The Dallas Morning News

LONDON – Ballots aren’t the only way to achieve the desired results in an election, and Iraqis are finding that many other ingredients – including blood, bullets and bombs – may well determine the final mix of Shiites, Sunnis and ethnic Kurds in the new leadership.

Each group, representing the deep religious and ethnic divide running through the country, holds a huge stake in the outcome of Sunday’s national, provincial and local elections. And each has demonstrated a willingness to use bloodshed to achieve the desired power balance if, as expected, ballots fail to do the job.

The question waiting to be answered is whether Sunday’s election will move Iraqis toward resolving their differences through the peaceful give-and-take of politics, or whether disappointment with the results will become a catalyst for civil war.

Iraqis as well as foreign analysts offer a pessimistic short-term outlook, citing an expected boycott by the Arab Sunni minority that will almost certainly lead to a skewed result. The Sunnis are providing the bulk of the insurgents trying to destroy polling places and attack anyone associated with the election.

The failure of Arab Sunnis, who compose 27 percent of the population, to field their own slates of candidates means they are likely to be severely underrepresented in the new, 275-seat Transitional National Assembly.

A December poll by the International Republican Institute found an overwhelming reluctance to vote among Iraqis in the primarily Sunni central midsection of the country. By contrast, in the Shiite-dominated south and Kurdish north, more than 80 percent of respondents said they “strongly intend” to vote.

If a new government takes power without proportionate Sunni representation, deep-seated ethnic and religious tensions are likely to boil over, Iraqis and foreign analysts say.

“I think we’re looking, if not at civil war, then civil unrest for quite a while,” said Rime Allaf, an Arab studies specialist at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London.

Animosity still runs high among the Arab Sunnis, who dominated Iraq under the regime of ousted dictator Saddam Hussein, and among the Shiites and Kurds who were tortured, oppressed and denied political power during his rule.

The Sunni insurgents’ ranks are supplemented by foreign fighters, including many linked to al-Qaida, who envision Iraq as the final battleground in a centuries-long religious dispute between Shiites and Sunnis.

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, one leader of the foreign fighters, issued a statement this week declaring war on the “evil principle of democracy” and predicted that the election would be stolen by the “infidel” Shiites.

“Democracy to them is the rule of the people as opposed to the rule of God,” said Azzam Tamimi, director of the Institute of Islamic Political Thought in Britain.

“Democracy to them means you make your own laws” and that human law cannot replace Sharia, or Islamic law, Tamimi said. “But democracy isn’t about making laws. It is about the people choosing a government and making it accountable. … Democracy is 100 percent compatible with Islam.”

For Iraqi Shiites, who make up 60 percent of the population, the election marks a significant compromise because it is tainted by the U.S.-led military occupation of their country, and the framework for the vote was largely devised by Washington.

Nevertheless, Shiites are embracing the process because it offers them the best hope for taking the power that, they feel, is their long-overdue right.

Only the vote count will tell, however, whether they prefer the more secular leadership style of the Shiite interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, or the more sectarian policies advocated by other leading candidates and parties. Recent polls suggest that most voters prefer a sectarian mixture that would allow Muslim clerics to influence – but not control outright – the direction of government.

Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the largest Shiite party, the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, has been emphatic that the new government will quickly set a timetable for a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq.

His cooperation, as spiritual leader of the 15,000-strong Badr Brigades militia, has been crucial in averting outright civil war as well as a broader confrontation between U.S. and Shiite forces.

Not only has he withheld his forces from direct combat with Sunni insurgents in spite of repeated bombings at Shiite mosques, al-Hakim also has refrained from deploying them against militiamen loyal to a rival Shiite cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr. al-Sadr’s fighters clashed with U.S. troops around Baghdad and in the Shiite holy cities of Al Kut and Karbala last spring and summer before agreeing to lay down their weapons and join the political process.

“I think the Shiites will win because we are the majority,” said Haytham Asahlani, a Shiite cleric from Basra who is visiting London. “But we want all other groups to be satisfied. We will write new laws to make sure everybody is represented in the government.”

Allaf said such power-sharing pledges, which have been echoed by other prominent Shiites as well as U.S. officials, mean that Iraqis might have to sacrifice some of the basic elements of democracy – that the people elect their representatives – for the sake of keeping Sunnis and Kurds happy.

“That, of course, defeats the whole purpose of holding free and fair elections,” she said.

(EDITORS: STORY CAN END HERE)

Ethnic Kurds, who make up about 20 percent of the population, identify with the Shiite sense of outrage over the oppression they suffered for decades under Saddam.

They see the elections as the quickest route to achieving their goal of Kurdish self-rule in northern Iraq. Part of their territorial claims include the oil-rich area around Kirkuk, which produces roughly 50 percent of Iraq’s petroleum.

This claim, as well as some demands for autonomy from the central government in Baghdad, has placed the Kurds at odds with Shiites.

At the same time, most Kurds are Sunni and tend to align themselves politically with Iraq’s Arab Sunnis. The Kurds maintain their own police and military forces estimated to number around 80,000 men, who conceivably could be called into action if the new legislature fails to meet the Kurds’ minimum demands.

Distrust among the three communities is high, and even in the best of times before the Baathist dictatorship, they have never reached a power-sharing formula that satisfied all.

“We fought Saddam Hussein by ourselves for 30 years,” said Mohammad Sasarkaw, 33, an unemployed Kurdish electrician from Halabja. He said his father, sister and uncle died in a poison-gas attack on Halabja in March 1988, and Sasarkaw spent 40 days in a hospital after the gas made him temporarily blind.

“Our people suffered while the Sunnis did nothing and the Shiites did only a little” to fight the dictatorship, he added. “We were the ones who fought for democracy. If we can’t have our own country, at least we should have the right to govern ourselves.”

—

(c) 2005, The Dallas Morning News.

Visit The Dallas Morning News on the World Wide Web at http://www.dallasnews.com/

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.

AP-NY-01-28-05 1930EST

Copy the Story Link