BAGHDAD, 23 November 2004 — Some Arab delegations at a meeting in Sharm El-Sheikh, with counterparts from Iraq’s neighbors and the United States among others, yesterday said it may be better to delay the polls in Iraq to ensure full participation.
However, Iraq’s interim government voiced confidence that the elections scheduled for Jan. 30 will go ahead despite violence and intimidation in some areas and a threat of a boycott by the once dominant Sunni minority.
“The government is determined that the security arrangements allow for elections to take place across the whole country, and that all Iraqi citizens can vote,” Prime Minister Iyad Allawi said in a statement after officials set the date on Sunday.
In Sharm El-Sheikh, Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari stressed the end-January deadline for voting set by a UN Security Council resolution earlier this year. “Our very credibility is really on the line,” Zebari told CNN. “We have to meet this deadline.”
But Egypt, Jordan and the Arab League all raised the possibility of delaying the elections beyond January, if the process is not inclusive.
Foreign Minister Ahmed Abul Gheit of Egypt, the conference host, said the debate would indicate “whether it is really possible to hold these elections at the time fixed or whether the matter requires additional thought”. One senior Iraqi official conceded delay was a possibility. And there was no sign of an end to bloodshed.
A leading Sunni cleric from a movement which has called for a boycott of the vote was gunned down in a drive-by shooting in the northern city of Mosul yesterday.
Tension has been running high in Iraq’s third city since insurgents routed the new, US-backed police force this month while American troops were concentrating on an offensive in the rebel city of Fallujah, west of Baghdad.
During the 20-nation conference at the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm El-Sheikh, Iraq’s representative to the United Nations conceded violence could mean the vote being postponed.
Also, Zebari said he would seek border agreements with Iran and Turkey next week, similar to those already in place with Syria, to keep foreign militants from entering Iraq in the run-up to the elections.
The Iraqi government sees the two-day meeting of foreign ministers, at which US Secretary of State Colin Powell will face opponents of the Iraq war like France and Syria, as giving a welcome endorsement of efforts to install democracy.
llawi said yesterday that the Fallujah offensive by more than 10,000 US troops with Iraqi allies had broken the rebellion there and made it hard for guerrilla leaders like Jordanian Al-Qaeda ally Abu Mussab Al-Zarqawi to regroup.
“What we did in Fallujah, we broke the back of the hard core insurgents and terrorists and I think it will be very hard for them to set up the same infrastructure elsewhere,” he told CNN.
Clearly anxious to soothe passions among moderate Sunnis, however, Allawi, a secular Shiite, has been meeting Sunni leaders to persuade them of the benefits of voting, including talks yesterday with tribal leaders from restive Sunni cities, including Fallujah, Ramadi and Mosul.
In Mosul, the Muslim Clerics Association said Sheikh Feydhi Mohammed Al-Feydhi, brother of the Sunni group’s official spokesman, was shot by masked gunmen in a car.
The association has called for a boycott of the election and says its members have been targeted by US and Iraqi security forces and also by insurgents trying to fuel sectarian unrest.
