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Rome,
28 Sept. (AKI) - Iraq's Sunnis made a mistake in not
participating in the elections and risk repeating
that by boycotting next month's referendum on the
draft Iraqi constitution, according to Suhob Yasoub
Rafik, an Iraqi Sunni woman currently in Italy for a
government-funded training course. Rafik told
Adnkronos International (AKI) that while she opposes
the draft constitution she feels it's her duty to
vote.
"I am afraid Sunnis will make the same mistake as
the last time," she says, which means that in the
reconstruction of Iraq, "we are like guests, we are
given our acquired rights but it is presented as if
it is a favour."
Daughter of the Iraqi ambassador to Kuwait - who was
sidelined with the emergence of the Baathists in
Iraq in the 1970s - Rafik grew up in Kuwait,
returning home to Iraq after the first Gulf War. For
a decade she was unable to secure work in government
or institutions as a translator because she was not
Baath-sponsored, and so "concentrated on widening my
horizons, studying, learning".
Living outside the country, Rafik did not experience
the power that the Sunnis - just 20 percent of the
Iraqi population - wielded under Saddam, yet even so
she feels strongly that the Sunnis are being
short-changed.
"Things cannot move ahead until there is national
reconciliation, but after the fall of Saddam the US
strategy was to sweep Sunnis out of everything,
dissolve the army, dissolve the Baathists, and these
people were left in the lurch" she said.
Rafik believes the country needed a few more months
to be prepared for the elections. "It was like a pot
with pasta boiling, but that was not yet 'al
dente'," she said. She also blames the electoral
system for the sense of disenfranchisement many
Iraqis feel. "People were voting for numbers, that
represented lists, not for people. (Ayatollah) Ali
al-Sistani would order people to vote, say, 165, and
many less educated Iraqs followed that, not knowing
who exactly they were electing."
With the fall of the regime, she was optimistic
about her personal development and the rebirth of
her country. Yet errors since the US-led invasion
and the rise of terrorism means she feels insecure
and frustrated.
Rafik is among a group of Iraqi women invited to
Italy by the foreign ministry's Task Force Iraq for
training in the creation of associations and civil
society in Iraq. While inspired by the examples of
civil society action in Italy in such fields as
health or women's rights, Rafik says the security
situation and ethnic strife right now make it
difficult to put these ideas into practice in Iraq.
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