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Iraqis abroad angry at Vote Ban
29.10.2005
By Omar Anwar in London (ICR No. 150)
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Though the
constitutional referendum is over, the exclusion of
expatriate Iraqis still rankles.
Iraqis in Britain have expressed anger and
frustration at being squeezed out of the referendum
on Iraq’s constitution, which was officially
approved this week.
Elections rules established under the previous de
facto constitution, the Transitional Administrative
Law, TAL, banned Iraqis abroad from voting in the
plebiscite held earlier in October.
They were, however, given the right to vote in the
January 2005 National Assembly elections and will be
allowed to cast ballots from outside the country in
the December parliamentary ballot.
Many Iraqis in the UK were angered by the referendum
ban ruling, arguing it ran counter to the democratic
ideals Iraq had strived to achieve.
“Are we Iraqis or not?” asked Haider Sadiq, an
academic living in London. “They confiscated our
rights, and we will be ruled by a constitution that
we never took part in. When you deprive a large
portion of people taking part in the constitution,
it’s not democracy. That is confiscation of
democracy.”
Anmar Jabbar, a physician from Nottingham, added,
“This is not acceptable… we took part in the January
elections, so why not now? I (wanted) to take part
in the future of Iraq. We should have the freedom to
vote.”
Hamdiyah al-Hosseini, a deputy director of the
Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq, said part
of the problem was that the commission did not know
how to count votes from abroad, because it might
have affected the two-thirds formula set up under
TAL. If two-thirds of voters in three of Iraq’s 18
provinces had rejected the constitution, it would
have become null and void.
Election officials announced this week that, after a
recount of ballots in some provinces, 79 per cent of
Iraqis who voted had approved the constitution. Some
60 per cent of eligible voters turned out for the
referendum.
It is unlikely that votes from Iraqis abroad would
have changed that outcome, said Joost Hiltermann,
Middle East project director with the Brussels-based
International Crisis Group. The referendum was going
to pass “with or without the (expatriate) vote”, he
said. “With the expat vote, the margin would likely
have been more significant, that’s all.”
He noted that few Iraqis living abroad voted in the
previous election.
Approximately 1.2 million Iraqis were eligible to
vote in 14 countries in the January 2005 ballot, but
only 275,000 registered to vote.
Still, some said the vote ban was an injustice.
“It’s unfair because they [deprived] the
intellectuals and the elite of voting,” said Ahmed
Kareem, an Iraqi translator in London. “I’m not
surprised by this decision because the Iraqi
government is always disorganised.”
An Iraqi is an Iraqi, agreed Bayad Nozad, a doctor
in Nottingham. Preventing certain citizens from
voting is “absolutely unfair and does not reflect
democracy”, he said.
Omar Anwar is an IWPR trainee journalist in London.
www.iwpr.net
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