Thread: Iraqi Provincial Elections are Tomorrow!

http://www.hudsonny.org/2009/01/iraq...s-i-of-iii.php

January 8, 2009 | Nibras Kazimi
Iraq’s Provincial Elections (I of III)

On January 31st, 15 million Iraqis will have the opportunity to elect provincial councils in 14 out of Iraq’s 18 provinces. The importance of these elections for Iraq’s future political trajectory cannot be overstated: the results will reveal trends among Iraqi voters that no number of polls, flying shoes or loud demonstrations can ever clarify with any certainty.

However, even before the ballots are to be cast, the number of registrants for these elections reveals a sense of voter apathy. The Independent Higher Electoral Commission (IHEC) had previously set August 14 as the deadline for the registration process—begun on July 25—at the time when the provincial elections were tentatively scheduled for last October. Two months of extensive awareness campaigns were launched during the summer to educate the Iraqi public about the need to register. By the end of the process, only 2.5 million voters had filled out the necessary paperwork. Since then, the registration process has been extended, and it is unknown if voter interest has picked up as the election campaigns got underway.

Voter apathy could go either way for the parties in power, namely the Shia and Sunni Islamist factions. A registered voter could be a party hack who is motivated by self-interest in keeping the status quo in place, or he or she may be an angry citizen who is about to cast a protest vote. At this point, we simply don’t know.

There are 14,800 candidates competing for 440 seats. That is a massive number reflecting a widespread participation in the political process, but it also marks a reality of political fragmentation. It means that an average of 33 candidates are competing for each seat; for most of them, the chance of winning is an unrealistic one given the presence of established political coalitions competing for the same prize. What will happen to the losers is another ‘unknown’: will they drop out of politics, or will they find ways of coalescing into a healthy and vibrant opposition?

Each Iraqi province offers up a unique set of variables, so it may be useful to take an in-depth look at a Shi’a province (Basra), a Sunni province (Anbar) and a mixed Sunni-Shi’a province (Baghdad) to get a better sense of the local challenges faced in each, as well as challenges that are national in nature.

Basra:

Basra’s election will reveal the true depth of the popularity seemingly enjoyed by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. For it was in Basra that Maliki came into his own when he battled the Sadrist militias last spring and wrested control of Iraq’s most important economic center back into the hands of the government.

Basra’s current Provincial Council consists of 41 seats. In the January 2005 provincial elections, 20 seats were won by a coalition patronized by the Hakim family, while 13 seats were won by the Fadhila Party. Maliki’s mainstream branch of the Da’awa Party had failed to win any seats.

Maliki’s chief challenge is to demonstrate that the Shia Islamist voting blocs of a city like Basra had shifted from the Hakims and Fadhila to his slate, aptly named ‘The State of Law’ coalition. It is unlikely that Sadrist sympathizers, much diminished in Basra and across Iraq, would vote for him, and since they are not running slate of their own, or seem to be supporting phantom slates, it is likely that Sadrist votes may back Fadhila. Maliki had hoped to build his base among Basra’s tribes, who were the first to rally to his call while fighting the Sadrists, but it seems as if he was unable or unwilling to bring aboard important local notables who have opted to run on their own slates.

Fadhila’s management of the province suffers from pervasive accusations of corruption, while the Hakims are disliked for their closeness to Iran, and for a controversial plan to make Basra the centerpiece of a constitutionally-allowable southern Shia ‘Super Region’ much akin to the one enjoyed by the Kurds in the north.

Another unknown is the Sunni vote, for Sunnis many account for as much as 10 percent of the population of Basra Province. They boycotted the last provincial elections (the main Sunni party the Islamic Party drew a little less than 5,000 votes), and won only one seat (out of 16) for Basra Province in the parliamentary elections of December 2005. It is probable that most Sunni votes will go to a Sunni slate as a means of showing their numbers in Basra, and the likely beneficiaries of this phenomenon are the two major Sunni slates (running nationally) that reflect either Islamist tendencies (the Islamic Party’s slate) or neo-Ba’athist tendencies (the list headed by MPs Khalaf Alalayan and Salih al-Mutlag).

Basra’s new Provincial Council shall consist of 35 seats (down from 41) reflecting a new allocation of seats calibrated according to population. While Fadhila and the Hakim faction will certainly cede some ground to incoming candidates back by Maliki, and others representing the Sunni minority, it is unclear what sort of traction secular lists will also have among voters. In the 2005 provincial elections, the main secular force benefitted from the patronage and incumbency of then Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, but only managed to garner 50,000 votes (compared to Fadhila’s 150,000). In the parliamentary elections held in 2005, Allawi’s slate, again the dominant secular slate running in Shi’a provinces, only managed to win two seats out of sixteen in Basra.

