By Richard A. Oppel, Jr.
The New York Times, 27 December 2005
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 26 - An analysis of preliminary voting results released Monday from the Dec. 15 parliamentary election suggests that in contrast to the remarkable surge in Sunni Arab participation in the political process, the Sunnis still have comparatively little representation in the Iraqi security forces.
The indication is troubling because Sunni Arabs, who are about 20 percent of Iraq's population, came out in greater numbers largely as a response to the recent domination of the government by Shiites and Kurds. In particular, Sunni Arabs say they fear that the security forces will be used against them.
American military commanders say that it is crucial to build an Iraqi Army representative of Iraq's ethnicity, and that the alternative is to risk the consequences of Shiite and Kurdish forces' trying on their own to pacify insurgent hotbeds dominated by Sunni Arab militants.
It has been suspected that Sunni Arabs are underrepresented in the new military and police. Election officials believe that a special tally from the Dec. 15 vote helps to detail the disparity, mostly because voting in Iraq has almost completely been along ethnic and sectarian divisions.
In the special tally - which the officials said overwhelmingly consisted of most of the ballots cast by security forces, but also included votes from hospital patients and prisoners - about 7 percent of the votes were cast for the three main Sunni Arab parties. Across the whole population, though, officials have estimated, Sunni Arab candidates won about 20 percent of the seats in the new Parliament.
Along the same lines, the tally also suggested that Kurdish pesh merga militiamen seemed to have a heavily disproportionate presence in the security forces.
The figures, which are preliminary, are far from exact and are nothing like a census of the security forces. And it is impossible to know whether Sunni Arab soldiers and police officers turned out to vote to the same high degree as the overall Sunni population.
A spokesman for the American military command that oversees training of the Iraqi forces also said that while he did not know the security forces' ethnic mix, he believed that there were more Sunni troops than the election data suggest.
Yet the results provide some clues to the composition and political sympathies of Iraqi soldiers, a crucial but elusive factor in a country struggling to overcome deep sectarian divisions and defeat the mostly Sunni Arab insurgency. And the estimation seems to be a sign of how complete the reversal of fortune has been for Sunni Arabs, who dominated security forces under Saddam Hussein.
After a respite following the election, more than 70 Iraqis have been killed in the last four days, including more than 20 killed Monday in a string of ambushes and car bombings.
At least six car bombs detonated in Baghdad, killing five Iraqis. In Baquba, north of the capital, five policeman died in an early morning ambush. And a rocket-propelled grenade also killed an American soldier on patrol in the capital.
The voting data released Monday were just one sliver of preliminary results indicating that although Sunni Arabs will play a larger role in the new Parliament than they did in the interim government, where they were almost completely shut out, Shiites will once again dominate Parliament.
The Sunni Arabs have accused the Shiite-dominated government of widespread voting fraud and have demanded a new election. Sunnis, and some secular Shiites, have threatened to boycott the new government. But any chance of a large-scale election rerun has been all but ruled out. Officials from the independent electoral commission said Monday that they saw no reason for new elections - an opinion seconded by the chief United Nations election official here.
"We do think there might have been fraud in a few isolated places, but we don't see this widespread fraud people are talking about," Craig Jenness, head of the United Nations electoral assistance team in Iraq, said in an interview Monday evening.
"It wasn't perfect, but it was pretty credible given the circumstances," he said, adding, "There's nothing we see that would suggest a rerun is warranted."
Though more attention has been focused on the ethnic makeup of the government, the American military is very sensitive to the perception that the Iraqi forces have few Sunni Arabs, especially in the north, where Kurdish officials have made plain their desire to expand their territory into Sunni Arab and Turkmen regions. To many American commanders, a proportionate representation of Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish soldiers is vital to the Iraq's long-term stability and cohesion.
But on that score there still appears to be a way to go, according to the numbers from the special election tally. In that category, 45 percent of votes were cast for the main Kurdish slate of candidates, compared with the combined total of just 7 percent for the three main Sunni Arab political parties. The principal Shiite political alliance received 30 percent of the votes in the category.
The heavily disproportionate votes for the Kurds and the slight showing for the Sunnis primarily reflected their relative numbers in the security forces, election officials here said.
By contrast, while final election results will not be available for another week, Iraqi news reports have estimated that Kurds and Sunni Arabs each received perhaps 20 percent of the overall national vote for seats in Parliament. The main Shiite political alliance is expected to take slightly less than 50 percent of the seats. Those estimates more closely follow Iraq's demographic makeup.
Lt. Col. Fred Wellman, a spokesman for the military command that oversees training of Iraqi forces, said some Iraqi soldiers voted near their homes on Dec. 15 and would not have been included in the special tally, though he said he did not know whether those included a disproportionate number of soldiers from any one ethnic group.
Colonel Wellman said he did not have detailed estimates of the ethnic composition of the Iraqi military, though he said Sunni Arab representation "clearly lags." He also emphasized the efforts being made to recruit Sunni soldiers, including more than 4,000 who have been signed up in the last six months.
"One of the biggest goals of this enterprise is to build an army that reflects the national makeup of Iraq and deploys those units away from their home," he said. "There are great efforts to bring Sunnis into the fold and balance out the army as much as possible."
In addition to the special tally of votes from the military, prisons and hospitals, the Iraqi election commission also released separate figures showing that Iraqis living abroad voted evenly for the main Kurdish and Shiite coalitions, with each receiving 30 percent of the overseas vote. The figures reflected the high number of expatriates who fled Mr. Hussein's rule, whose government and military was dominated by and favored Sunni Arabs.
In the overseas tally, the three main Sunni Arab parties combined received about 7.5 percent of the vote. The slate of candidates backed by former prime minister Ayad Allawi, a secular Shiite and former Baathist, received 12 percent.
Reporting for this article was contributed by Abdul Razzaq al-Saiedi, Mona Mahmoud, Khalid al-Ansary and Omar al-Neami.
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Citation: Richard A. Oppel, Jr. "Iraq Vote Shows Sunnis Are Few in New Military," The New York Times, 27 December 2005.
Original URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/27/international/middleeast/27iraq.html
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