WASHINGTON - 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 US 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
organizations - appears to be united behind a "no"
vote on the constitution. Kurds number only about
200,000 and non-Kurdish, non-Arab minorities
another 500,000 to 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 legitimize 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
Major Anthony Cruz, an US Army reserve civil
affairs officer assigned to work with the
province's 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 Pershmerga 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 without
Kurdish help, according to Cruz.
So the
brigade agreed to send a US 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, said 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 recalled, the US military tried to find
helicopters to carry the ballot materials out to
the six remaining district towns on the list, but
was able get ballots before the 5pm close of
voting to only one town, Bashiqa, which is almost
entirely Christian, Shabak and Yezidi.
But
according to Cruz, Kurdish militiamen stole the
ballot 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.
About 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
recalled 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% voter-participation rate" in
Sinjar. Nevertheless, the Stryker Brigade Combat
Team complied with the request for the ballots.
Later, the province's 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 Yawer in return for
his role in getting the additional ballots need
for the vote-stuffing exercise. 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
media briefing on February 8, IECI spokesman Farid
Ayar blamed the ballot fraud on unidentified
"militiamen or armed men". According to 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 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 media
attention from the Kurds, and US news media never
dug into the story behind the mountain of
fraudulent ballots exhibited by the commission.
In the constitutional referendum, the
Shi'ite government will share the Kurdish interest
in doing whatever is necessary to avert the defeat
of the constitution in Nineveh. Meanwhile, the US
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.
