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Iraq Charter Ratified, Sunnis Cry Foul
BAGHDAD, October25 , 2005 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) - Iraqis have ratified their new constitution, the results of a referendum showed on Tuesday, October25 , amidst cries of vote rigging.
Electoral Commission officials told a news conference 78 percent of voters backed the charter and 21 percent opposed it, Reuters reported.
Of 18 provinces, only two recorded "No" votes greater than two thirds, one province short of a veto.
Referendum rules stipulate that the draft fails if rejected by a two-thirds majority in any three of the 18 provinces and elections to a new parliament must be held.
Although a big "Yes" vote was expected across the country, given support for the charter from the Shiites and their Kurdish allies in government, the outcome was in doubt to the last because of the risk of a regional blocking vote in provinces with big Sunni Arab populations.
Two provinces had already been confirmed to have voted heavily "No" -- 96 percent in Al-Anbar and 81 percent in Salahaddin.
But the final results announced on Tuesday showed that a third, "swing", province of Nineveh, had voted by only 55 percent against the constitution, short of a two-thirds majority.
No other province returned a "No" majority.
Turnout in the October 15 referendum was 63 percent, commission officials had said previously.
A parliamentary election scheduled for December 15 will now elect a parliament with full constitutional powers for four years.
Had the charter been blocked, parliament would have had only interim powers for a year while it drew up another draft constitution.
Rigged
Saleh Al-Mutlaq, the leader of the Sunni umbrella body Iraqi National Dialogue Council, cried foul.
“The results have been rigged in Mosul, Nineveh, Diyala and most of the southern provinces,” charged Mutlaq in statements to Al-Jazeera television.
He said vote counting is illegal because it has taken place in Baghdad and not in each of the 18 provinces.
“We call for a fresh referendum under the supervision of the United Nations and Iraqi judiciary,” he said in a fiery mood. “Only then we will recognize the results.”
Mutlaq further said the Iraqi people are “disappointed” at the lack of transparency.
“We cast our votes though we knew for sure that the results would be rigged and now our complaints would fall on deaf ears.”
Iraq delayed the announcement of the October 15 vote results after the Electoral Commission said it was rechecking ballots amidst charges of vote rigging.
Dignitaries and tribal chieftains in Nineveh have warned of massive fraud in vote counting, calling for an international inquiry.
Sunnis are opposed to the charter, basically to the inclusion of a federalism article because they believe it will divide Iraq and exclude them from sharing in oil wealth, as reserves are concentrated mainly in the north and south.
http://islamonline.net/English/News/2005-10/25/article05.shtml
Final Results In Full
http://islamonline.net/English/News/2005-10/25/article05a.shtml
Of 18 provinces, only two recorded "No" votes greater than two thirds, one province short of a veto.
Referendum rules stipulate that the draft fails if rejected by a two-thirds majority in any three of the 18 provinces and elections to a new parliament must be held.
Although a big "Yes" vote was expected across the country, given support for the charter from the Shiites and their Kurdish allies in government, the outcome was in doubt to the last because of the risk of a regional blocking vote in provinces with big Sunni Arab populations.
Two provinces had already been confirmed to have voted heavily "No" -- 96 percent in Al-Anbar and 81 percent in Salahaddin.
But the final results announced on Tuesday showed that a third, "swing", province of Nineveh, had voted by only 55 percent against the constitution, short of a two-thirds majority.
No other province returned a "No" majority.
Turnout in the October 15 referendum was 63 percent, commission officials had said previously.
A parliamentary election scheduled for December 15 will now elect a parliament with full constitutional powers for four years.
Had the charter been blocked, parliament would have had only interim powers for a year while it drew up another draft constitution.
Rigged
Saleh Al-Mutlaq, the leader of the Sunni umbrella body Iraqi National Dialogue Council, cried foul.
“The results have been rigged in Mosul, Nineveh, Diyala and most of the southern provinces,” charged Mutlaq in statements to Al-Jazeera television.
He said vote counting is illegal because it has taken place in Baghdad and not in each of the 18 provinces.
“We call for a fresh referendum under the supervision of the United Nations and Iraqi judiciary,” he said in a fiery mood. “Only then we will recognize the results.”
Mutlaq further said the Iraqi people are “disappointed” at the lack of transparency.
“We cast our votes though we knew for sure that the results would be rigged and now our complaints would fall on deaf ears.”
Iraq delayed the announcement of the October 15 vote results after the Electoral Commission said it was rechecking ballots amidst charges of vote rigging.
Dignitaries and tribal chieftains in Nineveh have warned of massive fraud in vote counting, calling for an international inquiry.
