BAGHDAD, 26 November 2004 — Iraq’s Sunni Muslim political parties yesterday threatened to boycott the Jan. 30 election. “We call for elections to be postponed for six months because the security situation is not suitable,” Mohsen Abdul Hamid, head of the Iraqi Islamic Party, said. “Otherwise we will reconsider our stand. We may withdraw.”
The Iraqi Islamic party was joined in its demand for a postponement of the election by seven other Sunni parties — the Democratic Arab Front; the Al-Jabbar Tribal Council; the Reconciliation and the Liberation Bloc; Al-Wasat; the Iraqi Independent Front; the Iraqi National Movement; and the National Front of Iraq Tribes.
The parties urged the government to reconsider the election law which treats Iraq as a single constituency and “therefore limits the participation of a great percentage of the Iraqi provinces.”
Under the law, all Iraqis throughout the country will vote for the same list of candidates. Seats will be allocated according to the percentage of the vote each party receives, with an estimated 50,000 votes necessary to win a single seat.
The groups also asked the government to allow those imprisoned and all those living abroad to vote. The Independent Electoral Commission already said that Iraqis living abroad would be able to cast ballots in 14 different countries with large Iraqi populations. The Sunni groups called for abolishing the 60-day emergency law imposed Nov. 7 on the eve of the Fallujah assault, saying it limits freedom to campaign.
The Sunni clerical Association of Muslim Scholars, considered the most influential Sunni group in Iraq, has called for a nationwide election boycott to protest the assault on Fallujah.
Iraq’s interim government and the 60 percent Shiite majority that stands to gain most from the election are determined it take place by the Jan. 31 deadline set by a United Nations resolution.
Abdul Hamid said he was still in consultations with other parties to try to form a consensus on delaying the elections, so his party would not be forced to pull out.
Meanwhile, the interim government claimed yesterday that it had found a chemical bomb factory in Fallujah as US-led forces rounded up scores of suspected insurgents in a major sweep through the country’s “triangle of death.”
National security chief Kassem Daoud said a chemical bomb factory was found in Fallujah, while US forces said they discovered a huge cache of weapons in a mosque inside Fallujah. National guardsmen found a “chemical materials laboratory that was used to make explosives and toxic substances,” Daoud told reporters in Baghdad.
In continuing violence, a US State Department official who worked with the Iraqi ministers of education and higher education was murdered in Baghdad by a group linked to Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi. In a statement released late Wednesday, US Secretary of State Colin Powell identified the diplomat as James Mollen, who had volunteered for service in Iraq a year ago.
— Additional input from agencies