One of the Allawi’s parliamentarians has since broken off and formed his own faction: Wa’il Abdul-Latif al-Fadhl is probably the most significant non-tribal secular candidate running in Basra, and his signature issue is the establishment of Basra as a federal region all its own. However, it in unknown if the idea of the ‘uniqueness’ of Basra is widely popular, or even understood by the populace, and whether it would be enough of a rallying cry for al-Fadhl to make any major inroads into the dominance of Islamists. Al-Fadhl has managed to get 2 percent of Basra’s eligible voters to sign a petition supporting his plan, which prompted IHEC to begin the second phase of the process (as mandated by the constitution) that sought to collect signatures from 10 percent of Basra’s voters during the period of 15-21 December. Not enough signatures were collected: only 23,000 (out of a threshold of 140,000) voters signed on to the idea, prompting al-Fadhl to accuse IHEC of purposely sabotaging the effort by not opening enough registration centers, or actively advertising the drive.

http://www.hudsonny.org/2009/01/iraq...-ii-of-iii.php

January 15, 2009 | Nibras Kazimi
Iraq's Provincial Elections (II of III)
Anbar Province: Just How Relevant are the Tribes?

The provincial election of Anbar is probably as authentic a test for the role of tribes in Iraq’s present and future as there ever will be. Tribes should demonstrate their strongest showing in the local elections of this province, where tribal solidarity and cohesion is more likely to register in narrower races. Anbar is also Iraq’s more homogenous Sunni Arab province, and was once the epicenter of that community’s Ba’athist-inspired as well as jihadist-led insurgency against the changed political realities of post-Saddam Iraq, namely the fall of Arab Sunnis from the helm of power. The results in Anbar will reveal whether an important segment of Sunnis will opt to be represented by either rehabilitated Ba’athists or Islamists in the mould of the Muslim Brotherhood, or they may return to the familiarity of traditional identities such as tribalism.

Culturally, Anbar is divided into two: on the upper Euphrates, small caravan towns with limited agricultural activity such as Anah, Rawa, Hit and the oasis community of Kubaisa had always existed, their chief claim to fame was the export of clerics, minorities (specifically Jews), administrators and merchants to major cities like Baghdad where they reached the pinnacle of success, and never looked back. These towns gave modern Iraq some of its most ardent ideologues and apparatchiks, whether Arab nationalist or Communist. In more recent times, several important mid-level native Al-Qaeda figures emerged from these hubs.

But the swath of territory from Baghdad to the Muhammadi area fell prey to marauding tribes as central authority waned, itself a function of the waning fortunes of this particular trade route; some of these marauders would later coalesce into the Dulaim Confederation, Anbar’s most important tribal association. The townspeople who lived there were pushed out, either to Baghdad or to the other towns further up the river. Small tribes would be subsumed into the confederation, or would seek to join it. In the process, origins were obscured, and the Dulaim invented a genealogical table that links over a million souls alive today to three ancestors, brothers, whose names translate from Arabic as “Thursday, Friday and Saturday,” and who are separated from our modern times by a mere dozen generations. Most genealogists don’t put much stock into such claims.

Over the centuries, stronger clans or subsections of the tribes would emerge to do battle over the best arable lands; as a result the weakest were pushed to more arid margins, where they could only feed themselves through brigandage. Those habits die hard, for the descendants of these brigands turned into modern-day smugglers and into highway robbers who aided Al-Qaeda when the jihadists were ascendant and flush with cash. But it were these same bandits who first seized upon Al-Qaeda’s weaknesses and diminishing fortunes, and turned against it, settling for American gold and patronage. One such leader was Sattar Abu Risheh, a nominal sheikh who transformed his band of tribesmen into the first successful Awakening Council. That is where the idea of using tribes as a political counterbalance to Al-Qaeda took flight, giving tribes a new lease on political life, after decades whereby the individual tribesman turned his loyalties away from the tribal sheikh to that of the central state.

These efforts have historical precedents: when the British came to Iraq in the aftermath of World War I, they did some social engineering in Anbar itself, determining that the choice of a paramount sheikh for the Dulaim would make governance easier. Their candidate was Ali al-Suleiman, and their gold made his candidacy stick.

In 2005, the composition of the provincial council was determined by only 3,775 votes, the bulk of which were won by the Islamic Party. Most of Iraq’s Sunnis had boycotted the elections, while Anbar specifically was for the most part in the control of Al-Qaeda at the time. The Islamic Party, an offshoot of the pan-Middle Eastern Muslim Brothers movement and now attempts to model itself after Turkey’s ruling Islamists (AKP), had decided to join to the political process early on. They claim to be the most significant national force among Iraq’s Sunnis, a claim that will be measured against those made by the stand-ins for the Ba’athists, who have reinvented themselves as secular and staunchly sectarian politicians. In 2005, a coalition of the Islamic Party and these neo-Ba’athists groupings cornered the Sunni Arab vote for the parliamentary elections, but this coalition has been fraying of late, and in Anbar and elsewhere, the various components are competing against each other. Yet both political strands are keeping a watchful eye on how many votes the tribal lists may mobilize, a development that if successful will put their political futures at risk.

