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ARBIL/SULAYMANIYAH,
If anybody is to make a success of Iraq's upcoming
elections, set to take place on 30 January, it
should be the Kurds, local officials say.
Apart from the devastating double suicide attacks in
the northern Iraqi city of Arbil on 1 February 2004,
they have been spared the violent fate of southern
and central Iraq by a deep distaste for the
anti-Coalition insurgency and better security.
Unlike Iraqis living in the centre and the south of
the country, neither democracy nor the prospect of
life without Saddam Hussein is entirely new to them.
Saved from the Baathist regime in 1991 by Western
air power, they celebrated their de facto
independence a year later.
Small wonder that Kurdish confidence in the smooth
running of local polls has been high. "If we had to,
we could have our elections tomorrow," one senior
Kurdish official, told IRIN confidently back in
September.
As polling day approaches, that confidence has begun
to wane a little.
Kurds have no problem with the decision - made by
the newly-formed Iraqi Electoral Commission in
collaboration with the United Nations - to base
voters' lists on data compiled by the World Food
Programme (WFP) for Iraq-wide rations distribution.
They used a similar process in their 1992 elections,
after all. What has concerned them are
irregularities in the system and time constraints,
they say.
The fundamental issue surrounds the verification of
information on WFP forms. As elsewhere in Iraq, the
idea was for local heads of the electoral commission
to hand out voting lists to food stations
responsible for distributing rations.
Individuals would be able to check that their
personal details and details of their family were
correct while picking up their food. In case of
error or omission, they were to inform staff at
registration centres set up throughout the country.
Generally, the system has worked. But some of those
involved in the process complain of a lack of
professionalism on the part of staff at the food
stations. Others claim some food stations have
received voter lists either late or not at all.
"It's just not good enough seeing that your personal
details are wrong on so late on," Hasan Marif
Mohamed, manager of the registration centre in
Seyyid Sadiq, a town south of Sulaymaniyah,
complained to IRIN.
"That gives you just a few days to get people like
us to change things," he added, referring to the 15
December deadline for alterations to voting lists.
Kamal Khambar, head of the electoral commission in
the governorate of Arbil, estimated that as many as
70,000 people in his area of control may be denied a
vote because of such problems.
As in the rest of Iraq, an error somewhere in the
preparation process has excluded teenagers born in
1986 from electoral lists. Most 18-year olds IRIN
talked to had already visited the registration
centre to ensure their first opportunity to vote was
not lost.
Following a series of inter-party deals late in
November, however, some Kurds are beginning to
wonder whether they should bother to vote at all.
Nobody was surprised when the two main Kurdish
parties - the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and
the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) - agreed to
fight elections for Iraq's new parliament on a
single ticket.
A minority with few friends within the country, the
Kurds see a united front in Baghdad as their only
hope of getting what they want from Iraq's new
constitution.
But the 1 December announcement that the KDP and PUK,
plus half a dozen smaller parties, would form a
joint list for the Kurdistan regional parliament
elections due to take place on the same day was less
easy to understand.
"It's like George Bush and John Kerry running
together against Ralph Nader," said Said Mohamed, a
student in Sulaymaniyah, capital of the southern,
PUK-controlled half of Iraqi Kurdistan. "I hope they
win 99 percent of the vote, like that other expert
at democratic elections, Saddam Hussein."
They very well may, though an independent list led
by Arbil-based philosophy professor Ferhad Pirbal
has been accepted to run, local analysts give it
little chance of winning widespread support.
Such a result would mean dividing the 111-seat
Kurdish parliament along lines already agreed in
secret by Kurdish party leaders. The KDP and PUK
would take an equal share of 80 percent of the
seats. Smaller parties would get the rest.
To outside observers the joint ticket seems a
travesty of democracy. Despite growing discontent
with the politicians who have ruled them since 1991,
the vast majority of Kurds prefer not to see it as
such, offering two main reasons for justifying it.
The first is based on fear of their own leaders, who
went to war with each other in 1993 and have run two
separate, party-controlled administrations ever
since.
"The public knows that neither the KDP nor the PUK
would accept the other's election victory," said
Stran Abdullah, editor of the Sulaymaniyah-based
newspaper Asso. "It supports the deal as a means of
delaying a second round of conflict between them."
Though itself undemocratic, he added, the coalition
looked set, paradoxically, to improve the quality of
Kurdish democracy. It assures the existence of other
parties within parliament, and the closed list
system devised by the UN strengthens the freedom of
individual deputies to oppose their own leaders.
"Under the existing system, party leaders can sack
rebellious deputies," Abdullah explained. "They
won't be able to do that any more."
The second justification shows the same
Machiavellian pragmatism born of weakness. "The
Kurds have to show the Arab world, the US and the
Europeans that they are united on the Kurdish
issue," Fuat Hussein, a deputy member of the
Governing Council that ruled Iraq immediately after
the toppling of the Baathist regime, told IRIN in
Arbil.
"How can parties in coalition for the national
elections possibly fight a Kurdish election as
rivals? That's absurd and self-defeating."
Critical of the coalition, which he sees as a scam
by major Kurdish political players to hold on to
power, Sulaymaniyah-based journalist Hiwa Osman is
nonetheless forced to agree, up to a point.
"If there were elections for three assemblies in
Iraq, people throughout the country would vote for
new faces," he said, pointing to the 43 percent of
respondents to a recent poll in a Kurdish newspaper
who said they were thinking of voting for
independent candidates.
As it is, questions of security are uppermost, with
voters forced to give their support to men with guns
who can fight if need be. "These elections are
nothing to do with democracy," said Osman. "They're
about fear of domination, and that will consolidate
the power of people who are a model of bad
governance."
http://www.irinnews.org
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