In late November, the Interim Iraqi Government, with the encouragement of US President George W. Bush, declared that Iraq will hold a nationwide election on 30 January, 2005. Grand Ayatollah Ali Al Sistani, the country´s most respected figure, has issued a fatwa – a religious edict – instructing all Iraqis to vote. Today, Iraq´s streets are decorated with posters featuring the Ayatollah proclaiming ‘there is going to be elections and I want you to go put your votes in the ballot box. It is going to be free and we are asking that people vote for those who will be good for our country´. The hope in Washington and London is that a large majority of Iraq´s estimated 13.9 million eligible voters will indeed participate, and so give the Iraqi government the democratic legitimacy it urgently requires.
But successful elections – that is, ones seen by the majority of the population as fair and legitimate – are far from guaranteed. Technically, the US and the Interim Iraqi Government, with the assistance of a small United Nations team based in Baghdad, have to set up the bureaucratic and oversight structures to enable elections to be carried out efficiently and transparently. Politically, parties seeking the support of the population have to conduct a country-wide campaign, mobilising the electorate and delivering them to the polling booths. Both of these processes have to be carried out against a background of extreme instability and violence: Iraq today is dominated by a security vacuum into which have stepped as many as 50 separate insurgent groups intent on undermining the elections, bringing down the government and driving out multinational forces. The insurgents´ ability to deploy violence has steadily increased since the fall of Baghdad on 9 April 2003; the formation of the Interim Iraqi Government´s security forces, on the other hand, has been beset with problems in funding, recruitment and training. There are serious doubts that the political zeal of those demanding a nationwide ballot can be matched by administrative and security capacities.
Against this backdrop, 17 political parties in late November petitioned the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq to delay the elections for at least six months. The petition was drafted by the respected politician Adnan Pachachi, and was supported by Prime Minister Ayad Allawi´s party, the Iraqi National Accord and the two main Kurdish parties (the Kurdish Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan). Yet the Interim government signalled its strong preference to push ahead, characterising any delay to the polls as a triumph for terrorists, and the electoral commission´s chairman, Abdel Hussein Al Hindawi, on 27 November said that a delay was ‘out of the question´.
Electors, candidates and coalitions
The vote is designed to herald the start of an intense, year-long exercise in consultative democracy. It is supposed to elect a 275-member assembly that will serve for about a year. During that time, it will select a president and two deputies, who will in turn choose one of the assembly´s members to serve as prime minister. Its main task, however, will be to draft a constitution by the middle of August 2005. This will be submitted to a referendum by next October, and then used to conduct, by 15 December 2005, elections for a fully constitutional government that is to take power by the end of next year.
The countdown to polling day started on 1 November with the start of voter registration. The electoral roll is based on existing information collected for the ration distribution system. A recent audit of this data indicates that it is up to 85% accurate. From the beginning of November, as the heads of all households in Iraq began to collect their new ration cards, they were asked to confirm the names of those in their families old enough to vote. If the existing rationing information proved to be incorrect they were directed to one of the 545 electoral registration centres across the county to update the register of voters. The Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq hired 6,000 local staff to run the registration centres and had managed to open all but 90 of them. Of those that could not open, 24 were situated in al-Anbar province, the epicentre of the insurgency, and 56 stations in Ninevah province were closed on 11 November after an upsurge in violence centred on Mosul.
The next stage in the process is the registration of the candidates and parties seeking election. The Transitional Administrative Law, passed by the Interim Governing Council in March 2004, set stringent standards of eligibility. Candidates must have a ‘good reputation´, have no criminal convictions ‘involving moral turpitude´ and cannot have been senior members of the Ba´ath Party or the former regime´s secret services. Candidates must sign a declaration certifying that they meet these terms and collect 500 signatures in support of their application. By 2 November, there had been 198 applications to participate in the elections, of which the electoral commission had approved 126. Some 44 of the applications came from individuals, and the rest from parties of various sizes. Ominously, however, only 15 had come from organisations that wanted to represent the Sunni section of society.
The election will be held on the basis of a single constituency. The chief United Nations election adviser, Carina Perelli, has estimated that a candidate will have to secure 27,000–50,000 votes to get into parliament. In addition to organising the election around one national constituency, Perelli encouraged those candidates and parties seeking election to run as part of a nation-wide list. The overt aim of this was to promote cross-communal coalition building.
Early reports indicated that the US embassy in Baghdad favoured what was termed a ‘monster coalition´ list. This would unite all the parties that had dominated the Iraqi Governing Council and who formed the bulk of the interim government´s cabinet. The plan was apparently promoted on the basis that it would prevent one party or group dominating the administration, allowing Iraq´s first elected government to rule in a pluralistic and consensual manner. Yet it was widely attacked as being anti-democratic, not giving the potential voters a choice of parties and suppressing the growth of indigenous political parties by favouring those who had recently returned from exile.