Abu Risheh fell to an Al-Qaeda bomb and was succeeded by his brother, an urbane businessman formerly based in Dubai, who is running on his own slate in the forthcoming elections. Their tribe is small in number, and cannot be held as a measure of the strength of tribal support. The traditional tribal leaders of the Dulaim are also in the running; two cousins who descend from Ali al-Suleiman. However, one of them, the less prominent of the two, has been co-opted into joining the slate of the Islamic Party.

Therefore, the only measure of the relevance of tribalism shall be the slate headed by Ali al-Hatem, the other cousin, who is running as the head of a tribal alliance. His success or lack of it must be measured against that of the other two credible forces that command a national following among Sunnis, and will reveal whether tribes will come into their own as a credible and competitive political vehicle.

Anbar’s new provincial council is to have 29 seats.

http://www.hudsonny.org/2009/01/iraq...iii-of-iii.php

January 22, 2009 | Nibras Kazimi
Iraq's Provincial Elections (III of III)
Baghdad: Secular Comeback?

The results for Baghdad will tell us whether secularism is on the comeback in Iraqi politics. Ideological secularists are expected to do better in the capital than anywhere else in the country given the higher levels of education, cross-sectarian assimilation, presence of non-Muslim minorities, and political activism that Baghdad brings together.

The new provincial council of Baghdad is to have 57 seats, up from 51, with 2,482 candidates in the running. The current council is divided among the Hakims with 28 seats, the Da’awa Party with 11, and Fadhila at 6. There are no Sunnis represented in any real sense on the current council, but this will change with the new elections. In the parliamentary elections of 2005 which the Sunnis took part in, the sectarian specific Shi’a list took 58 percent of the vote, while its Sunni equivalent drew only 20 percent, prompting outrage from the latter over what they believe was evident fraud in a city where Sunnis consider themselves the plurality of the population, a belief precipitated by the symbolism of Baghdad as a former imperial capital of a Sunni caliphate. It is likely that while the Shi’a vote may get fragmented among competing Islamist and secularist slates, the call to Baghdad’s Sunnis to vote for sectarian specific lists to show strength in numbers will resonate. It should also be remembered that Baghdad bore the brunt of inter-sectarian killings and reprisal killings, and it was the scene of widespread population displacement. Therefore the Sunnis have something to prove in Baghdad.

However, one new element of Sunni politics, which is the relative political clout of the ex-insurgents, will not be measured clearly as the most prominent of these groups, reorganized as the Sons of Iraq (as opposed to tribal ‘Awakenings’) are running on the major neo-Ba’athist slate rather than on a list of their own.

But sectarian-specific slates, whether Sunni neo-Ba’athist or Islamist, or Shia Islamist, are likely fretting that a trend may emerge from Baghdad whereby a strong showing by non-sectarian, or ‘patriotic’ slates, may have wide-ranging immediate and long-term repercussions for more narrowly-based identity politics. Baghdad, being the center of centralized government and Iraq’s most cosmopolitan city, and certainly the place with the highest incidence of mixed sectarian and ethnic households (couples that usually met in Baghdad’s universities or mixed neighborhoods or government offices), may give a hearing to political wildcards such as the secular liberal democrat Mithal al-Alusi, who occupies his party’s sole seat in parliament (won in Baghdad), and whose base may expand on the provincial council. The third candidate for his slate in Baghdad is Madeeha Hassan al-Musawi, chosen as one of TIME magazine’s 100 most influential world figures in 2008.

Other secular politicians whose slates may win a number of seats are Ayad Allawi and Ahmad Chalabi, both from old Baghdadi families. But Chalabi is not banking on secular support to win; he is fishing for subtle support from the Sadrists, who wield their strongest base in Baghdad’s Sadr City and do not seem to be fielding any candidates directly associated with them. The Sadrist leadership may pick a couple of slates at the eleventh hour and inform their supporters to vote for them. That is why Chalabi has picked Rahim al-Darraji, a Sadrist functionary who served as the former sub-governor (qaim-maqam) of Sadr City, to put together his electoral slate for Baghdad.

Yet given that such as large number of Baghdad’s residents are employed by the state, a statist tendency could influence voters to cast their support for what they know and whoever advocates for a strong centralist state, which would be Prime Minister’s Maliki’s slate. That said, the Hakims still enjoy wide popularity in important Shia mercantile hubs such as Karrada, and their patronage network is unrivaled, so it is unlikely that Islamists in general would cede much ground to emerging Shia secular challengers, or to non-sectarian slates.

It is expected that a small number of seats may be won by the unified Kurdish slate that is relying on the large number of Faylis (Shi’a Kurds) and the 150,000 ethnic Kurds who live in Baghdad (state employees or retirees) to carve out a role on the provincial council. Several slates are pandering specifically to the Faylis, who are estimated to be 300,000 in number, including the Shi’a Islamists who used to be able to count on this demographic in the past but recent tensions between Maliki and the Kurds may have heightened the ethnic allegiances of the Faylis at the expense of their sectarian identity.