Two weeks before Iraq is scheduled to hold its first election since the fall of Saddam Hussein, violence has disrupted virtually every step of the electoral process in some of the nation’s most populous areas, raising serious questions about the election’s credibility both within Iraq and in the international community.
A United Nations report last February concluded that free and fair elections were important for the future of a democratic Iraq but would not be possible without improved security. Nonetheless, U.S. officials and Iraqi interim government officials insist that the balloting go ahead as scheduled Jan. 30 despite the roiling insurgency and doubts about whether Sunni Muslims will participate.
Interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi and top U.S. military commanders have conceded in the past two weeks that parts of the country are likely to be too dangerous to allow voting. Those statements are among many signs of revised expectations in the face of Iraq’s intensifying violence and ethnic or sectarian fragmentation.
`There may be other merits’
“They will not be free, fair and credible elections by any standard, but there may be other merits,” said Hrair Balian, former head of democracy efforts at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which the U.S. praised for bringing credibility to elections worldwide.
American, British and Iraqi officials now say that more important than the purity of the results is the progress of the democratic process in a nation that less than two years ago was a totalitarian state.
“I would not say it is a perfect election, obviously not,” a Western official said Saturday in Baghdad. “But by relevant standards, concerning freedom to compete, freedom to sign up and run, freedom to get your message across without the government saying you cannot or arresting candidates . . . this is going to be a free and fair election.”
Iraqi electoral officials go even further.
“We hope the process will become a model for other countries holding elections,” said Mustafa Safwat Rashid, a member of the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq.
The balloting will produce a 275-member transitional national assembly to form a new government and write a constitution. Iraqis are scheduled to vote on the document in October, and the election of a permanent, constitutional government is to follow.
Some U.S. officials said privately that a decision was made more than a month ago to proceed with the vote on schedule under the belief that a delay could do more harm than good.
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Kurds and Iraq’s Shiite majority, repressed by the Sunni minority that held power until Hussein’s ouster, have been pushing for elections for more than a year so they can take over from the interim government established last June by the U.S.-led occupation authority.
Further delaying those aspirations, despite the fact that large Sunni regions might not be safe enough to allow a credible election, risks deepening anti-American sentiment among moderate Shiites.
Pulling in the opposite direction is the possibility that Sunnis might refuse to recognize a new government built without their participation, generating more support for the insurgency.
But the political nature of the decision to press ahead, along with the UN warning last February that an election under the wrong conditions might make things worse, has been obscured as officials herald the vote and what they call the coming of democracy and peace.
“I think elections will be such an incredibly hopeful experience for the Iraqi people,” President Bush said in the Oval Office on Jan. 7, his most recent extended remarks about the process. He also said, “I believe when democracies take hold, it leads to peace.”
But officials from Washington to Baghdad have begun to temper those messages in an effort to lower expectations.
An administration official, one of two who spoke to reporters Wednesday in Washington on condition of anonymity, emphasized that the elections will be just “part of a long transitional political process.”
Just holding elections in Iraq is “in itself an enormous achievement,” the official said.
A senior British official who briefed reporters last week in Baghdad warned against getting “obsessed with what constitutes success.”
“We’re anxious not to get hung up on the fact that if only X percent of the Sunni population votes that means you can’t call this a legitimate election,” said the official, who also spoke on condition of anonymity.
The Feb. 23 report from UN experts, led by former special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, concluded that an improvement in security was a precondition, but in the months since, insurgent attacks have risen sharply and are expected to increase further.
In the past few weeks, Iraqi election officials have been publicly executed, suicide bombers have targeted leading candidates and some voter registration offices have been shuttered because of threats. Public campaigning has been difficult, if not impossible, in some of Iraq’s most populous regions.
A Jan. 5 Pentagon analysis found election workers were able to function in only 66 percent of the country. Iraqi election officials now say they are operating nationwide, albeit quietly–or secretly–in some of the most dangerous areas.
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, who has came under criticism since saying in September that a credible election would not be possible amid such insecurity, has avoided the security question in recent weeks. Instead, he has stressed that UN advisers are helping Iraqis meet the technical needs addressed in the February report.
Another sign of revised expectations is that American and British officials are trying to focus attention on what it will take to keep the expected Shiite ballot victories from deepening Sunni alienation.
The next stage
The officials say leading Sunnis will have to be included in the government even if they are not elected, in Cabinet posts or on constitutional committees. They also emphasize what they hope is the pragmatism of moderate Shiite leaders, saying those leaders will realize the necessity of reaching out to Sunnis after the results are made public in mid-February.
“The debate has started to move to the next stage,” said the British official. “There has been a lot of discussion about the makeup of that government, with most of the sensible guys saying, `Regardless of the election results where Shiites have won the majority, we want to include [Sunnis] in a broader representative government.'”
Still, prominent Sunnis have lobbied for weeks to stall the balloting. Many urge a boycott.
When the UN report was released nearly a year ago, U.S. policymakers welcomed it. But in Iraq, they were confronting far different political considerations. They wanted to persuade Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq’s most influential Shiite leader, to withdraw his demand for quick elections and go along with plans to pass authority to the interim government in June. He ultimately agreed.
Rashid, the electoral commission member, said last week that he had not read Brahimi’s report.
“Why do we need to read the report? We have a person on the board representing the United Nations,” he said. “They are there to provide technical support to the IECI to ensure that the elections abide by international standards.”