|
The Iraqi Situation: The Dashed Hope |
|
|
|
|
Saturday, 14 January 2006 |
Iraq is again at a very serious and an extremely dangerous crossroad, the hope for improvement in the terrible security situation, which is claiming the lives of dozens of Iraqis everyday. The long awaited reconstruction of the devastated country and its moribund institutions and the rejuvenation of its infrastructure and services seems to have once again been dashed and the country is descending much deeper into the abyss into which it has been sliding for the last three years. The December 15th elections were supposed to bring about the basis for this cherished dream by electing a parliament with a four year mandate that will represent all the components of Iraqi society irrespective of ethnicity or religion which would oversee the creation of a strong and efficient cabinet that is capable of dealing with the problems and difficulties that are facing the country. Unfortunately, the elections have been a great disappointment, a month after the closing of the ballot centers the results of these elections that we were promised will be known in two weeks time are still hanging in the balance awaiting the verdict of the four man international committee of experts who are investigating the hundreds of complaints and accusations of fraud by some of the major players. The complaints are mainly coming from the Sunni Iraqis who are accusing the Shiites of resorting to a campaign of threats and intimidation before and during the election and are demanding a rerun of the elections, and threatening to go back to their earlier position of boycotting the entire political building process and reverting to more active opposition.
The elections started quiet auspiciously, security was very tight, tens of thousands of Iraqi and coalition troops were deployed to ensure a safe and a secure environment. Nevertheless there were few incidents during the day the most serious one was a grenade attack on the green zone which coincided with the beginning of the election process, but it did not stop the balloting that was going on. There were government officials including the president and the prime minister who were casting their votes. There was a good deal of jubilation with the event, women were participating very heavily in more than 2,000 voting centers allover the country. There were about 14 million Iraqis who were eligible to vote and at the end of the day more than 10 millions have actually participated, a 73% participation which was a very impressive record. I voted myself in a center near our old house in the Mansour district, a few minutes before the center closed. The voting has actually started two days before in fifty cities in fifteen countries from Australia to the United States were over a million Iraqis were said to be eligible to vote. Inside of Iraq it was very clear that the voting was going on according to clear cut ethnic and religious lines, the secular groups were showing much less support than was expected. There were also signs that the process was not going as fairly or transparently but people like president Bush and Tony Blair and their followers said that it was great and successful and historical like they described in the previous election of January 15th and the referendum to ratify the draft of the constitution which took place on September 15th.
About midday during election day one of the electoral commission’s spokesmen said that the results of the elections will not be known before two weeks or a bit longer. The same commission in a surprise announcement on the 20th declared that the preliminary results of the counting pointed to a very clear victory to the Shiite group and to make things even more controversial its statement was worded and presented in a way which made it look as if it was the final and official results, that's when hell broke loose with the others shouting fraudulence by the Shiites and questioning the neutrality of the commission and started lodging claims of irregularity and complaints to the commission about incidents of fraud and threats and intimidation to the voters during the days which preceded the elections and on balloting day and demanded the annulment of the results and a re-run of the elections. The most serious complaints centered on the role the Iranians were involved in the process the most flagrant evidence of this interference was the capture of a trailer which was full of ballot boxes similar to those which were used by the commission itself that were full of ballot papers again very similar to the ones in use in the country. The captured trailer is said to have been one of four, which were brought into the country the other three were never found. The supposedly winning side stuck to its guns and started to talk about the formation of the new government and started to woo the Kurds who have swept their areas pretty cleanly including Kirkuk to their side, but that maneuvering only helped in hardening the position of the losers who were now coalescing in a major alignment of about 40 political parties and groupings and independent personalities which they called MARAM and were threatening civil disobedience and the boycotting of the newly elected parliament.
The situation was becoming very serious and highly polarized and explosive when it was announced on the 29th by the United Nations representative in Iraq that a high level committee of experts derived from the United Nations the Arab league and the European Union would arrive to rule over the complaints, a suggestion which was immediately endorsed by the American ambassador in Iraq who said that they are going to participate but will not agree to a rerun of the elections. The committee would work independently of the local commission and would decide on the final results of the elections, nothing was heard about the committee for two days and then it was suddenly known that the committee was in the country and has started its work, the earlier black out about its movements was evidently for security reasons. During these fateful days there were a lot of meetings and conferences by the various parties and political groups that were involved in the exercise the most important of which was the meeting that took place in Arbil between the Shiite leader Abdulazeez al-Hakeem and Masood Barzani the head of the autonomous Kurdish authority in the north. We were told that the two groups would collaborate in forming a government of national unity, but what we were not told is that al-Hakeem has agreed to the Kurdish demands about Kirkuk in return for a promise by the Kurds not to veto the Shiite plans for an autonomous administrative area of their own in the south like that of the Kurds in the north a plan which seems to have the blessings of the Americans and their friends. Meanwhile when this drama was unfolding in the highly poisoned political situation and the explosive and great uncertainties about the future of the Iraq, the general situation in the country was getting worse everyday, the relative quite time during the election day was shattered the following day with a spate of incredibly lethal atrocities, in a single day [January 4th] there were about ten bombed cars, eight of them in Baghdad alone, which resulted in many dead and injured, and on the 5th there were major incidents in Karbala, Ramadi and Baghdad which claimed the lives of at least two hundred men women and children, and scores of injured innocent individuals. The services have almost totally collapsed, electricity is supplied for a two to three quarters of an hour every five to six hours, the provision of food and medicine was practically non-existent, everything has painfully deteriorated and to make things even more painful was the sudden increase by the government of the price of gasoline, kerosene by five times, in a country that is known to posses the second largest reserve of oil in the world.
The future of this country and its people hinges on the decision of the four member international team of experts , if they are going to be able come out with a fair and honest verdict about what happened before during the last elections, a verdict which would satisfy the people otherwise what could happen in our country is extremely worrying and too frightening to predict. All of this makes one wonders about what is really happening and why is it that every time things look like they are going to improve and that the country will at last be on its way to recovery that these dreams and hopes of the suffering Iraqis are dashed so cruelly and mercilessly.
Dr. Najeeb Hanoudi
Saturday January 14, 2006
Amman/Jordan
Email:
This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
|
