The road to Iraq's first post-Saddam polls seems rocky and probably explosive, writes Salah Hemeid Iraq's interim government decided this week to postpone a population census designed to determine who will be eligible to vote in the general elections slated for January next year. Through balloting, Iraqis are to choose a 275-member National Assembly that will oversee the drafting of a new constitution and also pick a new care-taker government to replace Iyad Allawi's administration appointed in June by United States and United Nations. The census is essential as the election plan requires registering some 12 million Iraqi voters who will be asked by October 2005 to vote again on the new constitution and later to elect a new government in a another poll. Iraqis will be required to go to the polls three times in the space of a year. But now the government is saying that rations coupons introduced by the deposed Saddam Hussein's regime to supply households with food during the decade of international sanctions could be used instead of the census. Similar arrangements will be made to accommodate returning exiles and members of the three million-strong Iraqi diaspora. With voter registration to begin 1 November, some Iraqi leaders raise doubts over the feasibility of the elections not only in absence of a national consensus about the political process but also about the possibility that non eligible voters will be allowed to participate. For example, Sunnis are accusing Shia groups of encouraging Iraqis of Iranian origin who were expelled by Saddam in the 1970s and 1980s to return to their towns in order to participate in the elections. The Turkoman people of northern Iraq are making similar charges against the Kurdish groups and they accuse the Iraqi Kurds of bringing in Iranian, Syrian and Turkish Kurds to settle in Kirkuk, the disputed oil rich city. Officials of a UN electoral commission that would supervise the elections say the registration would not be a problem and underline deteriorating security as the main challenge. UN staff associations, representing the organisation's members, asked UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan to withdraw all the 35 UN international personnel in Iraq because of the risk to their lives. They say it is unsafe for people to go out and about and to organise elections with suicide bombings every day. The UN Security Council Resolution 1546, passed in June, says the UN should play a key role in helping the Iraqi interim government to hold elections, scheduled for 31 January. The US and Britain, the two major powers behind the Iraqi interim government, say that UN involvement will give the poll credibility. But their efforts to enlist support from other nations to send troops to Iraq to help protect the UN staff overseeing the process have been unsuccessful. On Saturday US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld met senior officers from some 17 nations to discuss the possibility of their armies contributing to such a force and the issue is expected to be raised again at an international conference on Iraq to be held in Egypt next month. So far not a single country has offered to provide troops for such a mission. Therefore, the UN team is protected by US troops, something which, they fear, identifies them with the occupying power, and puts them at greater risk. Yet, despite the grave situation, the government says elections will go on as planned. It says preparations for voter registration and other basic infrastructure arrangements are already underway. On Sunday, the government's electoral committee announced voting regulations under which voters will be asked to choose a political party rather than an individual. Under this system the election will be run on a proportional-representation list system -- each party contesting the election offers a list of candidates to fill the number of seats proportional to the share of the popular vote it wins. A party that earns 25 per cent of the overall vote, for example, would be allocated 69 seats in the 275-member body, to be filled by the first 69 candidates on its electoral list. They will also be invited to elect provincial assemblies on the same basis, and in the case of the autonomous Kurdish zone, to elect the members of the Iraqi Kurdistan National Assembly. The rules of the game are yet to be established by the electoral commission, and there is no certainty over the identity of the parties that will appear on those lists, and in what combination. Whatever the regulations, the purpose of holding an election now should be to secure the all- important legitimacy of a popular mandate for a new government to stabilise Iraq. By that measure, an election whose credibility is questioned by substantial sections of the Iraqi population and the international community could do more harm than good. And the prospect of the January deadline producing a flawed election has led many Iraqis to doubt its outcome. With election day only four months away, some Iraqis see little signs for hope or enthusiasm that elections will pick up. On Monday, The New York Times quoted Sunni Arab leaders as saying that many prospective Sunni voters were so suspicious of the American enterprise in Iraq, and so infuriated by the chaotic security situation in the Sunni-dominated areas, that they were likely to stay away from the polls in large numbers. Sunni participation is crucial to the election. If large numbers of Sunnis do not vote, the election will be regarded as illegitimate and may even feed the insurgency that has gripped much of the country. As for the Shia, the consequences of not holding the election on schedule could add the prospect of massive Shia unrest to the security challenge posed by multiple insurgencies, and leave the government in a legal and political limbo in which the basis of its tenure becomes increasingly open to question. More importantly, even, postponement would be hailed as an important victory by the insurgents, and give them the confidence and incentive to escalate their challenge. So far, the government has been able to remove one major obstacle this week when the Shia militia led by Moqtada Al-Sadr agreed to disarm in Baghdad following a deal reached with its ministers and US officials. Under the agreement the militia started Monday giving its weapons to the Iraqi police in return for US forces halting bombarding their slum area of Sadr city where they have strongholds. If extended to other Shia flashpoints around Iraq, the deal could go some way to stabilise the country ahead of the January elections. Security, or rather lack of it, is one problem but for Allawi's government to ensure genuine representation in polls dubbed as Iraq's first democratic election it first needs to give Iraqis hope and faith in a political process that would not be dominated by political factions who have monopolised power in post-Saddam Iraq. Otherwise the elections would sure be a prescription for a civil war and even disintegration of the country.
