Hi all, I got a morning off today. Didn't really need it, but my team insisted (ok, so there's only two on my team, including me). Anyway, I was told to sleep in, but I was wide awake at 0615, so I read for a bit, then went to the gym. Now I'm reading my e-mail and talking to you all.
I will try and explain the whole election situation, and what is happening now in country. I may make some leaps in logic that don't make sense, but I am trying to simplify a complex topic, and some of the bridges along the road from point a to point b I can't talk about for various reasons.
The media has been making a big deal of the whole election turnout, and how many voted. Let me first explain what the elections are about.
These elections were to establish yet another interim government, this time a quasi-democratically appointed one (more on that later). This government and assembly is going to write the constitution which will determine the form and composition of the future final government of Iraq. The constitution will be ratified in October, and elections using the new constitution will take place in December. I am unsure what kind of veto power anyone will have on drafting the new constitution, if any. If it is going to be by majority vote, then there will be problems, if it is by unanimous vote, then I don't see it getting ratified, unless someone holds a gun to their heads and forces them. There are too many divergent interests, old grudges and outright fear which can paralyze the whole system.
The just past elections took this form (I explained it in my last post, but I will clarify some points I glossed over). There was a roll of lists of candidates, somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 lists. They roughly equate to parties, but not quite, although a majority of them were groupings of like minded individuals. Some were local lists, some were presented by nationwide groups. All of them made it on the ballots. The list names, that is, not the actual candidate names. The candidate names were kept secret until the last minute, to prevent insurgents assassinating candidates. As far as I am aware, the polling sites were supposed to have the candidate names at them, not sure if there was one list per station or one list per site. In addition to the name of the list, each list had a number and a symbol. The number was to prevent confusion, as some lists didn't have names. The symbol was for those people who cannot read. Let me emphasise that point, a large minority of the population cannot read. Of all the lists, only a handful had anything remotely resembling campaigning, and Allawi's list was one of them, because he was already a target.
In the run-up to the election, there was the attack on Fallujah. Fallujah is west of Baghdad, and in the heart of the predominantly Sunni area. The population was predominantly Sunni, most of whom were not insurgents. The attack on Fallujah forced most of them out, and a large minority of them have not returned. While the attack prevented the insurgents from controlling the city, it did not eliminate them, as evidenced by Zarqawi popping up again. They simply spread to other areas. What it did do was create even more instability in the west, which wasn't the best place to begin with. Also, there was no election commission presence in the west, because of the instability, so there was no, I repeat, no education program to tell the people about the election, how it was going to work or anything about it. People vaguely knew there was an election, but not what it was for. The west was also the place where most Sunni insurgents are (except for Baghdad), and the Sunni controlled areas were those places where people were being threatened with death.
The demographic situation in the country is quite complex, so I am going to simplify it. In the north you have the ethnic Kurds, whose ethnic boundaries encompass parts of Turkey, Syria, Iran, Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, as well as Iraq. They have been campaigning for decades for a seperate country (Kurdistan), most countries in the region have savagely oppressed this (the Turks and Iraq in particular), Kurds are generally Sunni Muslims. In the south, you have Shi'a muslims, the same sect as in Iran. You also have two or three of the most sacred Shi'a shrines in the south. In the middle, west of Baghdad, you have Sunni, who held power for the past four decades. They are second in population behind the Shi'a. Their biggest fear is that the Shi'a will come to power and put them to the sword, wipe them out, kill every last one of them, in revenge for the years of oppression. So in the same country, you have a formerly oppressed majority, a formerly oppressive minority, and another minority that wants to secede.
The Shi'a are the key to this whole thing, as they have the greatest voting block. The most respected Shi'a by far is the Grand Ayatollah Sistani, who is a Shi'a cleric. If you take him at face value, he is the best hope for Iraq. He is completely religous, but wants the best for Iraq. He himself is not standing for office, as he feels it is best to not use his religous authority for popular gain, but he is organizing things as best he can for the good of the people. He organzied a coalition list with a broad spectrum of Shi'a, Sunni, religous and secular candidates. And he told his followers it was a sin not to vote.
As for the Sunnis, they resisted the elections (remember their fear). Their former political party (Ba'ath) was outlawed, but the remnants remained. They figured their best hope was to make the elections invalid. From their point of view, they are being occupied by the coalition, and being manipulated to vote in a puppet which will be controlled by the US. In this scenario, they consider the elections invalid. So their main political and religous groups told their people not to vote. After all, how can you have true democracy if a sizable portion of the second largest group is not represented? (I seem to remember a revolution being started over taxation without representation..)
As of yet, the true ratio of people who voted to the population eligible to vote is undetermined. What is being trumpeted right now is the ratio of registered voters who voted. As a distinction, outside of the country, only around 10% of those eligible registered. Inside the country, you are probably talking around 65-70% of eligible voters were registered. Those people not registering was not entirely their choice. In some cases they had no choice, due to political and insurgent interference.
During the elections, a vast majority of the Sunni didn't vote, because they were threatened with death, because they were afraid, because they had been displaced (Fallujah) or because they had been told not to. I have not seen actual ratios of eligible voters voting, but I would be highly suprised if it exceeded 15% for the sum total of Sunni areas. The greatest voting block will have been the Shi'a. This whole situation is roughly analogous to allowing Californians to vote, but having the North East only be able to vote with 15% of their population. Also, because of the way the polls were carried out, people were confronted with a ballot of hundreds of list numbers, but didn't know beforehand who was on the different lists. Kind of like having the Greater Atlanta Party show up on a ballot in Georgia, or the Greater Anglia Party show up on a ballot in the UK, with no prior campaigning. The entire ballot was like that, except for Sistani's list and Allawi's list, both of which had been publicised, (Sistani has a media office and Allawi has control of the government media). That is why I called it a quasi legal government in the beginning couple of paragraphs.
Yes it was a remarkable achievement and required great bravery for people to have actually voted. What annoys me, and the point of writing this whole thing for an hour now, is the media trumpeting it as a great success, and how true democracy has come to Iraq, without telling the whole story.
Sorry for the diatribe.
Myron
