Gareth Porter

Inter Press Service News Agency

WASHINGTON, Sep 28 (IPS) - If the referendum on Iraq's draft constitution next month is conducted fairly, it now appears very likely that the document will be defeated by a two-thirds majority in the three Sunni-dominated provinces of Anbar, Salahadeen and Nineveh, plunging Iraq into a new political crisis.

However, one way such a defeat could be averted is by massive vote fraud in the key province of Nineveh. According to an account provided by the U.S. liaison with the local election commission, supported by physical evidence collected by the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq (IECI), Kurdish officials in Nineveh province tried to carry out just such a ballot-stuffing scheme in last January's election.

The Sunni Arab majority of about 1.7 million in Nineveh -- including Sunni insurgent organisations -- appears to be united behind a "no" vote on the constitution. Kurds number only about 200,000 and non-Kurdish, non-Arab minorities another 500-600,000.

The non-Arab, non-Kurdish minorities -- Assyrian Christians, Shabaks, Yezidis and Turkmen -- which hold the balance in the province, are overwhelmingly opposed to the constitution.

Heavy-handed control by the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) of non-Kurdish towns, exercised through Kurdish militia and intelligence presence in non-Kurdish areas, has alienated all four groups. They fear the draft constitution would legitimise Kurdish plans to absorb into Kurdistan the areas of Nineveh where they are the majority, eliminating the limited recognition of status and rights as minorities they now have.

In the January election, the Kurds dealt with the problem of being a relatively small minority in the province by stuffing the ballot boxes, as recounted by Maj. Anthony Cruz, an Army reserve civil affairs officer assigned to work with the province electoral commission.

Cruz, now back in Los Angeles, provided a detailed account of the election in Nineveh to IPS in interviews.

The 1st Brigade, 25th Infantry Division ("Stryker Brigade") was responsible for getting ballot boxes and ballots to polling places on the Nineveh plain in January's election. But it relied on battle-hardened Kurdish pershmurga militiamen to maintain security in the towns and villages, and did not know its way around the area well enough to deliver ballot boxes there with Kurdish help, according to Cruz.

So the Brigade agreed to send a U.S. convoy with the voting materials to meet a Kurdish delegation in the Kurdish town of Faida on the border of Kurdistan 50 miles north of Mosul, so that the convoy could be guided to the largely Christian and Shabak towns on the Plain of Nineveh.

When the convoy arrived in Faida the day before the election, however, the promised Kurdish guides never came. Instead, says Cruz, the Kurdish mayor of the town came demanding the ballots for what he called Kurdish towns on the list. The convoy commander wanted to take all the ballots back, because the mission had been aborted.

A tense standoff followed, and the convoy commander called Cruz for a decision on what to do with the ballots. He advised the commander to give the mayor enough ballots for four towns, and the convoy returned to Mosul.

On election day, Cruz recalls, the U.S. military tried to find helicopters to carry the ballot materials out to the six remaining district towns on the list, but was were able get ballots to only one town, Bashiqa, which is almost entirely Christian, Shabak and Yezidi, before the 5:00 p.m. close of voting.

But according to Cruz, Kurdish militiamen stole the ballots boxes from the polling place, returning them later after obviously tampering with them and offering bribes to the election workers to accept them.

Meanwhile a much more ambitious vote fraud scheme was unfolding in Sinjar, a relatively small district town in the west known to be a predominantly Sunni Arab area.

Around 12,000 ballots had been sent to Sinjar, but on election day KDP officials in Sinjar requested a number of ballots far in excess of the estimated electorate in the town and surrounding villages, according to Cruz. He recalls that the request was supported by the office of the interim president of Iraq, Sunni Arab Ghazi Al-Yawer.

Cruz remembers joking about the "500 percent voter participation rate" in Sinjar. Nevertheless, the Stryker Brigade Combat Team complied with the request for the ballots.

Later, the province Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq (IECI) forwarded 38 ballot boxes, 174 plastic sacks and 14 cardboard cartons of ballots that had obviously been tampered with to the national IECI. In some boxes, reams of ballot papers that had not even been folded were visible. In others, boxes had been resealed with red and green duct tape.

When Cruz asked the local IECI director how many of the fraudulent ballots had come from Sinjar, he was told, "All of them."

The average number of ballots per ballot box nationwide was 500, and if each of the 236 boxes and bags of votes from Sinjar had that many ballots, those bags would have contained about 115,000 ballots. The total number of legitimate votes in Nineveh was only 190,000.

The Kurds apparently wanted to bolster their claims on Sinjar and much of the Plain of Nineveh. They also were apparently trying to ensure that non-Kurdish minorities would not have enough votes to gain representation in the interim National Assembly or in the province council.

