Iraqis Grapple with Confusing Election Choices

Lin Noueihed
Reuters
30 December 2004

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Mohammed Slaibi was planning to vote in Iraq's first post-Saddam Hussein election until attackers burned down the local election office. Now the driver thinks it is too dangerous even to register for the Jan. 30 poll. Anyway, he wouldn't know who to vote for or how to do it. "To be honest I am scared, because there is nothing to guarantee you will make it home from voting alive," he said. "Anyway, I don't know who any of the people running are. You have to know who you are voting for or what is the point?"

With only a month to go until what Iraq's interim government says will be the country's first free election, even Iraqis who are willing to brave the threat of bombs and bullets to cast a ballot have little idea what that really means. A poll commissioned by the International Republican Institute, a U.S.-funded body that promotes democracy, found that while over two-thirds of Iraqis strongly intend to vote, some 41 percent think they will be electing a new president. Less than a third of those polled between Nov. 24 and Dec. 5 understood that they would be electing a 275-seat National Assembly and only a third knew its task would be to draft a constitution that would pave the way to a permanent government.

One college-educated Iraqi said he was determined to vote and would take his family's ballots to the box on election day, not realizing votes must only be cast in person and in secret. Another Iraqi thought the election was going to take place over two weeks, saying he would wait a few days before casting his ballot to see which polling stations were safe from attack. "Iraqis have no previous electoral awareness as Iraq only had cosmetic elections under Saddam," said Farid Ayar, spokesman for Iraq's Electoral Commission, which is organizing the poll. "The Commission has only existed for six months and it is difficult, in that time, to make people fully aware. But we are doing a lot; Iraqis are now aware that there will be elections."


SHI'ITE CAMPAIGN

Slick television and newspaper advertisements encourage Iraqis not to miss their historic opportunity to vote. On election day, voters will get one large, folded ballot sheet with a mind-boggling choice of 111 candidate lists, each identified by its title, number and logo. The names of the candidates will not be included, to the likely confusion of people who generally identify with senior political or religious figures heading or backing the slates.

But the biggest challenge is to ensure that Iraqis of all ethnicities and religious groups show up on election day. "How can you elect people if you know nothing about their background, if they are noble people from good families who have served Iraq?" said Wissam Khaled, a Sunni doorman in Baghdad. "The only ones that we hear about are those that spent their whole lives in Iran not Iraq. On election day, I bet people are just going to mark their sheet at random. No one knows."

On the streets of Baghdad, there is little evidence that almost 7,500 candidates will be competing in the poll. The only campaign posters to be seen carry the image of Iraq's most revered Shi'ite Muslim cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who has given his blessing to the United Iraqi Alliance, a joint Shi'ite list likely to dominate the poll. Sistani has issued an edict demanding Iraqis vote. Shi'ites, oppressed for decades, are keen to take part in a poll likely to cement their increased power since last year's U.S.-led war.

Kurds, who elected an assembly in their northern enclave in 1992, have more experience with democracy than most Iraqis. Most of them are expected to vote for a coalition that brings together Iraq's top two Kurdish parties, the PUK and KDP. But many Sunnis, dominant before the war but marginalized since the overthrow of Saddam, say they have little to vote for.

Iraq's main Sunni party pulled out of the running, saying persistent bloodshed in the Sunni north and west would deter voters who were ill-prepared for the landmark poll anyway. "If you visit Mosul it would never occur to you that this city will see its first free election next month," said a local journalist in the mainly Sunni Arab northern city, who declined to give his name. "We have no prominent candidates who are known in our community. Anyway people are too scared to vote."

Citation: Lin Noueihed, "Iraqis Grapple with Confusing Election Choices," Reuters, 30 December 2004.