BASRA, Iraq, 21 January 2005 — As Iraq’s election campaign enters its final stages, most candidates are more worried about staying alive than canvassing for votes. Even the few like Shiite politician Mansour Al-Tamimi who have openly joined the electoral race are avoiding debates and rallies at all cost.
Fears of assassination loom so large that most of the 7,500 candidates taking part in the Jan. 30 poll are keeping their names secret, denying voters information normally considered fundamental to the democratic process. In the countdown to Iraq’s first national ballot since a US-led invasion toppled Saddam Hussein, one Western diplomat called it the first “stealth” election campaign in history. The reason is clear. “The death threats are constant,” Tamimi said as his bodyguards kept watch at the fortified US Consulate in the southern port of Basra. “I choose to take the risk (but) I can’t blame others who want to remain anonymous for now.”
Insurgents assassinated a candidate from Prime Minister Iyad Allawi’s party in the city earlier this week, just the latest in a string of killings of politicians and election workers throughout the country. It was another sign that Sunni guerrillas bent on scaring people away from the polls are stepping up attacks on the Shiite south, which has been spared the worst of the violence sweeping Baghdad and the Sunni Arab heartlands.
With campaigning curtailed in most places except for the relatively safe Kurdish areas, experts predict religious, ethnic and tribal loyalties will guide most voters.
Majority Shiites, oppressed under Saddam, a Sunni, will vote for Shiites, ensuring them victory. Kurds, looking to cement their self-rule, will vote for Kurds. Sunnis, if they defy calls for an election boycott, will vote for Sunnis. There are fears, however, that a sectarian election outcome could increase the risk of civil war. With only 10 days to go, the ballot is shaping up as an exercise in confusion for Iraqis more accustomed to Saddam’s rigged one-man races. This time, voters must choose from more than 100 candidate lists, each put forward by a party or coalition, to choose a 275-member transitional national assembly that will appoint a government and approve a constitution.
Campaigning has been reduced mostly to posters plastered almost everywhere. Allawi, a US favorite, also has used television ads and call-in shows. Hardly anyone can describe a party’s platform, let alone its nominees, but many are still enthusiastic about voting.
Trying to put the best face on the anonymity of most candidates, some Iraqi officials point out voters will be picking parties, not individuals. But many Iraqis lament that fear governs their first democratic exercise in decades. The Bush administration has responded by lowering expectations for the poll’s success. With few exceptions other than Iraq’s tiny Communist Party, most candidates have chosen to stay off Baghdad’s streets to avoid exposing themselves to the bombs and bullets of insurgents who brand them collaborators with foreign occupiers. Though his wife has pleaded with him to keep a low profile, Tamimi, 37, a lawyer and city council member listed as an “independent secular technocrat”, is one of the few who have publicly identified themselves as candidates.
Meanwhile, one of Iraq’s top two Shiite Muslim parties urged reluctant Sunnis yesterday to vote in elections and promised the once-dominant minority a role in the new Iraq even if they fail to win many seats. “We call on our Sunni brothers, as we have called on everyone in all parts of Iraq, to actively participate in the elections so as to present a practical response to the terrorists,” the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq said in a statement.
Sunni Arabs, marginalized since the US-led invasion toppled fellow Sunni Saddam Hussein, have threatened to boycott the poll amid bloodshed in the central Sunni heartland. Such a boycott would skew the outcome in favor of long-oppressed Shiites.
SCIRI leader Abdel Aziz Al-Hakim heads a joint Shiite electoral list expected to dominate the new 275-seat assembly.
That list was drawn up under the auspices of Iraq’s leading Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani, who has issued a religious edict urging his followers to cast their ballots. A Sunni boycott, coupled with the strong turnout expected among the 60-percent Shiite majority and among Iraqi Kurds, could undermine what US and Iraqi officials hope will be free elections, and fuel a raging insurgency.
