[Mb-civic] You're Voting for Whom?

[Michael Butler]

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    You're Voting for Whom?
    By Rod Nordland
    Newsweek

     Thursday 09 December 2004
 Iraq's new political coalition is reluctant to release the names of its
election candidates. But some surprising figures have been included - and
left out.

    The much-anticipated Shiite list of candidates for the forthcoming
elections in Iraq was presented today-in partial anonymity and peculiar
secrecy. This is the slate of candidates who will almost certainly win
elections if they take place on schedule next Jan. 30. And in a few days it
will have to begin campaigning.

     The grouping of 228 candidates, a coalition running together as the
newly formed United Iraqi Alliance, today formally filed for a place on the
ballot at the Baghdad offices of the Independent Elections Commission for
Iraq and then held a press conference at which representatives of the group
refused to reveal the names of those on their list, or even who was at its
head. A media spokesman for the IECI also refused to reveal the contents of
the Shiite list. The head of the elections commission, Adel Hindawi, reached
by telephone, said, "I haven't seen the list, and I don't know anything
about it."

     The United Iraqi Alliance list will presumably eventually become
public, when the Dec. 15 deadline for candidates to file passes and
campaigning begins-assuming that candidates do not contemplate campaigning
in secrecy. The secrecy is apparently motivated by security concerns for
some of those on the list, and by horse-trading still going on among members
of the coalition over what positions they'll get in the new government. Some
of the names on the list have come out, but the most stunning thing about it
is who is left out: notably, Prime Minister Iyad Allawi and his Iraqi
National Accord party. This makes it almost impossible for Allawi to be
re-elected prime minister, and could even mean he would not win a seat in
the National Assembly.

     Is this any way to run an election? Nothing about preparations for
Iraq's first free poll has been easy. In a third of the country's provinces,
nearly all of the country's Sunni Triangle, it's been nearly impossible to
conduct voter registration. Sunnis, who are only 20 percent of the
population but long ruled the country, have called for a delay in the
elections until security conditions improve. Most of their leading
organizations have called for a boycott of the vote; others have insisted on
a delay of six months. Even Allawi, a secular Shia from an exile party, has
suggested that the poll be conducted over a period of many days or weeks, to
keep lines shorter and make the risk of attack less-a proposal the elections
commission rejected today. Elections-commission officials have insisted that
security at polling places will be provided only by the Iraqi police and
National Guard-not by American or Coalition troops, so as not to intimidate
voters or create the impression that the poll isn't independent. But Iraqi
security forces have been reeling from one attack after another on their
police stations and checkpoints, on individuals at home and on the highways.
Even Lakhdar Brahimi, the United Nations diplomat who crafted the deal on an
interim government to prepare these elections, has recently said he thinks
the atmosphere is too violent for credible elections to take place.

     The Shia, however, are having none of that-and American authorities
seem determined to support their insistence that elections take place on
schedule, no matter what. "Our operating assumption is that these elections
will go forward," said U.S. ambassador John Negroponte at a recent lunch
with a small group of American journalists in the former palace that is now
the American embassy. Anti-election Sunnis, he suggested, still have plenty
of time to change their minds and participate. "Do they really want to opt
out of a constitutional convention that sets the political future of the
country? Or do they want a seat at the table?" And a few prominent Sunnis
have come out for elections, most notably the interim president, Sheikh
Ghazi al-Yawer. Sunni leader Adnan Pachachi, an elder statesman with close
ties to the Americans and Brahimi, was the architect of an abortive attempt
at delaying the polls-but when that fell through, he was among the first to
register his slate's candidacy. And despite the problems with
voter-registration sites, the system set up by the U.N. under a small team
led by veteran elections troubleshooter Carlos Valenzuela has a built-in
solution. Most of Iraq's voters are passively registered, and only have to
go to the centers if there is something wrong with their names on the voting
rolls. The voting rolls are correlated with ration cards, which all Iraqi
families have to enable them to get monthly supplies of donated
food-ensuring that everyone will know if their registration is in order.

     At the press conference announcing the list, organizers gave the names
of the major parties that make up their coalition, although not the names of
all the individuals on the list. They include the leading Shia parties,
Hizbullah, the Supreme Commission for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the
Dawa Party. In addition, the list included nonpoliticians, independents such
as Hussain Shahristani, a nuclear physicist and an intimate of Ayatollah Ali
al-Sistani who was one of the organizers behind the UIA.

