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Shi'ites in search of
allies
By Charles Recknagel
PRAGUE - Iraqi politicians are hailing the
elections as a success in putting the country on
the road to a functioning multiparty system of
government. Iraqi National Security Adviser
Muwaffaq al-Rubay'i told reporters as the election
results were announced on Sunday that they proved
there is political "competition" in the country.
"This is the first time ever in the
history of this nation that the people of Iraq
have voted freely and you can see there [is]
competition. It is a free and fair and full
election."
The election results show the
United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), endorsed by
preeminent Shi'ite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali
al-Sistani, as winning some 48% of the vote to
gain about 140 seats in the new 275-seat assembly.
In second place is the united Kurdish bloc, with
about 26% of the vote. Candidates allied with
interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi took third
place with 13.8% of the vote.
The tally is
still open to slight but probably not significant
changes as the Independent Electoral Commission
continues to examine some challenges to the vote
count. The final confirmed election results are be
announced in a few days.
Analysts said the
challenge for the top three election winners now
will be how to form sufficiently strong alliances
to either make themselves the ruling party or part
of an opposition bloc so powerful it cannot be
ignored.
Some of the upcoming votes in the
National Assembly will require the ruling party to
muster two-thirds of the votes in the chamber.
That is the case with the assembly's first major
piece of business, electing a presidency council
that includes a president and two deputies.
However, some other motions, including the
vote of confidence to approve the prime
minister-elect and cabinet, will require only a
simple majority to pass.
The first move in
the coalition-building game now belongs to the
victorious UIA. It comprises a disparate group of
candidates who are mostly drawn from Shi'ite
religious parties, but it also includes members of
secular Shi'ite parties and members of Iraq's
minority Sunni and other communities. The alliance
must find a way to keep its existing group intact
and reinforce it with as many additional seats in
the assembly as possible.
Ahmad al-Rikaby
is director of Radio Dijla, a talk-radio station
in Baghdad on which listeners and public figures
air their views. He told RFE/RL that one of the
first groups the UIAe might court is the bloc of
Iyad Allawi, a secular Shi'ite politician.
Al-Rikaby said that third-place Allawi's
importance as a potential coalition partner can be
judged by the reception he received from the
second-place Kurdish bloc last week. Kurdish
political leaders accorded him honors usually
reserved for the visiting head of another country.
"When Allawi visited, he was received by an honor
guard and the reception was very, very similar to
the receptions we see on Arabic television
[stations] when a president is visiting a
neighboring country," al-Rikaby said. "The way
Allawi was received is a clear reflection of the
Kurdish interest in bringing Allawi to their side.
So, I think this example gives us a lot of
indications about what is happening now in the
Iraqi political arena."
The UIA could also
court the Kurds. A key leader in the alliance -
Abd al-Aziz al-Hakim of the Supreme Council for
Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) - said earlier
in February that "the alliance with the Kurds is
known, it is continuing".
Al-Rikaby said
that the UIA also could try to build its strength
by wooing some of the smaller parties that won a
handful of seats in the assembly. These small
parties range from the fourth-placed party of
Iraq's Sunni interim President Yawir Ajil
al-Ghazi, to moderate Islamic splinter parties, to
a Turkoman party.
Al-Rikaby said one thing
that makes coalition building particularly fluid
in Iraq is that most of the key parties and
leaders - including Allawi, the Kurds, the SCIRI
and many others - long worked together as exiled
opponents to Saddam Hussein.
"All these
groups which we see today, they were together as
part of the Iraqi opposition," al-Rikaby said.
"They dealt with each other for many years, they
know each other very well. I think that what we
will see in the future will be very much similar
to what we have seen in the past. The relation was
fluid, we have seen disagreements, however,
despite everything, they never stopped dealing
with each other."
As Iraq's election
winners now engage in new rounds of coalition
building to maximize their strength in the new
assembly, major questions remain as to how to
bring the formerly politically dominant Sunni
community into the political process.
The
election results indicate that most Sunni voters
stayed home on January 30 amid security concerns
and calls from some community leaders to boycott
the poll as handing power to the Shi'ite majority.
Leading Iraqi politicians are signaling that they
now want to include the Sunnis in the National
Assembly's main tasks, even though the Sunnis
themselves are underrepresented in the new body.
The National Assembly's main tasks are to
choose the next interim government and to oversee
the writing of the country's permanent
constitution. If the constitution is accepted,
Iraq will go to a new round of elections for a
national government in December.
Copyright (c) 2005, RFE/RL Inc.
Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio
Liberty,
1201 Connecticut Ave NW, Washington DC
20036 |
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