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The omission of
thousands of Kurds from voter lists is attributed to
administrative error, but sparks deep-seated
mistrust of Baghdad.
A carnival atmosphere dominated in Sulaimaniyah on
election day, but when Khooshkan Fatih returned home
from the polls, her mood was anything but festive.
The 25-year-old civil servant slipped off her
traditional Kurdish clothing – a sequined dress many
women put on especially for the election – wiped off
her make-up and lay down to sleep.
Then she got angry. “This is what the Arabs are
like,” she said. “Before, when they had power, they
bombed us with chemical weapons. Now they remove our
names [from the electoral rolls] so that we can't
vote.”
Fatih was one of thousands of people in Iraq's
northern Kurdish regions whose names were missing
from official lists of voters for the national
parliamentary election.
Election officials in Iraqi Kurdistan and the city
of Kirkuk said they had sent voters’ names to the
headquarters of the Independent Electoral Commission
in Iraq, IECI, in Baghdad. But when the IECI sent
out the finalised lists, thousands of names were
missing.
IECI and international officials said the names went
missing due to technical error in Baghdad. But while
such cases were not limited to Kurdish areas, the
problems stirred deep-seated anti-Arab sentiment
among Kurds, a persecuted community under Saddam
Hussein’s regime.
The problems started several days before the
December 15 election in the ethnically mixed Kirkuk
region. Election officials noticed that about
196,000 of the region's 691,410 registered voters
were missing from official lists. Most of them were
Kurds.
Kurdish officials in Kirkuk scrambled to get the
names added to the lists. Most voters there were
able to cast ballots on election day, but other
regions experienced similar problems.
On election day, the names of 30,000 voters were
missing from the voting list in the Kurdish-ruled
northwestern province of Dahuk. Election officials
there resorted to using voter lists from the January
parliamentary election, which the IECI in Baghdad
reportedly agreed to accept.
In Sulaimaniyah, as many as 10,000 voters’ names
were missing when the lists were sent out from
Baghdad, local election officials reported. In
Hawlea in the Kurdish city of Erbil, electoral staff
estimated that several thousand voters’ names were
missing. Mosul, which is ethnically mixed, also
experienced problems.
The mix-up has led some Kurds to suspect that the
Baghdad government tried to marginalise them as a
constituency.
“It is clear that this is a conspiracy against
Kurds,” said Dara Mohammed, a 20-year-old student in
Sulaimaniyah. “The IECI in Baghdad made trouble for
Kirkuk and Mosul. Now they've extended it to
Sulaimaniyah and Erbil as well. But it's our
[Kurdish] leaders’ fault because they are soft on
the Arabs.”
Miran Ahmed, a 28-year-old day labourer, disagreed
and argued that the missing votes probably wouldn't
affect the final results anyway.
"The system wasn't well-organised," he said. "This
wasn't a conspiracy against the Kurds," he said.
Barham Ahmed Salih, who heads the Kurdistan Alliance
in Sulaimaniyah, said he asked United Nations
representative Ashraf Qadhi to investigate the
issue.
"People brought women in blankets and men on
wheelbarrows, and I couldn't let them vote because I
was forced to follow the rules," said Zana Raoof,
coordinator of a voting centre in the city who had
to turn away voters because their names were not on
lists. “I went home frustrated.”
The incidents cast a shadow over an otherwise
positive election day in Iraq's Kurdish territories.
Election officials and monitors estimated voter
turnout in Iraq's three Kurdish territories at 75 to
80 per cent. In Kirkuk, a majority Kurdish city that
also has Arabs and Turkomans, turnout was estimated
to be near the national average of 70 per cent.
Monitors and electoral officials did not report any
serious violations, unlike in January’s elections
and the October constitutional referendum.
The Kurdistan Alliance, which currently holds 77
seats in Iraq's 275-member parliament, was widely
expected to take the lion's share of votes in Iraqi
Kurdistan. Political analysts believe the alliance
will lose some seats to Sunni Arab lists that are
competing for the first time.
“We used to struggle with military force and bloody
battles to realise our rights,” said Salah Aziz, a
39 year-old shopkeeper. “Today the style of that
struggle has changed to a political fight. We want
to achieve our rights through ballot boxes.”
The two main parties in the alliance, the Patriotic
Union of Kurdistan which runs the eastern region of
Iraq's Kurdish territories and the Kurdistan
Democratic Party, KDP, which controls the west,
faced stiff criticism from some voters ahead of the
election who accused them of corruption and of
failing to provide basic services.
The Islamic Union of Kurdistan, the third most
powerful Kurdish political party that ran with the
Kurdistan Alliance in January, this time ran
independently on a platform advocating a new,
uncorrupt leadership.
“I voted to put an end to the power of the corrupt
authorities, and so the rights of all groups can be
justly realised,” said Hero Salih, a 22 year-old
student who endorsed the Islamic Union of Kurdistan.
The party's secretary-general, Salahadin Muhammed
Bahaadin, and several of his staff and bodyguards
were beaten by Kurdish security forces guarding a
polling station when they went to vote in Erbil.
Hama-Rasheed Mawati, a senior party member, said the
ministry of interior arrested 41 police and members
of the security forces at the polling station.
Four party members, including an official, were shot
and killed by a policeman in Dahuk shortly before
the elections.
"We expected the KDP would put pressure on us, but
we didn't expect that it would attack us in such a
manner," Mawati said of the polling centre incident.
The party said the attack "distorts the democratic
experiment and political co-existence in Kurdistan".
Muhammed Mala Qadir, a KDP politburo member, said
those who attacked the Islamic Union of Kurdistan
must have been Kurdish nationalists who believed the
party betrayed them by breaking with the alliance.
"We don't have any political or historical problems
with the Islamic Union of Kurdistan," he said.
Frman Abdul-Rahman and Talar Nadir are IWPR
trainee journalists in Sulaimaniyah.
www.iwpr.net
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