New York Times on Iraqi Election

Date: Wednesday, 2 February 2005

"Quite a significant number of Christians in the Mosul area were denied ballot boxes and ballots," Barham Salih, the Iraqi deputy prime minister and a Kurd, said in an interview late Tuesday.

Iraqis Report a Variety of Complaints About Irregularities on Election Day

The New York Times
By JAMES GLANZ and CHRISTINE HAUSER

Published: February 2, 2005

BASRA, Iraq, Feb. 1 - As the national euphoria over the high turnout and seemingly smooth operation of the elections on Sunday begins to fade slightly, claims of election irregularities are surfacing around the country.

In northern Iraq, protests have repeatedly broken out over the past few days in several cities where officials claim that hundreds of thousands of citizens, many of them Kurdish Christians, were not able to vote because balloting materials arrived inexplicably late.

A huge crowd of Shiite Muslims returning to southern Iraq from the hajj, their holy pilgrimage to Mecca, said Monday that they and hundreds of others like them had been deliberately kept from coming back to their country in time to vote. "They have wasted our votes," said Jaleel Harran, 41, a pilgrim from the southern city of Nasiriya.

There are also claims that election workers bent the rules to allow unregistered citizens to cast ballots, and one charge that a political party was improperly left off the ballots.

Many of the claims have not yet been lodged as formal complaints with Iraq's Independent Electoral Commission, leading to some confusion over how serious any problems may have been and whether they could threaten the legitimacy of the vote. Election officials were privately concerned about the possible problems in the north, mostly clustered around Mosul, the provincial capital.

A spokesman for the Assyrian Democratic Party, a Christian political organization, said a formal complaint about the problems in Mosul would be lodged Wednesday.

Hamdiya Husseini, deputy chairwoman of the election commission, said at a news conference on Tuesday that "the complaints have been minimal" but added that about 100 had been received so far.

About 40 of the complaints, she said, involved "simple matters, like why was a particular language not used in conjunction with Arabic and Kurdish."

Ms. Husseini did not directly characterize the others, but said "every complaint is being looked into and will be thoroughly investigated." A special committee will be formed to sift through the complaints, she said. There is also a three-judge panel to hear appeals of the committee's decisions. The panel was put in place last year by the same directive that created the commission itself.

Some of the complaints involve access to the basic tools of voting. "Quite a significant number of Christians in the Mosul area were denied ballot boxes and ballots," Barham Salih, the Iraqi deputy prime minister and a Kurd, said in an interview late Tuesday.

Mr. Salih, who was closely involved in organizing this year's hajj, also confirmed that at least one flight carrying returning pilgrims was denied permission to land in Baghdad because of a security lockdown on Saturday and Sunday.

"We tried very hard to get exceptions for the hajj flight, but the security advisers would not budge," Mr. Salih said.

But like other Iraqi government and election officials, he characterized the problems as understandable given the task that the nation faced.

"You're talking about an unprecedented operation in the history of Iraq, taking place in a terrible security environment," Mr. Salih said. "Let's not lose sight of the context."

Hussein Hindawi, the election commission's chairman, said in the Tuesday news conference that 5,216 polling centers that opened Sunday had been monitored by tens of thousands of observers in Iraq, mainly from Iraqi political parties and local organizations. Indeed, observers were commonly seen sitting as they watched intently from chairs within polling stations.

One, Hamza Ali of the Islamic Virtue Party, was serving at a polling station at a school in Basra around midday on Sunday.

"If I object to something, I should go to the directorate," the top local election officials, he said. "But until now, the electoral process is good."

At the same school, a man and his wife were turned away after, they said, having walked five miles to vote. They were refused because their names did not turn up on voter lists, an example of sticking to the letter of the law, Abdul Rahman, the coordinator of the polling place, said Sunday.

But in some other polling places, election workers gave in and were seen letting those who displayed convincing distress drop ballots into the boxes without proper registration.

In one example in Baghdad, a group of women cloaked in abayas said they had been displaced from the Sadr City slum during looting after the 2003 invasion and had become squatters elsewhere. The women, whose names did not appear in the registry, went from line to line at one polling place until workers relented and let them vote.

A man in Najaf, Muhammad Jasim Numan al-Musawi, said he had properly registered his political party with the commission and was surprised to discover that it had been left off the ballot. Mr. Musawi charged that a government conspiracy had kept the organization, the Free Republicans in Najaf, from receiving its due on election day. "So we are going to submit a formal complaint," he said.

The returning pilgrims, or hajjis, who had complained flew into the airport on the outskirts of Basra and were mustering at a center run by the South Oil Company, a government-run company that is a linchpin of the local economy. From the center, the hajjis were taking buses to their cities across southern Iraq. Mr. Salih, the deputy prime minister, said that some 33,000 Iraqis all told had gone on the hajj this year, and that a great majority had made it back in time for the elections.

But Faleh Hassan, a security official with the company who was coordinating the transportation, said Monday that 3,000 people had returned over the previous five days and that travel restrictions leading up to the elections had repeatedly kept buses from moving along roads and passing between provinces. He said some of the pilgrims had been in a "very miserable state."

Ghani Shaheed, a cleric from Najaf who made the hajj, estimated that in addition, about 350 people had been affected by the diverted flight. Missing the vote was particularly galling for some of those people, because senior clerics had declared that every citizen had a duty to go to the polls.

The Kurdish deputy governor of Mosul, Khasro Goran, said Kurdish parties would also lodge a complaint with the election commission about the claim of irregularities in the north.

"This affects 200,000 people," he said. Without giving details, Mr. Goran said election officials had deliberately tried to suppress the Kurdish vote in the north, an ethnic tinderbox.

He said four districts, all near Mosul, had been most affected.

In one, Shaikhan, a reporter saw election workers in formal Kurdish dress waiting at midday in an otherwise deserted polling center for ballots to arrive. Long lines of potential voters left when it became clear that no vote would take place there.

James Glanz reported from Baghdad for this article, and Christine Hauser from Mosul. John F. Burns and Dexter Filkins contributed reporting from Baghdad, and Khalid al-Ansary from Najaf.