Ten Iraqi political parties including two large Kurdish ones want the Jan. 30 elections postponed because of the security situation. Eight of them, which together represent the country’s Sunni community, have even threatened a boycott. The threat follows a similar call from the Sunni clerical Association of Muslim Scholars, the most influential Sunni group in Iraq, as a protest against the assault on Fallujah.
The parties’ concern is real. The assault on Fallujah has neither destroyed nor even cowed the militants, who are well aware that a legitimately elected government would rob them of any claim to being a “resistance” movement. They will bomb and kill to disrupt the elections to maintain instability — and it will be Iraqis who will be their principal victims.
Nonetheless, it would be a potentially catastrophic mistake to boycott the poll if it is seen as a “Sunni Boycott”. Boycotts can sometimes work, as happened recently in Macedonia in the referendum on stripping Albanians of new constitutional rights: Enough people heeded the boycott call by various political parties to make the ballot constitutionally invalid. The situation in Iraq is very different. There are no legal thresholds. If Sunnis boycott the vote, it will still go ahead. The Americans want it on Jan. 30. So do the Shiites — and they constitute a powerful majority. Nor will it be like the vote in Ukraine which the US and EU have refused to recognize. It will be recognized. All that will happen if there is a boycott is that Sunnis will have marginalized themselves. The Sunni community will have no political voice — a voice it will need to disassociate itself from Saddam Hussein’s vicious treatment of the Shiite community which his upcoming trial is bound to highlight. Worse, it may well be seen as a suspect community, secretly on the side of the militants — thereby lining up itself for an inevitable backlash.
The Sunni community wants to be fully involved in the new Iraq. It wants to join in the elections, and rebuild the country. It must not be prevented from doing so by its leaders. Crucially, it must not allow itself to be used as a scapegoat — which would certainly happen if there were a boycott. There lies the path to victimization. It is bad enough that by opposing the ballot its leadership has inadvertently seemed to ally itself with the militants. That was not their intention; but that is how it will be seen by many Shiites and Kurds. Not taking part in the elections is no solution to the very real dangers associated with them. What Iraq’s Sunni community needs instead is the promise of extra resources to ensure that the militants’ attempts to derail the elections do not succeed. It is not a promise that can be easily fulfilled, but fulfilled it must be.
As for the Sunni parties’ complaints about the proposed use of the list system in the elections, and their demand that prisoners and Iraqis living abroad be allowed to vote, the latter demands are fair and, even at this late date, could be addressed. The same cannot be said of the rejection of the ballot system. It works well elsewhere and is fair.
