By Edward Wong
The New York Times, 16 December 2005
ALTUN KOPRI, Iraq, Dec. 15 - As lines of voters snaked out of two polling places along the main road, and as celebratory gunfire resounded through the neighborhood, a group of children chanting Kurdish songs, waving Kurdish flags and yelling Kurdish greetings barreled through the middle of this village on Thursday.
By all appearances here, the elections for national parliamentary seats might as well have been about Kurdistan and Kurdish dreams. Iraq, or the idea of Iraq, seemed as distant as the moon.
"I will vote for 730," Fakhri Muhammad, 32, said as he stood in line outside the village's primary school, referring to the ballot number of the main Kurdish coalition. "The list is Kurdish, and it represents the Kurdish people."
So went the refrain through much of the north, with Kurdish voters shying away from Arab candidates and siding with Kurdish groups, particularly the Kurdistan Alliance, the coalition of the two main Kurdish parties.
It was as stark an illustration as any of how much the vote across Iraq was split along ethnic and sectarian lines. For many Kurds a vote for the alliance was first and foremost an effort to secure autonomy for the mountainous Kurdish homeland in the north.
Political fervor was especially rampant here in dry, windswept Tamim Province, whose capital is the oil city of Kirkuk, 15 miles southeast of Altun Kopri. Under Saddam Hussein's rule, the government deported Kurds and Turkmens and moved in Arabs to increase its control of the region's oil fields. Kurdish leaders have made no secret of their desire to incorporate Kirkuk and other parts of the province into Kurdistan.
"This entire area is Kurdistan; Kirkuk should go to Kurdistan," Hussein Sadr, 74, said as he shuffled out of a high school in Kirkuk, his index finger stained purple to prevent repeat voting, his eyes peering from behind thick glasses at the crowds of Kurds all around.
Minibuses filled with voters and adorned with Kurdish flags sat nearby. It was unclear who had bused in the voters, but the scene seemed certain to confirm the Arabs' and Turkmens' conspiracy theories - that the Kurdish parties were transporting voters from other provinces to increase their support here.
In Altun Kopri, a mixed Kurdish-Turkmen village whose name means Golden Bridge in the Turkmen language, electoral officials at two schools said that by 10:30 a.m. they had turned away 400 people whose names were not on the voter rolls.
Some may have gone to the wrong school, but others may have been trying to vote illegally, the officials said. Ferman Abdullah, the official in charge of voting at one school, said 3,500 people were registered to vote here and 200 had been turned away, most of them Kurds.
"That's the only problem we have right now," he said. In the weeks leading up to the elections, this province came under more scrutiny than any other because the Iraqi electoral commission had uncovered possible voter fraud.
At the end of August, in the final two days of registration, 81,000 new names appeared on the province's registration lists, an increase far above the national average. Election officials announced this week that many of the applications looked suspicious. They decided that any of the 81,000 showing up on Thursday would have to present extra identification.
The surge came from six registration centers, five of them in Kurdish areas, including one here in Altun Kopri.
At the village primary school, an election observer representing one of the Kurdish parties complained to a visiting American diplomat that too many Kurds were being turned away. "They say, 'I came from this area and Saddam kicked me out, and I can even show you my piece of land. And now I don't have the right to vote?' " said the observer, Rashad Wali.
A Sunni Arab observer outside the same school, Haithem Hashem, 25, appeared more satisfied. "The process is good, everybody is good and it's going very well," said Mr. Hashem, a supporter of the Iraqi Consensus Front, a coalition of religious Sunni groups.
Nearly two hours after polls officially closed, Farhad Abdullah, the provincial head of the electoral commission, estimated that at least 70 percent of registered voters had turned out.
A few voters stepped across ethnic and religious lines when they cast their ballots, hinting that maybe, just maybe, the prejudices here could be uprooted after all.
"I voted for the Kurdistan Alliance," said Dina Awiya, 22, a Christian student standing in the courtyard of a polling place in Kirkuk. "We have a connection with the Kurds. We've lived with them since we were children. Until now we've been one team."
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Citation: Edward Wong. "A Celebration of Kurds' Hopes for Their Region, Not the Country," The New York Times, 16 December 2005.
Original URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/16/international/middleeast/16kirkuk.html
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