BAGHDAD — Hopes for a January election in Iraq faded Monday
after Shiite Muslim and Kurdish legislators teamed up to vote for a new version
of an election law that in effect takes seats away from Sunnis and is almost
certain to draw another veto from the country’s Sunni vice president.
Parliament then adjourned for a holiday until Dec. 8,
leaving in limbo the fate of the law that is needed if the crucial election is
to go ahead by the end of January, as mandated by Iraq’s constitution. The
withdrawal of U.S. forces has been pegged to the timing of the poll, and a
delay could jeopardize President Barack Obama’s promise to bring all combat
troops home by August 2010.
The head of Iraq’s election commission told The Associated
Press that he doubted there was now enough time to hold the poll by January.
“Most probably, it might be moved to February,” Faraj al-Haidari
said.
Though that would violate the terms of Iraq’s constitution,
lawmakers seemed unconcerned by the prospect of a constitutional crisis.
“Nobody’s applying the constitution anyway,” said
Kurdish legislator Mahmoud Othman, who predicted the election would be delayed.
“We are in a mess now, so it doesn’t make a lot of difference.”
The protracted battle over the election law has again
exposed the sectarian fissures that pushed Iraq to the brink of civil war
earlier in the decade, in a troubling reminder that the country’s factions
still have not resolved most of the major differences that divide them.
In a rerun of scenes that were common during the height of
the bloodshed in 2005 and 2006, fuming Sunnis stormed out of the parliamentary
session, leaving the main Shiite and Kurdish alliances that dominate the
legislature to vote overwhelmingly for amendments that will take away seats
from Sunni provinces and add them to Kurdish ones.
The amendments did not offer any extra seats to Iraqi
refugees, which include many Sunnis, and therefore did not address the
complaint that prompted Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi to veto the original
law last week.
Kurds had subsequently threatened to boycott the poll
because they didn’t like the way seats had been distributed by the election
commission. They took advantage of the veto to recast the law, with the help of
Shiites, in a way that would give the Kurds a greater portion of seats in an
expanded parliament than provided under the version passed last month.
Sam Parker, of the Washington-based U.S. Institute of Peace,
estimated that the new formula will take seven seats from Sunni provinces and
give them to Kurdish ones. “This is truly a scandal,” he said.
“I bet Hashimi is kicking himself.”
Iraq’s president and two vice presidents have authority to
veto legislation.
Al-Hashimi did not have an immediate comment Monday on the
revised law. But Sunni lawmakers, enraged that the veto had resulted in a law
even more unfavorable to their interests than the previous measure, vowed not
to accept it.
“We will seek to veto this law once again because it is
against the interests of Iraq and against the constitution,” lawmaker
Osama Nujaifi told reporters. “This will delay the elections.”
He also called on Sunnis to take to the streets to protest
the law in the Sunni provinces expected to lose the most seats under the new
formula.
Though Shiites and Kurds have enough votes in parliament to
override a second veto, the upcoming Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha will push
back the process until well into December, leaving little time for preparations
for the poll.
The prospect that Shiites and Kurds will use their numbers
to squash Sunni concerns also raises the worrying possibility that Iraqis will
go into this election as bitterly divided as they were the last time around,
when many Sunnis boycotted the balloting, and that the legitimacy of the vote
will be challenged.
Iraq’s election commission had said it needed 90 days to
organize the election, and the law states that it must have 60 days’ notice. A
major Shiite religious festival at the end of January will make it logistically
impossible to hold the election that month any later than Jan. 21, election
officials say, meaning that both deadlines already have passed.
Via McClatchy-Tribune News Service.