It did succeed in reducing the vote for the national Assyrian Christian list to exactly 3,346, despite an electorate approaching 100,000. The Iraqi Turkmen Front list garnered only 1,342 votes, despite an electorate that was many times larger.

Judging from the large disparity between the 77,000 legitimate votes for the Kurdish list for the national assembly and the 110,000 legitimate votes for the Kurdish list for province council, the Kurds deliberately shifted a substantial number of votes to Al-Yawer in return for his role in getting the additional ballots need for the vote-stuffing exercise. Al-Yawer was threatened with a minimal vote in the province because of the Sunni boycott.

Although it displayed the boxes and bags of fraudulent ballots, the national IECI downplayed the seriousness of the ballot-stuffing in Nineveh and covered up the Kurdish role in it.

In his press briefing on Feb. 8, IECI spokesman Farid Ayar blamed the ballot fraud on unidentified "militiamen or armed men". According to Maj. Cruz, however, the only such incident in the province was in Bashiqa.

Ayar refused to divulge which party would have profited from the fraudulent ballots, telling the journalists, "I can't accuse any party, because we don't know."

The KDP obviously miscalculated in thinking that electoral officials in Nineveh could be bribed to turn a blind eye to such crude ballot stuffing. But no damage was done by the failed attempt. The IECI helped by diverting press attention from the Kurds, and U.S. news media never dug into the story behind the mountain of fraudulent ballots exhibited by the commission.

In the constitutional referendum, the Shiite government will share the Kurdish interest in doing whatever is necessary to avert the defeat of the constitution in Nineveh. Meanwhile, the U.S. military remains heavily dependent on Kurds in Nineveh. The KDP may well believe that a more sophisticated Kurdish ballot-stuffing scheme will work on October 15.

*Gareth Porter is an historian and national security policy analyst. His latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam", was published in June. (END/2005)

Related Araticle:

Kurds Prevent Assyrian Representation, Continue Divisive Formula in Iraq

March 28 , 05 

(AINA) -- The convening of the Iraqi National Assembly on March 16 symbolized a bitter realization for Iraqi Assyrians that the Iraqi road to democracy remains dotted with pitfalls. Assyrian Christians (also known as Chaldeans and Syriacs) were left reeling following the final certification of the elections on February 17 by the Iraqi High Election Commission (IHEC). Despite formal worldwide protests1 by over a dozen Assyrian organizations regarding vote fraud, threats, and killings targeting Assyrians, the IHEC final report white washed any protests by Assyrians and failed to accommodate demands for voting rights for disenfranchised minorities in the Nineveh Plain including Assyrians, Yezidis, Shabak, and Turkman. Even the UN report, eager to move ahead with a semblance of governance in the new Iraq, ignored all minority complaints of nearly total disenfranchisement.

For Assyrian Christians, referred to as ChaldoAssyrians in the Iraqi Transitional Administrative Law (TAL, English, Arabic), democracy in Iraq has remained elusive and, at times, downright dangerous in some areas. A pre-election terror campaign by warlord Masoud Barzani's Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), as well as beheadings, beatings, mutilations, kidnappings and church bombings in Baghdad and Mosul, succeeded in drastically reducing Assyrian voter turnout in Baghdad, Kirkuk, and Mosul. On election day, when thousands of would be voters defied threats in the Nineveh Plain, armed thugs of the KDP simply stole the ballot boxes destined to the towns and villages of the Nineveh Plain (AINA, 01-31-05, 02-27-05). Voter lockout of Assyrians in and out of Iraq was also suspected.

The end result for Assyrian Christians was an abysmal showing in the National Assembly. The disenfranchisement of Assyrians was to a level perhaps never before seen in Iraq, including during the reign of Saddam Hussein. Out of all of the independent Assyrian Iraqi slates including the Assyrian National Gathering (139), the Rafidain Democratic Coalition (148), the Rafidain National list (204) and the Chaldean Democratic Union Party (223), only one representative reached the necessary minimum threshold level of 29,000 votes, Mr. Yonadam Kanna of the Assyrian Democratic Movement (ADM). That one single representative was all that could be mustered from a population of 1-1.5 million Assyrian Christians inside Iraq, not including the several hundred thousand outside the country.

Another Assyrian Christian representative succeeded to the National Assembly through the secular Iraqi List slate (285), headed by interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi. Mrs. Wijdan Mikhael, although not part of an independent Assyrian political organization, has none the less received hopeful praise by some Iraqi Assyrians as someone who is aware of and sensitive to the critical issues facing indigenous Assyrian Christians in Iraq. Mrs. Mikhael's election through the Iraqi List slate reflects support given by some Iraqi Assyrian Christians to the moderate secular leadership of Ayad Allawi.