Shiamobilisation
The likelihood of the election being dominated by a US embassy-inspired coalition ticket has, in any case, been dramatically reduced by the actions of Ayatollah Sistani. As the head of Iraq´s Shia community, Sistani has continually pressed for early elections as the only way to reduce violence, guarantee Iraq´s progress to democracy and lessen the influence of the United States in the running of the country. In mid-October, Sistani´s spokesperson announced that the Ayatollah had encouraged the formation of a six-person committee, led by Hussein Shahristani (the former nuclear scientist imprisoned by Saddam Hussein, who had been favoured by UN Special Envoy Lakhdar Brahimi for the post of prime minister), to ‘co-ordinate´ the creation of a list for the elections. Parties and individuals could join this list if they agreed to vote as a bloc in the new parliament, not to challenge the ‘Islamic character´ of the Iraqi people and not to support any legislation that ran counter to Sharia law. Negotiations about the proportion of political parties against independent candidates on the list, and whether the radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr would join it, are still ongoing. But indications are that out of a proposed 165 names on this list, 30–50% will go to Shia political parties, including 10–12% to Muqtada al Sadr´s movement, 12–15% to the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), and 20% to the various factions of the Dawa party.
If this list does enter the election as a coherent campaigning bloc, it is bound to do well. Accounting for an estimated 60% of the Iraqi population, the Shia community will be influenced by Ayatollah Sistani´s role in creating this list. Although they will not vote uniformly or solely on the basis of their religious identity, the grouping of such a large number of parties seeking the Shia vote together on one list will have a major influence on the composition of the parliament formed after 30 January. If successful, it would also dilute Washington´s ability to influence the new government. Yet the Shia list could undergo major changes before the election campaign. Muqtada al-Sadr has argued against political mobilisation on the basis of religion or ethnicity and his spokesmen have been increasingly critical of Ayatollah Sistani. In addition, al-Sadr is being courted by those mobilising a campaign to boycott the polls and has expressed his support.
Sunni discontent...
Lacking the centralised religious institutions of the Shia community or the two dominant parties of the Kurds, political mobilisation amongst Sunnis has not been as well organised. This section of society has to date been dominated by the fear that the new order would result in its collective marginalisation or persecution. It is indicative of the fractured nature of Iraqi society that a coalition of Sunni mosques across the country, the Association of Muslim Scholars (Hayat al-Ulama al-Muslimin), has become one of the most influential voices within the Sunni community. Formed in 2003, it now claims to represent 3,000 Sunni mosques and has led the campaign to boycott the elections. After the controversial US assault on Fallujah, they have been joined by the Iraqi Islamic Party, whose leader, Mohsen Abdul Hamid, called for the elections to be postponed for six months. On 15 November, the Association of Muslim Scholars was joined by 14 other organisation to form the Iraqi Founding National Congress, an umbrella group for all those refusing to take part in elections. The danger of running an election campaign that a number of groups feel they cannot, or will not, take part in is that it will further increase the anger and violence directed at the government.
…and continuing insurgency
During the summer of 2004 the US embassy in Baghdad developed a strategy for breaking the back of the rebellion in the run-up to the elections. This was to have involved US forces bringing 20–30 key towns in the northwest of the country back under the control of the coalition before campaigning started. Samarra, a town of 200,000 people lying some 65 miles north of Baghdad, was the first town to be seized, with the capture of Fallujah being the defining moment of that campaign. Things appeared to be going to plan with 5,000 troops taking control of Samarra on 1 October. Fallujah came under sustained attack and then occupation on 8 November.
However, the seizure of Fallujah did not result in the pacification of the rest of northwestern Iraq. The ‘dynamic cordon´ placed around the city by the US Marine Corps in mid-October seems not to have prevented large numbers of fighters leaving Fallujah prior to the well-publicised assault. The campaign itself was greeted by an upsurge in violence across the region, with suicide bombings killing 39 people in Samarra. In Mosul, Iraq´s third-largest city of more than 1m people, a revolt resulted in attacks on nine police stations and the desertion of 3,200 members of the city´s 4,000-strong police force. Despite US and Iraqi claims that hundreds of radical insurgents have been killed, the net effect of these military operations is still open to debate.
An acute dilemma
The timetable under which the elections are taking place appears to have been dictated more by US politics and international diplomacy than by the practicalities of organising an election in a country wracked by profound uncertainty and violence. The ramifications of a failed electoral process would be predictably grave. Firstly, an unabated increase in violence in the run-up to the vote would highlight the impotence of the government and its inability to control the country. Secondly, an election campaign in which a large section of the community, in this case the Sunnis, did not take part would fuel the growth of sectarian politics: the new parliament would be dominated by politicians who explicitly identify themselves as Shias and who had mobilised their voters on that basis. Those excluded from this process, voluntarily or not, would be largely from the Sunni communities of the north-west. Having no stake in the constitutional process, the temptation to support the men of violence would be much greater.
Overall, an election held in a country slipping towards anarchy, that failed to include a large section of the population, would further highlight the illegitimacy of the state whilst exacerbating, if not creating, the basis for violent sectarian politics. And yet indefinite delays would entail their own risks. The current Iraqi government desperately lacks legitimacy and would benefit greatly from a democratic mandate. Successful elections ought also to bring a degree of international legitimacy and perhaps induce greater multilateral cooperation – currently in rather short supply – in efforts to deal with the country´s manifold problems. To this extent, the decision to push ahead with the elections represents a gamble, rather than a fulsome statement of confidence. Ultimately, the choice of whether to push on with elections in the face of increased violence and boycotts, or delay in the hope that the situation may get better, could rest with Ayatollah Sistani. The Shia political parties are better organised than most and would benefit from an early election. However, presented with a firm timetable for rescheduling, Sistani could be convinced that calling elections in the present climate would increase sectarian tensions and fuel chaos.