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SULAIMANIYAH,
IRAQ - A labourer used to early starts, Amjat
Mohamed Said was at the polling booth by 6 a.m. That
was in January, when Iraq's parliamentary elections
took place. On Saturday, as the country voted on its
new constitution, he preferred to spend the morning
in a tea shop with his friends.
"I'll go later, probably," he said with a shrug.
"But let's have a few more glasses of tea first."
It's an attitude that summed up the low-key
atmosphere on polling day in Iraq's Kurdish north.
In January, most polling stations reported 90 per
cent turnout by midday. On Saturday, only about 60
per cent of voters appeared to have made the trip,
most of them arriving in the afternoon.
Some officials blamed public lethargy on Ramadan,
the Muslim month of fasting when many believers wake
late to shorten their day.
Others pointed out that it is easier to get excited
about a parliamentary election than an abstract set
of laws that received little debate in the Kurdish
press.
Among the voters milling around the polling booths,
though, only a tiny minority talked about the
constitution. For the rest, the referendum was a
vote of confidence for the current government.
With Iraq's president hailing from the Kurdish
minority and Kurds overrepresented in the Baghdad
parliament, almost all said they had an obligation
to vote "yes.'' But many did so unwillingly.
"The Kurdish parties promised us the world before
the January elections, but they have done nothing
since," said Hussein Ibrahim, owner of a sportswear
store in central Sulaimaniyah.
"If I had had a choice, I would have voted 'no.' "
After another night of severe electricity cuts
throughout Sulaimaniyah, housewife Bafreen Latif
made a more radical, last-minute decision: to
boycott the referendum.
"I think a lot of people didn't turn out this time
around because they are unhappy with the [Kurdish]
parties," said Jemal Hussein Wali, supervisor of
five polling stations in the poor Sulaimaniyah
district of Haji Han.
But while popular anger may be directed at the
corruption and incompetence of local authorities,
educated Kurds were riled by late changes to the
constitution.
Until last week, a vote of approval on Saturday was
supposed to set the constitution in stone. Afraid
that Sunni Arabs would veto it, though, the U.S.
managed to persuade the Shia- and Kurdish-dominated
government to add an article permitting further
changes to be made early next year.
"This is not a referendum on the constitution," said
international election monitor Thomas von der
Osten-Sacken. "It is a referendum on a referendum."
It remains to be seen whether the changes are enough
to persuade Sunni Arabs to join the political
process.
Editor of Hawlati, Iraqi Kurdistan's only
independent newspaper, Assos Herdi said bitterly
that they are nearly enough to persuade him to turn
his back on politics.
"The elected government has been publicly debating
this draft for a year now, and then they go and
change it at the last moment, behind closed doors,"
he said.
"It just makes the whole process -- and the
constitution -- look like a bad joke."
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