 30.
A month before Iraqis take the biggest step yet in President Bush’s
plan to plant democracy in the former dictatorship, the eventual
tally is overshadowed by larger questions:
– Can free, fair elections be held in the midst of a violent
insurgency?
– Will a broad swath of Iraqi factions, including the Sunnis who
formed the backbone of Saddam Hussein’s regime but now threaten to
boycott, actually vote on Jan. 30 and thus make the results
legitimate?
– Will Iraqis abide by the popular vote and unite behind a Shiite-led
government? Or will Iraq succumb to what interim Prime Minister Ayad
Allawi warns is the insurgents’ plan to “create ethnic and religious
tensions” and possibly civil war?
The Bush administration predicts success. “People will be able to
look back and know that they’ve been involved … in something truly
historic,” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said last week during a
visit with some of the 148,000 U.S. troops stationed here.
A successful election also could let those troops start a withdrawal
from Iraq.
But even moderate Iraqis, such as Sunni elder statesman Adnan
Pachachi, say violence or a boycott jeopardizes the process. “A
non-inclusive election that leaves large parts of the country
unrepresented and millions of Iraqis disenfranchised, an election
like this, is worse than no election at all,” he says.
Ready or not
Iraq is not accustomed to elections. Since a monarchy was overthrown
in a 1958 coup, it’s seen little except tallies like the 100% vote
won by Saddam in 2002.
The Jan. 30 ballot, by contrast, could leave Iraqi voters dazzled by
choice: 230 slates representing more than 7,000 candidates for a
275-seat national assembly. It would name a new interim government to
replace the U.S.-backed one now in power. By mid-2005 the assembly
would draft a constitution. Election of a permanent government would
be held by year’s end.
>From an office inside the U.S.-military-protected Green Zone, Abdul
Hussein al-Hindawi, head of the Iraqi election commission, and a team
of United Nations advisers are overseeing the production of ballots,
the training of 150,000 poll workers and the management of a host of
details that must be in place by election day.
Asked how things look a month away, he interrupts: “Not a month – 35
days! Every day is needed.”
But, he insists, the election will happen. On his table, he assembles
four sheets of paper into a larger square to show how big the ballot
will be. Each slate will get a single line, with its name, the party
symbol and a commission-assigned number that also identifies it. Next
to each will be an empty box for the voter to mark his or her choice.
No machines and no hanging chads here. Counting the votes will be
done by hand and take two or three days, he predicts.
To deter people from voting twice, poll workers will stamp hands with
indelible ink.
Hindawi acknowledges that’s a risk to voters if anti-election
insurgents want to punish them. But for now that’s the plan.
To prevent counterfeit ballots, Hindawi says the 14 million sheets
are being printed with currency-style security paper. Hindawi says
he’s recruiting students, teachers, lawyers and other educated Iraqis
to work at the thousands of polling places.
Up to 1 million Iraqi exiles will be eligible to cast ballots in 15
countries including the USA.
Working as an election official is one of the highest-risk jobs in
the annals of bureaucracy.
In Baghdad last week, in one of the most brazen attacks of the
insurgency, election workers were dragged from their car and three
executed on a downtown street. Unable to find enough security for
election day, U.N. monitoring will largely be conducted from
neighboring Jordan.
The danger to poll workers and voters on election day could force the
government to set up precincts outside of neighborhoods where people
could safely vote.
The commission has brushed aside a suggestion by Allawi to spread the
election over days or weeks to allow for more concentrated use of
Iraq’s inadequate security forces.
Iraqis will vote, Hindawi predicts, and perhaps astonish the
doubters.
Already, he says, the election is changing Iraq: “All the people
speak of elections. Open any newspaper and you read pages about the
elections, even newspapers which are against the elections. The
people see it happening.”
“This is not something really strange” for the cradle of
civilization, he adds. Iraqi archaeologists “consider us the first
democracy in the world, even before the Greeks.” he says.
Legitimacy in the balance
Violent attacks by insurgents are one threat to a revival of Iraq’s
long-dormant democratic heritage. Another, potentially more
devastating, is a boycott by Sunnis, Iraq’s second-largest faction.
Sunnis are only about 20% of the country’s 25 million people, but
they controlled Iraq for more than 40 years, mostly through Saddam’s
now banned Baath Party. The United States and interim Iraqi
government managed to lure several other Sunni groups to enter
candidate slates.
But on Monday, the largest Sunni political party pulled out, arguing
that poor security in Sunni cities such as Fallujah and Ramadi make a
legitimate outcome impossible. “Delaying would make a better and more
comprehensive process,” said Muhsin Abdul Hamid, secretary of the
Iraqi Islamic Party. He joined other Sunni leaders in demanding a
six-month delay.
