BAGHDAD, 31 December 2005 — Leaders of Iraq’s Sunni and secular communities gave a cautious welcome yesterday to a plan to bring foreign experts to Baghdad to review the results of this month’s election, which they say was fraudulent.
They said they would cooperate with the experts and still hoped to join Shiites and Kurds in a grand coalition government capable of healing Iraq’s sectarian wounds and providing its people with the basic services they so badly lack.
The closure of a major oil refinery in the northern town of Baiji due to fears of insurgent attacks heaped further misery on Iraqis, prompting longer-than-usual queues for fuel in the capital and fears that supplies would run out.
“If the refinery stays shut, the queues at fuel stations will get longer and I imagine I can see I’ll have to wait more than three hours for petrol,” said Sadiq Shamikh, 28, as he lined up to fill the tank of his taxi in Baghdad.
In a bid to placate their anger, the Iraqi Electoral Commission (IECI) has invited a panel of international experts to Baghdad to review the disputed results.
The team comprises two Arab League representatives, a Canadian politician and a European academic. Although there seems little they can do to dramatically change the outcome of the vote, their presence could help bring disgruntled Sunnis on board.
“This is intended to please some political factions who have asked for this,” IECI chief Hussein Hindawi said.
“Their evaluation will probably solve this political crisis.” Other electoral officials said the initiative was a face-saving exercise that would allow some Sunnis and secularists to back down from their demands for a rerun of the vote without alienating their own supporters.
Responding to the initiative, the Iraqi Islamic Party, part of the main Sunni bloc, gave a cautious welcome.
“The arrival of this committee shows the international community has responded to our demands,” said party official Iyad Al-Samarraie. “(But) if we see it is willing only to check technical irregularities, we’ll have to think about what to do.”
Abdul Aziz Al-Hakim, head of one of the two main parties within the coalition, addressed an audience in Kurdistan and outlined his vision of a federal Iraq in which the Shiites, long oppressed under Saddam Hussein, have significant autonomy.
“Just as federalism was the right choice in the Kurdish areas of Iraq, so it is in the middle, in the south, in Baghdad and all other Iraqi cities,” Hakim said.
Those federal issues, enshrined in a constitution opposed by Sunnis, will top the agenda for Sunnis hoping to amend the charter once the new parliament convenes; many of them fear Kurds and Shiites will deprive their community of oil revenues.
The Shiites and Kurds have been holding bilateral talks in the largely peaceful north of Iraq this week while the violence has continued further south. At least five people were killed and 23 wounded when two mortar shells landed in central Baghdad yesterday.
