Early Results Show Religious Groups Leading in Iraqi Vote
By EDWARD WONG New York Times
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 19 - Early voting results announced by Iraqi electoral officials today indicated that religious groups, particularly the main Shiite coalition, had taken a commanding lead, with nearly two-thirds of the ballots having been counted.
The secular coalition led by Ayad Allawi, the former prime minister, had won only meager support in crucial provinces where it had expected to do well, including Baghdad.
The front-runner in Sunni Arab regions was a religious coalition whose leaders have advocated resistance to both the American military and the Shiite-led government and has insisted that President Bush set a timetable for withdrawal.
The preliminary results accounted for more than 90 percent of votes cast in 11 of Iraq's 18 provinces. About seven million ballots have been counted across the country, of an estimated turnout of 11 million in the vote last Thursday for a full, four-year government, electoral officials said.
Officials warned that today's results were uncertified and could still change. (edit; translation, the U.S. has requested time to through fraud change the vote to get what they wanted --max)The Iraqi electoral commission has received 692 complaints of campaigning violations or voter fraud, at least 20 of which are considered serious enough to potentially "affect specific election results," said Adel al-Lami, the commission's chief electoral officer. Several candidates, including Mr. Allawi, have angrily accused the main Shiite coalition of resorting to such underhanded tactics as tearing down posters and ordering police officers to campaign for the coalition.
Yet, the early results gave strong hints of voting trends. Voters generally cast their ballots based on ethnic or religious allegiances, as in last January's elections for a transitional government. It has also become apparent that much of the electorate is staunchly religious, in a country that many experts had once proclaimed, before the American-led invasion, to have a large secular middle class.
The early results for Baghdad province, the most diverse region of the country, provided the strongest indication of the religious nature of the voting. With 89 percent of the ballots there counted, the main Shiite coalition, the United Iraqi Alliance, had won 1.4 million votes, or 59 percent of the total. The runner-up was the Iraqi Consensus Front, the main religious Sunni Arab coalition, with 19 percent of the votes. Mr. Allawi's secular coalition, the Iraqi List, came in third, at 14 percent.
Fifty-nine of the 275 seats in the Council of Representatives are up for grabs in Baghdad, more than in any other province.
The early results come as a blow to Mr. Allawi and his fellow candidates, who had expected to win broad support in Baghdad. In last January's elections, Mr. Allawi's list won only 40 of 275 seats in the transitional assembly, a dismal performance that spurred him to reject any role in the current Shiite-led government.
Mr. Allawi, a secular Shiite and former Baath Party member, as well as a White House favorite, had been hoping that he would win more votes this time because of growing discontent with the transitional government and the earnest participation of Sunni Arab voters, who had largely boycotted the January elections.
Mr. Allawi has already filed formal complaints against the Shiite coalition, accusing it of campaign malfeasance and vote fraud.
"We're waiting for their response to the violations and falsifications," Saad al-Janabi, a candidate on the Iraqi List, said of the Iraqi electoral commission. "That could have a big effect. We're asking for the United Nations, the United States and international groups to intervene at once."
Another prominent secular candidate, Ahmad Chalabi, the former Pentagon favorite, won less than half a percent of the vote in Baghdad, possibly denying him a seat in the new Parliament.
Until all the ballots are counted, it will be impossible to determine exactly how many seats each political group will get. That uncertainty is compounded by the fact that 45 of the 275 seats will not be divvied up to the winners in the provinces, but will be given out by the electoral commission according to an arcane set of rules.
How many seats each political group ultimately gets will determine what alliances they will try to make as they negotiate to form a government. A two-thirds vote of the Council of Representatives is needed to install the executive branch, so the groups will have to band together in a coalition or national unity government. Last January, after three months of negotiations, the religious Shiite coalition and the main Kurdish coalition came together to install a president, prime minister and cabinet.
The early results show that the Shiite coalition will once again be at the center of the negotiations because it will almost certainly win more than a third of the seats, giving it veto power over any proposed government.
Even if he wins less seats than last time, Mr. Allawi still has a slim chance of cobbling together a government if he can unite with the Sunni Arabs and the Kurds, and if he can pull away some of the religious Shiites. That task would be made more difficult by the influence of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most revered Shiite cleric in Iraq, who has fought hard to install the religious Shiite parties into power.
An important question is whether the Sunni Arab parties will be invited to join in the new government. Those faring well from the early returns are conservatives like the Iraqi Consensus Front and Saleh al-Mutlak, a hard-line politician. They disagree with the religious Shiites on such fundamental issues as whether autonomous regions should exist, the distribution of oil revenues and what form of Islam should dominate.
The Bush administration's hopes for quelling the raging Sunni-led insurgency rest on drawing Sunni Arabs into a political dialogue. If the Sunnis are denied their say in the new government, that could further inflame the guerilla war and possibly undermine plans to draw down the 160,000 American troops here.
After a lull around the elections, violence flared across parts of Iraq today. A car bomb exploded by an Iraqi police patrol in Baghdad in the morning, killing at least two civilians and injuring at least eight others, including four policemen, an Interior Ministry official said. Gunmen opened fire on a convoy carrying the deputy governor of Baghdad, Tarik al-Zawbai, killing three bodyguards and injuring Mr. Zawbai, another guard and a pedestrian, the official said.
The American military said a marine was killed Sunday by small-arms fire near Ramadi, the insurgent-rife capital of Anbar Province.
The Islamic Army in Iraq, a Baathist militant group, released a six-second video showing what it claimed to be the killing of Ronald Alan Schulz, an American security contractor abducted earlier this month, according to the SITE Institute, which tracks insurgent postings. The Islamic Army said on Dec. 8 that it had killed Mr. Schulz, 40, a native of North Dakota, but gave no confirmation at the time. The latest video shows a man in a black hood firing an automatic rifle at a blindfolded figure kneeling on the ground; several bullets strike the figure around the head and shoulders.
Because the victim has his back turned to the camera, it is impossible to identify him.
The Islamic Army had posted messages before the elections saying it would not attack polling centers or voters. There was little violence on election day, indicating that guerilla groups had decided that Sunni Arabs should regain some measure of power by taking part in the political process.
AI
