Will the Iraqis vote?
If the turnout is above 50 per cent, says Richard Beeston, the Americans and the British can declare victory — but the violence will continue
Mosul
Inever did find out if our mission had a code name, but a good one might have been ‘Operation Flying Circus’. Under the guise of handing out school books to the needy children of Mosul, who were still on holiday, our platoon of large-tracked armoured vehicles ground through the streets of a residential neighbourhood as though we were the first troops inching into Berlin.
When the tracks finally came to a halt, the huge reinforced steel ramps at the back came clattering down and disgorged heavily armed soldiers who sealed off the area, scanning rooftops for snipers and motioning away any approaching cars, fearful that they might be concealing a bomb.
A tall, good-looking captain in the Washington National Guard, completing a year’s service in Iraq, marched out and began inspecting the school as a possible polling station for Sunday’s elections. The key criteria were how many voters you could fit inside the school walls to protect queues from suicide car bombs, and whether snipers on nearby buildings would be able to pick off the electorate as they scurried towards the ballot box.
The Second Qadissiya school in Mosul’s al-Bakr district was no Fort Knox but it would probably do, and Captain Kuntz took the opportunity to meet some of the people he was trying to help. ‘Tell them I want them to get out and vote on election day — it is important for their future,’ he said, handing out photocopied leaflets in Arabic exhorting locals to do their democratic duty. On this occasion, their democratic duty is to vote for a national assembly that will debate and approve a new constitution.
A mechanic from the large Christian minority in Mosul looked sceptical. It might be only a short nip across the road from his house to the polling station, but as far as he was concerned it could have been the Grand Canyon. His community has already been attacked for sharing the same religion as the invading armies of the West. He pointed out the graffiti on the school walls written by the insurgents days before the Americans showed up. ‘Down with Allawi. Down with the elections. We warn everyone against voting. Long live the mujahedin.’ If Iraq’s ‘get the vote out’ campaign seems unorthodox, consider some of the other unique aspects of the development of Iraqi democracy. With only days to go before the polls open, the location of most of the 5,000-plus polling stations remains a secret. A ban on all civilian traffic means that even if voters know where to go, they may have to trudge for miles on foot to get to their polling station. Many people in Iraq have no idea who is standing for election, which parties they can vote for and what their policies are. The names of some candidates, who fear being assassinated by the insurgents, will be known only on election day if voters actually ask to see the names on the party lists inside the polling stations.
While Shia and Kurdish parties are expected to do well, some unexpected challengers are putting up a strong campaign. The portrait of Sharif Ali, formerly a banker living in Holland Park in London, now stares out from posters across Baghdad. The heir to the Iraqi throne wants to restore the Hashemite monarchy to Iraq. But he is facing stiff competition from an even older institution, the Iraqi Communist party, once a powerful political force in the country, which defied Saddam’s purges and the recent course of global history and has come out fighting.
Other areas of the campaign are more familiar. A nasty spat has erupted between Hazem al-Shalan, the defence minister, and Ahmed Chalabi, the former Pentagon protégé who has recast himself as a Shia populist. Chalabi has accused al-Shalan of diverting hundreds of millions of pounds to foreign bank accounts. The defence minister insists that the money is to buy weapons for the Iraqi army. He in turn has threatened to arrest Chalabi and deport him to Jordan, where he is wanted for corruption. One of the two will probably be in exile by early February.
Arguably the most extraordinary personality to emerge from the whole motley assembly of soldiers, political opportunists and chancers is the distinguished figure of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. The country’s main hopes for a successful vote lie in the hands of this ancient recluse with a flowing white beard who rarely leaves his home in the holy city of Najaf.
Although an Iranian by birth, which excludes him from voting, his simple declaration last year that it was a Muslim religious duty to cast a ballot will ensure that millions of his brethren across the huge swaths of southern and central Iraq will set off for polling stations on Sunday morning. Barring some unforeseen calamity, which Iraq has become rather good at producing, al-Sistani’s followers will deliver a turnout large enough for the Americans to declare that this country’s first exercise in democracy has been a resounding success.
If voters top the magic 50 per cent mark, then Iraq can expect some serious and rapid changes. The coalition, which has nearly 200,000 foreign troops in the country, will have its first opportunity to declare the war a victory and to begin pulling their troops out. Many countries, like Bulgaria, Ukraine and the Netherlands, have already signalled that they will withdraw their forces from Iraq in the coming months. The British are likely to reduce their presence substantially. Even the number of American troops, now about 150,000, will probably drop by several thousand within days.
This does not mean that the violence will halt, the reconstruction will begin or that the threat of a civil war between Iraq’s ethnic and religious communities will recede. Iraq is likely to be messy and ugly for some time to come. Worst of all, they have another round of elections in December — this time for a government rather than an assembly — and will have to go through all this again.
Richard Beeston is the diplomatic editor of the Times.
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