Sunnis Complain They Were Deprived of Chance to Vote

Borzou Daragahi
Newhouse News Service
1 February 2005.

Despite gunfire and explosions nearby, Maisem Khalil Yacoub and her husband, Sabah al-Tayee, locked their two children safely at home Sunday and ventured out to vote. But after three hours of walking fruitlessly from one closed election center to another at one point coming within 300 feet of gunfire the two returned home dejected. "There has been injustice," said Yacoub, a 35-year-old cemetery employee and resident of the Adhamiya neighborhood, a Sunni Arab section of Baghdad. "This is a very obvious and unacceptable marginalization of the Sunnis' role in the new government."

As the results of Iraq's first democratic election in decades are tallied, Sunni candidates and voters are decrying irregularities that they say drove down the proportion of Sunni Arab votes and in some cases prevented those eager to participate from casting ballots. Shiites and Kurds went to the polls in droves. Most analysts and observers believe that Sunnis, favored under the rule of Saddam Hussein and now swelling the ranks of the insurgency, voted in far smaller numbers because of security worries and antipathy toward the election process. Still, anecdotal evidence suggests Sunnis especially those living in mixed cities and neighborhoods turned out in higher numbers than expected, and officials from several Sunni political parties said many of their followers wanted to vote but were prevented by a lack of polling places, ballots and security.

"Where they could vote, they did vote," said Sharif Ali bin Hussein, head of the Constitutional Monarchy Movement, which claims support among Sunni Arabs. "Where they couldn't vote because they didn't give them election centers or they were too far or ... where they didn't give them security they didn't vote."

Iraq's Independent Electoral Commission acknowledged the problems. "The elections took place under difficult conditions, and this undoubtedly deprived a number of citizens in a number of areas from voting," Hussein al-Hindawi, who heads the commission, told Reuters on Tuesday. The commission also issued a statement urging those with complaints to submit accounts by Thursday. The Iraqi Election Information Network, an independent group that claims to have deployed approximately 10,000 election monitors throughout the country, is scheduled to hold a press conference Wednesday.

Many Iraqi and U.S. officials, as well as international observers, expected Sunnis to heed the boycott calls of their clerics. Insurgents have for months targeted election officials and candidates in Sunni stretches of the country in an attempt to derail the vote. Few voting centers opened in cities like Ramadi and Fallujah, and few voters showed up in cities like Samarra or Tikrit, Saddam Hussein's hometown. But Sunni Arab politicians said they had anticipated a last-minute surge in participation from their constituents. Large numbers of voters who planned to heed the boycott calls had second thoughts when they realized that provincial councils in ethnically mixed Mosul and Kirkuk were also at stake, that Shiites were going to vote in droves, and that insurgent efforts to derail the vote would come to naught, the politicians said. "Just in the last two weeks it began to dawn on them what was going to happen," said bin Hussein. "In the last few days we were surprised to hear some prayer leaders asking Sunnis to vote."

Mishan Jabouri, leader of the Sunni-heavy Homeland Party, said he had pleaded with officials of the U.S. embassy and the electoral commission to prepare for voters turning up in Sunni strongholds where he expected a surge in voter enthusiasm. "I said, 'Please try to open an election center in Ramadi. Please, there are not enough ballots in Hawija, not enough in Beiji, not enough in Mosul.'" In one complaint filed by an official of the Homeland Party in Hawija, a violent Sunni Arab stronghold southwest of Kirkuk, voters reported that ballots ran out at 11:30 a.m. and extra ballots didn't arrive until 3:30 p.m., two hours before the close of voting. Party officials say 8,000 too few ballots were delivered. "The election commission did not distribute ballots according to needs of each center, especially in Arab areas," wrote Mustafa Ahmed al-Tamawi, a party official in Kirkuk.

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Citation: Borzou Daragahi, "Sunnis Complain They Were Deprived of Chance to Vote," Newhouse News Service, 1 February 2005.