Sunnis are opposed to the charter, basically to the inclusion of a federalism article because they believe it will divide Iraq and exclude them from sharing in oil wealth, as reserves are concentrated mainly in the north and south.
http://islamonline.net/English/News/2005-10/25/article05.shtml
Final Results In Full
http://islamonline.net/English/News/2005-10/25/article05a.shtml
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By Daud Salman and Zeinab Naji in Baghdad (ICR No. 148, 25-Oct-05)
Iraq’s electoral commission announced this week that voters had overwhelmingly approved a new constitution that many Sunni Arabs strongly opposed.
The Independent Electoral Commission in Iraq said on October 25 that 79 per cent of voters approved the constitution in the referendum held on October 15. Voter turnout was 63 per cent.
The commission did not announce the results for 10 days so as to check reports of voting irregularities - details of which it will release later this week. The commission, along with the United Nations, recounted votes in those provinces that registered extraordinarily high approval rates, and in some Sunni Arab provinces where some leaders said they suspected voter fraud.
Many Sunni Arab leaders who believed the constitution marginalised Sunnis hoped that they would be able to muster enough no votes to veto the constitution and draft a new document from scratch. Two-thirds of the voters in three out of the country’s 18 provinces would have needed to vote against the constitution for such a veto.
Two Sunni Arab provinces, Salahaddin and Anbar, both met that requirement. But according to official figures, voters in two other provinces with substantial Sunni populations, Diyala and Ninewa, did not even come close to rejecting the charter by two-thirds.
Despite the official declaration, some remained sceptical.
Emad Mansoor, a 23-year-old Baghdad University student, said the recounts “raised suspicions” that there had been fraud.
“Whether [the constitution] is approved or rejected, we want it done without forgery or fraud," he said.
As soon as the results were announced, a period of relative calm in the Sunni city of Ramadi was shattered when huge explosions were heard in the centre of town as clashes continued between insurgents and United States forces. Ramadi is the capital of Anbar province, where 97 per cent of voters rejected the constitution.
“The results that were announced don’t mean anything to us,” said Azmi Shawkat, an assistant professor in the college of education at Anbar university. “This is a photocopied constitution and it doesn’t change anything for Iraq’s situation.”
In the southern, mainly Shia city of Basra, 22-year-old Mohammed Rahim said the endorsement of the constitution showed “that the Shia and the Kurds are the majority in Iraq and all should respect their opinions in this country.”
In al-Adhamiyyah, a majority Sunni Arab neighbourhood in Baghdad that has calmly waited for the results, teashops buzzed with the news that the constitution had passed.
"We expected the constitution to be defeated,” said Waleed al-Adhami, a 48-year-old carpenter. “This is a surprise."
In al-Hurriyyah, a mostly Shia neighbourhood in the capital, residents took to the streets, chanting "No to terror! Yes, yes to the constitution! Yes, yes to the Marjiyah!", the latter a reference to the Shia clerical leadership.
“This was the first referendum for a constitution that aimed to build an institutional state that avoids totalitarian or unilateral power,” said Farid Ayar, spokesman for the electoral commission. “The constitutional referendum, regardless of whether votes were cast for or against, was a modern step.”
The commission waited until October 25 to release the official results of four provinces including Basra, Erbil and Babil, where voters overwhelmingly approved the constitution. In the predominantly Shia city of Basra, 97 per cent approved the constitution; in Erbil, 99 per cent voted in favour; and in Babil, also a Shia stronghold, 95 per cent approved the charter.
Diyala approved the charter by 52 per cent, the commission reported. In Ninewa, a primarily Sunni Arab province, 45 per cent cast their ballots in favour of the constitution. Officials recounted votes in that province over fraud concerns.
Recount results in the provinces proved identical to the original figures, reported Izzadin al-Muhammadi, an electoral commission official in Baghdad.
Commission officials said they received 125 complaints and appeals for investigations, including 80 in the city of Kirkuk, fifteen in Mosul in Ninewa province, six in Diyala and five in Basra.
Most of the complaints dealt with violations such as missing names on voter registration lists and polling centres opening late, said Abdul-Hussein al-Hindawi, a commission member.
Basil Abdul-Wahab al-Azawi, chief of the civil society organisations commission in Baghdad, worked as a monitor during the referendum. He said most of the violations he observed involved the head of a family voting on behalf of all his household.
Mishaan al-Jabouri, a national assembly representative and leader of the Home Party, registered voter fraud complaints for Ninewa and Diyala, another Sunni Arab province that rejected the constitution. He claimed that 200,000 additional Kurdish voters had registered in both governorates, tipping the scale in favour of constitution-supporters.
