Political Turmoil Follows Barring of Hundreds From Iraq Ballot
January 16, 2010 — A knot of young men stood Friday outside the Umm Al Qura Mosque, once a nest of insurgent fervor where a year of relative tranquillity has softened the jagged edges of nearby bullet holes. They were angry, frustrated and quick to punctuate their denunciations of a decision to bar scores of Sunni candidates from Iraqi elections in March with a single word: sharaiyya, Arabic for legitimacy. "We’re not going to boycott because our candidates were disqualified," said one of them, Suheil Najm. "We’ll boycott because the elections won’t be legitimate." The decision to disqualify nearly 500 candidates, many of them Sunni Muslim, plunged Iraqi politics into turmoil on Friday...
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Political Turmoil Follows Barring of Hundreds From Iraq Ballot
By ANTHONY SHADID, NYTimes
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Iraqis in Basra held up posters of Nehru Mohammed Absul Karim on Wednesday, protesting his being banned from running in the March elections.
January 16, 2010
BAGHDAD — A knot of young men stood Friday outside the Umm Al Qura Mosque, once a nest of insurgent fervor where a year of relative tranquillity has softened the jagged edges of nearby bullet holes. They were angry, frustrated and quick to punctuate their denunciations of a decision to bar scores of Sunni candidates from Iraqi elections in March with a single word: sharaiyya, Arabic for legitimacy.
"We’re not going to boycott because our candidates were disqualified," said one of them, Suheil Najm. "We’ll boycott because the elections won’t be legitimate."
The decision to disqualify nearly 500 candidates, many of them Sunni Muslim, plunged Iraqi politics into turmoil on Friday. Leading candidates vowed a boycott of the vote, perhaps the most important since the fall of Saddam Hussein. Protests were threatened, and anger rippled through Iraq’s Sunni communities.
But beyond the din of recriminations, the decision posed an even greater challenge to Iraq’s nascent body politic, lawmakers, officials and residents say. A hard-won legitimacy of Iraq’s political process that had finally turned elections into an arena of contest for virtually all factions here looked dangerously tattered on Friday, they said.
"The credibility of the state and the credibility of our elections is at stake," said Mahmoud Othman, an independent Kurdish lawmaker. "Time is running out."
The disqualifications, ratified Thursday, were the latest turn in a mercurial process that even rivals of the barred candidates acknowledge has been shrouded in secrecy and characterized by unpredictability. It took United States and United Nations officials by surprise and has left Iraqi leaders scrambling for some kind of compromise weeks before the campaign for the March 7 parliamentary elections was supposed to officially start.
Some of the most prominent Sunni politicians, fixtures for years on Iraq’s fickle political landscape, have been made targets, apparently for supporting Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party. Among them were Defense Minister Abdul-Kader Jassem al-Obeidi and Saleh al-Mutlaq, the head of the National Dialogue Front, whose alliance with Ayad Allawi, a former prime minister, was expected to fare well in Sunni provinces that were underrepresented in the last election in 2005.
"This is a perversion of the political process; it is a perversion of the democratic process," said Nada Jbouri, a Sunni lawmaker and ally of Mr. Mutlaq’s. "When you eliminate candidates, it is no longer a fair representation of the people."
The dispute began last week when Iraq’s Accountability and Justice Commission said it would disqualify more than a dozen candidates and political parties. The eventual list sent to electoral officials had about 500 names, out of 6,500 candidates. Hundreds more will be disqualified Monday, said Falah Shanshal, a Shiite lawmaker whose committee oversees the commission’s work.
"The commission’s work was very professional," he said. "All the documents were carefully checked. They did a great job."
Critics, though, have questioned the very legality of the Accountability and Justice Commission. It inherited the responsibilities of the contentious and now-disbanded de-Baathification committee, but Parliament has yet to approve its members, leaving the previous staff, including its director, Ali Faisal al-Lami, as powerful caretakers.
Hardly anyone seems to believe that the commission acted on its own. That lack of transparency has given rise to a raft of conspiracy theories in Baghdad that has already frayed electoral alliances, in particular Mr. Mutlaq’s coalition with Mr. Allawi. More troubling, it has hampered efforts to reach a compromise, politicians and diplomats say, because no one seems to know who is driving the campaign.
"That’s one of the main problems," said Dr. Othman, the Kurdish lawmaker. "These decisions are being made behind closed doors."
Electoral officials say the candidates will have three days, beginning Monday, to appeal the decision before a seven-judge panel approved by Parliament. Some Iraqi officials, along with United States and United Nations diplomats, hope those appeals can secure a last-minute compromise, not unheard of in a political system accustomed to brinkmanship.
But in Baghdad’s Sunni neighborhoods, and predominantly Sunni provinces to the north and west of the capital, where anti-Baathism is often seen as coded language for a campaign to disenfranchise Sunnis, many viewed the disqualifications as an indictment of Iraq’s fledgling institutions and their attempt to portray themselves as representative.
The dispute has highlighted an issue that remains unresolved in Iraq: to what degree will members of the banned Baath Party be reincorporated in public life.
"If these decisions hold, it will prove that democracy, which was built on the foundation of the occupation, doesn’t exist in Iraq," Hassan Hadi, a professor, said after prayers in Falluja, west of Baghdad. "It will affect the entire future of the country."
Near the venerated Abu Hanifa Mosque in the Baghdad neighborhood of Adhamiya, where leaflets in 2005 promising to "wash the streets" with the blood of those who dared vote have given way to advertisements for satellite dishes, a religious instructor denounced the campaign as simple sectarian politics.
"The defense minister?" asked Ammar Adnan. "How can they bar the head of one of the most important ministries? It’s a political game. It’s not an issue of law."
The question of legitimacy had bedeviled Iraqi institutions since the very first days of the American-led occupation, calling into question the credibility of the security forces, the Constitution, and the de facto sectarian and ethnic system it enshrined. In the 2005 election, many Sunnis boycotted — out of fear or protest — and many have blamed their disenfranchisement for the onset of devastating sectarian carnage in 2006 and 2007.
With the 2009 provincial ballot in January, though, most factions had at least nominally subscribed to the elections as a tool for peaceful contest. In Sunni regions, most currents — religious, tribal and neo-Baathist — were represented, and Mr. Mutlaq fared well in appealing to the still-substantial support for Mr. Hussein’s Baath Party there.
United States officials, in fact, were worried less about low Sunni turnout in March and more that the Sunni vote might be too splintered among various electoral lists to guarantee an effective say in negotiations over the next prime minister. Now, diplomats worry that disenchantment and even a boycott could undermine what they viewed as one of the most remarkable accomplishments over the past seven years.
"Dangerous," one Western official, speaking on the condition of customary anonymity, said in describing the ban. "This won’t be good for the electoral process."
Weary and dejected, Mr. Mutlaq agreed.
"It’s going to be very hard to have a real democratic process," he said.
"If Mutlaq and big political parties can’t protect themselves, how can an Iraqi citizen?"
Nada Bakri and Omar al-Jawoshy contributed reporting from Baghdad, and an Iraqi employee of The New York Times from Falluja.
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:: Article nr. 62245 sent on 17-jan-2010 07:24 ECT
www.uruknet.info?p=62245
Link: www.nytimes.com/2010/01/16/world/middleeast/16iraq.html?pagewanted=print
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