     Some analysts see Allawi's omission as a plus: the prime minister's
popular support has eroded dramatically since he took office June 30, in a
deal engineered by the Americans and approved reluctantly by the U.N. As
violence increased, and basic public services and reconstruction stalled,
Allawi's government has taken much of the blame. Also off the Shiite list is
Moqtada al-Sadr, the young radical whose anti-American insurgency was
brought to a halt after Sistani intervened in August. Sadr had been
negotiating for a position on the Shiite list, but in the end, according to
Shahristani, he and his followers did not register as political parties or
entities, and so could not join the coalition. "The Sadrist movement
announced that it supports the religious authorities and its call for Iraqis
to hold elections," Shahristani told reporters. "It also supports the list."

     There was a stunning inclusion in the list, as well-Ahmad Chalabi and
his exile-based Iraqi National Congress party. Chalabi, initially supported
by the American government as a potential replacement for Saddam, has fallen
into disfavor with the United States after a series of scandals and even
allegations that he was working with Iranian intelligence. The State
Department had long butted heads with the Pentagon over Chalabi, and INC
figures have been accused in Congress of fabricating evidence on weapons of
mass destruction to provoke the United States into invading Iraq. Chalabi's
fall from grace culminated in a raid by U.S. troops on his homes and offices
in Baghdad seven months ago, and Allawi's government briefly brought
corruption charges against him. In addition, he has negligible support among
non-exile Iraqis. But Chalabi has close ties with Iran, and recently has
forged a relationship with both Sistani, an Iranian-born cleric, and with
Sadr.

     The UIA is an attempt to broaden the Shia list from a purely sectarian
basis, and it is indeed more than just Shia religious parties-the major
ones-and leading Shia individuals like Shahristani. "I think that this list
is a patriotic list," said one of its leaders, Sheikh Fawaz al-Jarba, leader
of a large Sunni tribe from the Mosul area. There are also secular groups,
Kurdish Shia, Turkomen and Yazidi sect members on the Shia list-although
apparently no Christians, another leading minority that initially had wanted
to join the alliance. But just how many of the candidates on the UIA list
are non-Shia is unknown. "The agreement that was reached, was that we should
not discuss the names [of candidates] at the present time," said Dawa Party
official Ali al-Deeb, who was one of the candidates, at the press
conference. "We are not going to mention the names, neither in this
conference nor in another one." But Chalabi insisted it was not a secret
list. "The names of the candidates are a matter of public record." Once, of
course, the public record is released, and so far the elections commission
has not announced any intention to do so.

     What is certain is that most on the Shia list will win these elections
if they do take place. Shahristani said the marjaya, the Shiite supreme
religious leadership, and Grand Ayatollah Sistani, its preeminent figure,
appointed the six-member committee that put the coalition together. That
gives it Sistani's implicit endorsement at the very least. And Shahristani
even left open the possibility that Sistani might explicitly endorse the
slate. "Whether he will support the list or not, is not known, but he has
encouraged all Iraqis to participate in the elections," Shahristani said.

     The voting system set up for Iraq by the former American civil
administration is proportional, with parties running a slate of candidates
elected on a national basis. That means that the seats in the 275-member
National Assembly will be awarded to each slate proportional to the number
of votes each wins. So if the UIA wins 60 percent of the vote, it will get
60 percent of the seats, with the remainder going to the losing slates
similarly. In that case, candidates whose names are near the top of the list
are all but guaranteed election, even in losing slates; while those near the
bottom have less chance. Thus the order in which the candidates' names
appear on the list is vital-and UIA spokesmen refused to say even who the
top ones were, let alone their order. Aides to Chalabi, however, said he is
in the top 15 of the UIA list. And a source at SCIRI named the No. 1
position as going to Sayid Ali al-Hakim, who is Sistani's representative in
Basra; as a nonpolitician, he was a compromise to stop bickering among
parties on who got top billing. Sayid Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the head of
SCIRI, is No. 2; an unidentified woman third, and the current interim vice
president, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, is fourth, these sources say. Shahristani
himself is No. 7 on the list, while Chalabi is 10th.

     Complicating the distribution of names on the list is the requirement
that 25 percent of the names be women-and the Shia list, its representatives
said, included 33 percent women, though none were among the eight candidates
who revealed themselves at the press conference, and no women's names were
released. Women lower down on the list will be given preference in the award
of assembly seats, to keep with the requirement that at least one quarter of
the assembly be female.

     The new assembly will elect a prime minister and a cabinet, and will
also preside over a constitutional convention to write a new constitution,
which will then go to a referendum sometime next year. Then the first
constitutional national elections will be held, in December 2005. Hopefully,
by then, Iraqis will know in advance who they're voting for.

  

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