Iraq: Bridging the sectarian divide

Voting ended throughout Iraq at 5pm on Sunday, and preliminary results are expected on Thursday. The event did not pass without violence, which led to no less than 38 people being killed and 90 wounded — although there were no major blasts, like the ones that rocked Baghdad in August, October, and December 2009.

Six thousand candidates, representing 86 political parties, contested for the 325 seats in Parliament under the watchful eye of 120 international monitors. One notable change was the high voter turnout in Baghdad, recorded at over 70 per cent and an increase of 50 per cent voting in the Sunni province of Al Anbar — a sharp contrast to the drop in voter turnout in Shiite strongholds like Karbala.

Despite the attacks, there is a feeling that Iraqi society at large has matured since the last elections of 2005. Back then, Iran-backed Shiite parties, grouped under the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA) won 48.1 per cent of the vote, granting it 140 out of the then-275 seats in Parliament. Since then, the UIA has suffered major setbacks, casting doubts on how victorious its successor, the Iraqi National Alliance (INA), will be this time, and thereby raising the victory chances of Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki, who is campaigning on an independent list, and his predecessor Eyad Allawi, who is leading a cross-sectarian alliance.

One setback for the INA was the visible distance of the Grand Ayatollah Ali Al Sistani who, unlike 2005, stood at arm's length from all candidates in 2010. Another was the 2009 death of Abdul Aziz Al Hakim, head of the UIA, who was also president of the Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council (SIIC).

His group had already been viewed with plenty of scrutiny throughout Iraq for having fought alongside the Iranian army against Saddam Hussain in the 1980s, harbouring pan-Shiite, rather than pan-Iraqi loyalties. It engaged in civil war against other Iraqis in 2006-08, and suffered a stream of criticism from Shiite heavyweight Muqtada Al Sadr, who accused Al Hakim of being a stooge of the Iranians.

Al Hakim's support for the US invasion of 2003, his refusal to term US troops on Iraqi soil as ‘occupation forces' and his never-ending feud with Iraqi Sunnis, all contributed to the drop in SIIC popularity. During the provincial elections of January 2009, SIIC lost 8 out of 11 provinces — despite the backing of Iran — proving that Iraqi voters were fed up with political groups that preached a radical form of political Shiite Islam.

Al Hakim's successor Ammar Al Hakim, who co-heads the INA, is young and inexperienced, having been raised in Iran under the powerful influence of Iranian clerics, explaining just why his team might score poorly in this election. Other heavyweights in the INA, like ex-prime minister Ebrahim Al Jaafari, are also not very popular at a grassroots level, having been tried in power in 2005-06 and failed tremendously, leading to massive sectarian violence that accumulated with the bombing of a holy Shiite shrine in February 2006 and led to major reprisal attacks against the entire Sunni community.

Another powerful figure in the INA, Ahmad Chalabi, is also frowned upon by Iraqi voters, given his strong connections to the Americans and the fact that he lobbied extensively with the George W. Bush team to invade and occupy Iraq in 2003.

Predictions

The track record of these men explains the poor voter turnout in Shiite hotbeds like Karbala, for example, where voting was less than 50 per cent on Sunday. According to a government-mandated report issued days before the elections, the INA is expected to get no more than 17.2 per cent of parliamentary seats, a drop of more than 30 per cent since 2005, minimising their chances at bringing one of their prime minister-hopefuls, like Jaafari or Adel Abdul Mahdi, to power.

According to the same government report, the Iraqi National List, which occupied 9 per cent of the 2005 Parliament, will end up with 21.8 per cent this time. This is still not enough for a majority, making it difficult for ex-prime minister Allawi to return to power.

The real battle, therefore, is presently between the State of Law Alliance, headed by incumbent Al Maliki, and a colourful assortment of Sunni voters, whose vote is divided among the Iraqi Accordance Front and independents in the Allawi coalition.

These Sunnis, who boycotted the elections of 2005, were determined not to do so again, explaining the high voter turnout in Sunni strongholds like Al Anbar. Many rich and affluent Iraqi Sunnis, who left Iraq en masse in 2003, have returned to cast their vote in the elections.

They know that they won't be able to restore the pre-2003 status quo, but they can minimise damage done to the Sunni community by electing the right politicians. That certainly means that they will work to foil the ambitions of the INA and instead vote either for Allawi's team, or for the State of Law Coalition, which has partnered with Sunni heavyweights from the Abu Risheh clan.

Presently, several options are on the table. One is that Al Maliki himself will be re-elected — and might return to power if he hammers out a suitable coalition that gives power to Sunnis and heavyweight Shiites like Al Sadr, whose reputation has not been tarnished by the failures of government in 2006-10.

Al Maliki needs 51 per cent of the votes to return to the premiership, and only someone like Al Sadr (who is likely to win all contested seats) can offer him that, although Al Sadr himself is allied to the INA.

Another possibility is that none of the heavyweights will get a popular mandate to rule, forcing them to rely on the support of respected Sunni figures, in order to come to power through a Sunni-Shiite alliance.

(Sami Moubayed is editor-in-chief of Forward Magazine in Syria.)