Defiant Sunni Arabs refuse to join Iraq's poll campaign

Steve Negus and Dhiya Rasan
Financial Times
4 January 2005

Until recently, the walls of Salman Pak were covered with posters distributed by the congregation of a local Sunni mosque - a ballot box, marked with the American flag, borne on the back of a US tank. The posters are now gone, pulled down by Iraqi government troops who entered the town accompanied by real US military vehicles on Saturday on an anti-insurgent sweep. However, the political belief that the posters represent - that parliamentary elections are merely a US ploy to legitimise the continued occupation of Iraq - continues to have a solid grip on this Sunni Arab community.

For the past few months, US and Iraqi officials have worried that insurgent violence would lead to a low turnout among Sunni Arab voters, leaving Iraq's former ruling minority alienated from the country's next government. That violence continues unabated: yesterday, a car bomb went off outside the offices of the Iraqi National Accord of prime minister Iyad Allawi just as the party was set to announce its list of candidates, killing at least four people. Dozens of election officials had resigned the day before in the Sunni-majority towns of Mosul and Bayji, fearing assassination, the Iraqi press reported, while insurgents shelled with mortars two schools near Tikrit that were intended for use as polling stations. Residents of Salman Pak say that no party campaigner or electoral official has dared to visit them, while at least one Shia cleric organising a get-out-the-vote drive in a nearby village was gunned down.

None of about two dozen Salman Pak residents interviewed for this article said they would vote - not out of fear, but because they genuinely believed that voting would benefit the Americans and their Iraqi allies. "The political drift is clear in this town. Everyone supports the resistance, and everyone rejects the elections because they will prolong the occupation," said policeman Sabah Jabbar al-Mindalawi, 56. Many in Salman Pak say that the form of the elections is aconspiracy to ensure that the US-allied Iraqi exile parties that have dominated the country's politics since the invasion will continue to have a lock on power.

Accustomed to the one-party system of Saddam Hussein's day in which each locality had its own representatives, they believe that the new system - in which citizens cast their ballots for nationwide lists of candidates - is rigged in favour of professional politicians rather than local populist leaders. Other Sunnis say that the very idea of a "party" - a word that often carries negative connotations of factionalism and opportunism in Muslim theological writing - is un-Islamic.

Faced with such difficulties, some Iraqi parties who had hoped to reap the Sunni vote have all but given up.

The Iraqi Islamic party, the main Sunni Arab faction in postwar governments, has pulled out of the elections, while the Independent Democrats, a pan-confessional party led by Adnan Pachachi, the Sunni elder statesman, continues to press for the vote to be delayed so security can be improved. Other politicians, however, continue to try for as much of the Sunni vote as they can. Mr Allawi - himself a Shia, but with extensive ties among Sunni tribal leaders and military officers - has formed an alliance with Sunni leaders. Their "Iraqi List" plays to Mr Allawi's reputation for forcefulness and Iraqi yearnings for security, with the slogan promising "Strong Leadership and a Safe Nation".

Meanwhile, Saad al-Janabi, a businessman from a wealthy Sunni tribe whose Baghdad office is frequented by recognisable figures from the Hussein regime, is running a well-funded campaign across the country on a populist line. His party's platfom is clearly geared to Sunni aspirations, and includes setting a date for the withdrawal of US forces, maintaining a strong centralised Iraqi state, and putting US and Iraqi officials on trial for the "errors" committed since the 2003 invasion. For the residents of Salman Pak, however, these measures were not radical enough to merit their votes.

"There is no party or list in the elections that I will support," said a former soldier in his mid-30s who called himself Mohammed Sarhan. "None has a programme supporting the resistance," he said. "I want a government that backs the insurgency."

c. Financial Times

--------------------------------------------
Citation: Steve Negus and Dhiya Rasan, "Defiant Sunni Arabs refuse to join Iraq's poll campaign," Financial Times, 4 January 2005; Original URL: http://news.ft.com/cms/s/85100608-5df6-11d9-ac01-00000e2511c8,ft_acl=,s01=1.html