"If there is fraud [regarding] the constitution in Ninewa, Diyala or Kirkuk, it will be a dangerous precedent that could be included in Iraq’s phoney democracy tour," said Mustafa al-Dulaimi, a 40-year-old preparatory school teacher in Baghdad.
But Farhad Majeed al-Talabani, director of Kirkuk's electoral commission, said, "No electoral process in the world, not just Iraq, can be free of violations and fraud. Thus, it should not be considered a 100 per cent clean process."
Only one per cent of voters in the three Kurdish provinces of Dahuk, Sulaimaniyah and Erbil rejected the charter.
In Sulaimaniyah, many said they were glad the constitution was officially approved, even as car bombs shook this generally stable city just hours before the results were announced.
"I'd anticipated that the majority of the Iraqi people would vote for the constitution, and I'm happy that it passed,” said Chopi Mahmood, a university student in Sulaimaniyah. “I hope we will be able to take a step towards stability."
Mohammed Thamer, a retired man, said, “What will happen after the constitution passes? Today there were many explosions, but I’m still optimistic about the future.”
Daud Salman and Zeinab Naji are IWPR trainee journalists in Baghdad.With additional reporting from IWPR trainees Samah Samad in Kirkuk; Rebaz Mahmood in Sulaimaniyah; Yasin al-Dilaimi in Ramadi; Safaa Mansoor in Basra; and Nasir Kadhim in Baghdad.
http://www.iwpr.net/index.pl?archive/irq/irq_148_1_eng.txt
Wednesday, October 26, 2005
Iraq requires more sacrifice: BushConstitution Enacted, According to Electoral High Commission
It takes an Aussie newspaper to put the headline so bluntly. As the milestone of 2,000 US military deaths in Iraq since the beginning of the war passed on Tuesday, " Iraq requires more sacrifice: Bush." Now Bush is menacing us with Usamah Bin Laden taking over Iraq. Note that this scenario would have been utterly laughable in 2002. That is, anyone who heard that Bush thought Usamah Bin Ladin could overthrow Saddam and take over Iraq would have just fallen down laughing. Saddam would have had all the al-Qaeda people just taken out and shot. Twice. It was risible. Now, Bush has screwed up things so royally that he can even say this with a straight face. (It still is fairly ridiculous, since 80 percent of Iraqi is Shiites and Kurds who would kill Usamah on sight, and few Iraqi Sunni Arabs would want a fugitive Saudi terrorist as their leader). It is George W. Bush's fault if this outcome is at all plausible. His policies have reduced Iraq to violent chaos, and he is the one who let Usamah escape at Tora Bora. And then he made the US military lie about it during the presidential campaign! Impeachment is too good for this kind of dishonesty and incompetence. Actually I have to just stop writing about this now before my blood pressure goes into the 200s. Usamah in Iraq, indeed.
Al-Hayat: The Iraqi High Electoral Commission announced that 78.4 percent of Iraqis who voted in the constitutional referendum approved the new constitution. But there were enormous differences among the provinces, which observers expected to result in increased violence. The two largely Sunni Arab provinces of Anbar and Salahuddin rejected the constitution by a wide margin. The third province where they might have done so was Ninevah, and if they had succeeded in mustering a two-thirds majority against it there, it would have failed. As it was, the official tally against in Ninevah was 55.08 percent.
The Kurdistan Alliance and the United Iraqi Alliance, the two coalitions that dominated parliament and produced the constitution, hailed its passage as "historic" and said it would help fight terrorism.
Nancy Youssef of Knight Ridder reports on the extreme suspicion with which the results were viewed by Sunni Arabs and by Shiites of the Sadr Movement.
A constitution should be a bargain and a compromise among the major factions in a nation. If a single bloc like the Sunni Arabs of Iraq rejects the constitution, then it isn't really a constitution. And this one guarantees that the guerrilla war goes on for a long time.
Al-Hayat: Sunni figure Salih Mutlak complained that the tallying in Ninevah was carried out by Peshmerga militiamen, who, he alleged, tampered with the ballots. He insisted that the vote in Ninevah was in fact 2/3s against, and that the constitution had really failed, even if the elected Iraqi government would not recognize it. Mutlak intimated that the Sunni Arabs would now boycott the December 15 parliamentary elections.
Three car bombs exploded in the Kurdish city of Sulaimaniyah, resulting in the deaths of 13 Peshmerga militiamen. This city is the power base of Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, and the Sunni Arab guerrillas are underlining that they can reach into any corner of the country. No one is safe. In other attacks, guerrilla violence killed 2 US GIs and 11 Iraqis.
Al-Sabah: Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari dedicated $182 million to the southern port city of Basra, much of it to be used to build two new docks. Jaafari and his government will go to the polls on December 15.
posted by Juan @ 10/26/2005 06:33:00 AM