Kurdish, Sunni threats put Iraqi elections in peril

Baghdad - Threats from Kurdish and Sunni Arab politicians to withdraw support for the country's new election law have once again thrown into question whether a vote will take place on time. After weeks of tense debate on voting in the disputed northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk, lawmakers last week reached an 11th-hour compromise to allow voting to take place on January 18, ahead of the constitutionally mandated deadline of the end of January.

But Iraqi Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi, a Sunni Muslim, on Tuesday again threatened to veto the law if more seats are not reserved for expatriate Iraqis, most of whom are believed to be Sunnis.

The Kurdish Regional Government on Tuesday also said it would boycott the polls if the number of seats from its two provinces was not increased.

"The presidency of the Kurdish Regional Government has decided to boycott the coming parliamentary elections because of the mechanism for distributing the number of seats in the parliament across the country's provinces," Kamal Kirkuki, speaker of the parliament for the semi-autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq, told reporters Tuesday.

"It is impossible to accept a seat-allocation mechanism based on data from (food) ration cards," he said.

Absent a census, which has been stalled out of fears it would bring to a head an old dispute over areas claimed by Kurdish and Arab Iraqis, population data was taken from food-ration cards all Iraqis hold under a system started by former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein.

Kurdish politicians have objected to an overall reduction in the number of seats at stake from the two provinces that make up the semi-autonomous region based on that data.

The Kurdish threats to boycott the polls came as al-Hashemi gave parliament until Tuesday night to raise the number of seats reserved for refugees and expatriate Iraqis.

He has asked that 15 per cent, not 5 per cent, of seats in parliament be reserved as compensatory seats to insure a higher representation for refugees.

If parliament did not respond to his requests by Tuesday night, al-Hashemi said, he would oppose the law and try to prevent its passage.

"There are several gaps in the elections law. To avoid opening many political files, I focused only on the main issue that concerns Iraqis inside and outside Iraq, (the one) ... concerned with the displaced and refugees outside Iraq," he said in a statement on the Iraqi presidency's website.

Under the Iraqi constitution, there should be a member of parliament for every 100,000 Iraqi citizens. With at least 4 million Iraqi refugees, al-Hashemi argued, parliament should raise the number of seats allocated for them.

Iraqi politicians greeted parliament's last-minute passage of an elections law on November 8 with relief, after debate over the sensitive issue of voting in the disputed city of Kirkuk and surrounding al-Tamim province threatened a political and constitutional crisis.

US President Barack Obama likewise praised the compromise. The US military has said it would begin decreasing the number of its troops in Iraq roughly two months after the polls, provided the country appeared stable.

Source: Earth Times.
Link: http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/295134,kurdish-sunni-threats-put-iraqi-elections-in-peril.html.