Bush has ruled that out, concerned that a delay would encourage the
insurgents.
Just hours before Hamid’s news conference, a car bomb exploded
outside the Baghdad residence of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the head of the
most prominent Shiite slate and a close associate of Sistani. Hakim
was not hurt, but 15 people were killed, including some of his
guards.
On Tuesday, insurgents killed at least 25 people, mostly Iraqi
police, in attacks across the Sunni Triangle, as a militant group
claimed to have executed eight Iraqi employees of a U.S. security
company.
Secretary of State Colin Powell has stressed the importance of having
Sunnis represented in a new Iraqi government.
Even Shiites, hungry for power after decades of oppression under
Saddam, say Iraq will fail without Sunnis in a power-sharing
government.
The Sunnis “must participate no matter what the results of the
election,” says Saad Jawad Qindeel, acting head of the political
bureau of Hakim’s party, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution
in Iraq, or SCIRI. “Even if we get 70% of the seats of the national
assembly, we still believe that the transition government cannot be
made from one component” of Iraq.
Those words seem especially moderate given SCIRI’s history of
fighting Saddam. Still hanging in the entrance to the SCIRI office in
Baghdad is a small sign: “Every Baathist is a criminal until proven
otherwise.”
Optimism vs. history
Such views raise the chilling prospect of unrelenting conflict
erupting into civil war, something the CIA warned of in an analysis
that became public this year. It was based partly on the stated goals
of terrorists such as Osama bin Laden and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,
Iraq’s most prominent al-Qaeda associate, and partly on history.
Monday, a man claiming to be bin Laden called for a boycott of the
elections in an audiotape broadcast. He also called Zarqawi, who has
claimed responsibility for kidnappings, beheadings and suicide
attacks, a true “soldier of God” and anointed him al-Qaeda’s leader
in Iraq.
For centuries, Iraq’s history of violence and oppression has pitted
one ethnic group against another. Saddam’s ruthless regime was only
the latest.
Sunnis and Shiites “have massacred and oppressed each other in Iraq
since the seventh century, taking time off to do the same for the
country’s Armenians, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Jews, Kurds and other
minorities,” writes Edwin Black, author of a history on Iraq. The
election “guarantees that the Shiite majority will once again control
the nation, settling old scores and disenfranchising everyone else,
and laying the groundwork for another civil war.”
The Bush administration has begun trying to tamp down hopes that the
election will end Iraq’s insurgency. “Elections are an event, and
democracy is a process,” says Bob Callahan, spokesman for the U.S.
Embassy here. A stable and democratic society will come, but “nobody
thinks it’s going to happen in a year or two.”
But Iraq’s new politics are not only a power play between Sunni
extremists and American idealists. The prospect of free elections has
energized niches in Iraqi society, represented by scores of virtually
unknown political groups that registered slates. They seek a voice,
if not power.
“This is our country, and we have to contribute in building and
establishing freedom and democracy,” says Yon’adam Kan’na, head of a
Christian coalition slate. “People are scared because of terrorists
and Saddam Hussein’s regime remains, but I will say that we have to
be confident that peace and stability will succeed.”
“The idea of an election is quite modern, and I love to see our
country’s politics the same as in civilized nations and no
dictatorship,” says Said Sara Ahmed, a university student who favors
U.S. ally Allawi as someone strong enough for the job.
When the official campaign season kicked off Dec. 15, Iraq’s
Communists, powerful before Saddam took over, held a rally at a
soccer stadium. In Iraq’s south, Hindawi says, there’s even some
Western-style campaigning with candidates meeting voters. In addition
to the national assembly, each Iraqi province has municipal elections
Jan. 30. Kurdistan, the semi-autonomous province in the north, also
elects its regional assembly.
In Baghdad, open campaigning is dangerous, but thousands of posters
are scattered across city walls. Most are simple, with maps of Iraq
and lists of candidates. There are pictures of peace doves, scales of
justice and other symbols of a better Iraq.
Perhaps because the concept of representative democracy is so new, or
because the situation is so dire, even major parties like SCIRI shy
away from U.S.-style pork-barrel promises. Instead they discuss
ideals such as justice, peace and religious rights.
Holding elected officials accountable to the people’s material needs
will come later, Qindeel says.
“Having elections, having a constitution, getting the people to
exercise their rights, all … are important steps toward providing
solutions to the daily problems they suffer,” from gas lines to power
outages to unemployment. “There are no magic solutions to these
problems, but it starts with having a representative government that
comes from the election boxes.”
Contributing: Sabah al-Anbaki and Charles Crain in Baghdad; wire
reports