Sunnis Cry “Fraud” in Baghdad

The Iraqi Accord Front is a loose alliance of three Sunni political groups thrown together to fight the recent election. The ballots in Baghdad haven’t even been counted in full, yet the IAF has told the electoral commission it wants a rerun. As Americans learned in 2000 and 2004, it isn’t how one votes that counts, but rather how one counts the votes.

Baghdad province, the most populous in the nation, will send 59 people to the Council of Representative, as the parliament is known, from a total of 275. According to the count from 89% of the ballot boxes, the electoral commission says the Shi’ite-led United Iraqi Alliance won 58% of the vote. The IAF’s 18.6% was a distant second, beating Ayed Allawi’s rather secular Iraqi National list into third at about 14%.

Farid Ayar, one of the commissioners for the province, said the commission had received over 1,000 complaints of “irregularities,” of which about 20 were “very serious.” He told the BBC, “We are studying all of them; we have two or three committees studying them. They are serious and they may change the results, but I don't think the complaints will make a big change in the overall result.” For all anyone knows, he is right.

However, that doesn’t mean the IAF will accept things. Feeling aggrieved, in this situation, is as bad as being aggrieved. Another IAF leader, Hussein al-Falluji explained at a news conference, “We will not accept this. We will go to the streets and call for demonstrations. We might also boycott the new parliament.” Students of the IRA and Sinn Fein in Ulster will recognize the pattern: win an election, boycott the parliament and blow up a few cars, repeat for decades

The elections are over, and the hoped for deus ex machina they were to create is nowhere in sight. The ballot does not drive out the violence right away, and indeed, it can make the bullet appear legitimate. While it is possible that the IAF will get something it can live with out of its protest, it is not the likely result. Instead, the Sunni voters will be told they were cheated, that the election was not legitimate, and the struggle to get them to participate goes back to where it was a year ago. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that there is no “next election” to put it right; Iraq has to live with this result. So, what’s next? Anybody? Anybody? Anybody?

© Copyright 2005 by The Kensington Review, J. Myhre, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent.
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