In marked contrast, the election of four other Christian representatives from the Kurdish slate (Mrs. Jacklin Qawsan Zomaya, Mr. Ablahad Afram Sawa, Mr. Salim Petros Elias, Dr. Goriel Isho Khamis) poses a grave and ominous threat to legitimate Assyrian Christian aspirations in Iraq. The four Kurdish list Christians represent smaller fringe groups who, according to one analyst "have no standing in the communities they claim to represent." Moreover, "these groups knew they had no chance of garnering support; as a result, they allied themselves with Kurds simply to gain a presence in the National Assembly."

Mr. Ablahad Afram remains one prime example. A self-described member of the KDP, Mr. Afram established the Chaldean Democratic Union under the explicit direction of the KDP in order to create a sectarian split between Christians from the Church of the East and the Chaldean Church. One analyst summarized "Mr. Afram's organization is an artificial creation and, were it not for direct support from the KDP, would not exist at all. It has no platform or mission other than to periodically declare -- at the behest of the KDP -- that Chaldeans and Assyrians are separate people."

Another representative on the Kurdish list is Dr. Goreal Esho Khamis of the ChaldoAssur Organization, an affiliate of the Kurdish Communist Party. The third Christian member on the Kurdish list, Mr. Salim Petros Elias was elected as a representative of the Chaldean Cultural Society, another front organization sponsored by the KDP. Rounding out the list, Ms. Jacklin Zomaya was elected to the Assembly as a member of the Assyrian Patriotic Party. The APP likewise allied themselves with the Kurdish list because as one observer noted "fearing elimination and irrelevance, they joined with the KDP. In their calculus, they could not have won on their own."

As far as the KDP is concerned, directing 4 out of 6 of the total Assyrian representatives in the Assembly virtually assures them near total control over Assyrian political aspirations. With Assyrians being a troublesome obstacle to Kurdish expansion into the Nineveh Plain, the KDP scheme hopes to capitalize on two important points regarding Assyrian Christians: institutionalizing a formal legal split amongst various Assyrian Christian communities based on self-identifying terms and the subversion of calls for an Assyrian self-administered area in the Nineveh Plain.

Following the fall of the Baathist regime, the Assyrian Democratic Organization (ADO) and the Assyrian Democratic Movement (ADM) cosponsored the Chaldean Syriac Assyrian Conference in Baghdad during October, 2003. The two most important points of agreement that emerged from the conference were the consensus decision by all of the communities to legally refer the "Chaldean Syriac Assyrian" people as "ChaldoAssyrians," and to demand the establishment of an Assyrian self-administered area in the Nineveh Plain. Through perseverance, both points were incorporated into the TAL, with article 53D guaranteeing administrative rights for ChaldoAssyrians.

The KDP strategy is geared to attack these major Assyrian political objectives head on. First, by propping up groups who maintain fabricated sectarian-ethnic identities and declare that Assyrians and Chaldeans are separate people, the KDP hopes to fragment the third largest demographic group in Iraq -- the Christians -- into smaller, less significant fragments. As one Iraqi noted, "Mr. Ablahad Afram has evolved into the point man to drive the KDP wedge into the consensus position."

Secondly, the Assyrian desire for a self-administered area outside the direct control of the Kurdish occupied region is anathema to the larger Kurdish vision of an ever expanding "Kurdistan" reaching west through the Nineveh and Dohuk provinces to the Syrian border. As one Assyrian analyst noted "They (the KDP) have drawn their map and it includes the whole of the Nineveh Plain." Furthermore, in response to independent Assyrian calls for a self-administered area, the analyst added "it is widely believed that the four Christian representatives on the Kurdish list have foresworn any ambition for administrative rights in the Nineveh Plain except as a wholly owned and subjugated portion of the Kurdish occupied area." For Assyrians, that leaves only one or at best two representatives, themselves under threat, to fend for themselves in an Assembly of 275 controlled by much larger blocs.

For the KDP, appointing the bulk of the Assyrian Christian representation in the Assembly has kept alive KDP dreams of incorporating the Nineveh province into the Kurdish occupied region. For the Assyrian leadership, the move has been a predictable continuation of the ongoing policy of KDP expansion, then consolidation, and then homogenization of adjacent areas by ethnic cleansing. One analyst summarized the KDP strategy by noting "The KDP has executed a carefully orchestrated 3 pronged strategy of violently terrorizing the Assyrian community, deliberately blocking any real ability to participate in the democratic process, and finally, cynically propping up illegitimate organizations to be our official representatives."

One activist adamantly summarized the widely held mainstream Assyrian view by saying "Mr. Barzani can add as many Christians to his list as he likes. These so called leaders are Barzani's representatives, not ours. They don't have the backing of the community and widely known to be there simply to subvert our genuine and legitimate aspirations as a people." For the indigenous Assyrian Christians as a whole, the very process that produced this scenario remains at its root undemocratic and illegitimate.