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From War News Radio: post-election fallout in Iraqi Al-Anbar province

In print | February 12, 2009

The story Maan Khater tells about voting in Anbar’s recent provincial election is a happily uneventful one. He and his father and brother walked from their house in downtown Ramadi to a nearby polling station, found their names on the registration list, waited in line for a few minutes and cast their ballots. Khater, a unit manager with USAID, says this election stands in stark contrast to the previous provincial elections in January of 2005. Thinking back to those elections, Khater recounts, “the insurgents had closed off the neighborhoods. I was lucky to vote because I lived next to a school that is an election center. It was not a very good thing to talk about the 2005 election.” This time around, voting was far more secure, with vehicle curfews in place and a large police presence. Voter participation understandably increased, up to around 40 percent in Anbar province as a whole.

There were still flaws in the election system this time around. Voter registration lists were based on the government food ration cards, and some Iraqis (especially those displaced from their former neighborhoods) searched in vain for a polling station that would let them vote. Election monitors also report being denied entry to some polling centers. But the more alarming developments in Al-Anbar Province came after the polls were closed and two rival parties started claiming victory. The party viewed as front-runners before election day threatened that, if their opposition were to be certified as the winners, “Al-Anbar will be the new Darfur.” Thaar Al-Dulaimi, a Ramadi English teacher, said he was frustrated by what he saw as political posturing. “Everyone accuses the other of faking the elections. I think there is a confusion and both parties are nervous.”

What happened in Anbar after the polls were closed provides a window into the present state of democracy in Iraq. Understanding exactly what happened requires a little history, from the 2005 provincial elections.

In 2005, many Sunnis chose to boycott the vote, some to protest the invasion and their ouster from power and others in response to threats against voters made by Sunni religious leaders and insurgent groups. Out of over a million people in the largely Sunni province, not even 4,000 cast ballots. Only one major party, the Iraqi Islamic Party, or IIP, campaigned in Anbar. It won all 41 council seats in the province. According to Dr. Michael Knights, head of the Iraq program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, this was hardly a recipe for success. “Anbar province has been in a political cloud since 2005 because of the very unusual circumstances under which the provincial council was formed,” he says. “The Iraqi Islamic party has come under attack by the various tribal groups who contended that the IIP cooperated with the U.S. military and should not have been given control of the provincial council.” Those tribal groups are the traditional power brokers in Anbar, and resented losing out to a political party that many saw as being closely tied to Baghdad. “Before 2005,” Al-Dulaimi explains, “the [IIP] was the most popular in Ramadi and in Anbar. But it does nothing for tribal counties. It just stays in Baghdad involved in the political movement.”

Beginning in late 2005, many of Anbar’s tribal groups joined forces in the fight against Al-Qaeda in the province as Iraq saw the beginnings of its so-called Awakening Movement take form. As the groups started to gain widespread support, they began to enter Anbar’s political process through the back door, through informal councils that worked with and operated in parallel to the official provincial councils. Knights says that thanks to this approach, “Many of the tribal groups felt they had some stake in the system and that their voices were being listened to.” But, he continues, that didn’t stop them from looking to take over the provincial council and formal control of the province. The Awakening groups received support from the U.S. in their fight against Al-Qaeda, and both the groups and officials in Washington saw the 2009 provincial elections as a chance for them to turn their influence into political power.

But the road to victory wasn’t a smooth one. Knights says the Awakening councils and their militias quickly started fracturing into rival factions. “They have never been a particularly homogeneous force, and have always been run by tribal leaders that have strong personalities and rivalries with each other. As a result, it was very easy for these various Awakening movements to be split apart by the Iraqi Islamic Party, which is a fairly well-organized party.” The splintering of the tribal coalition was seen to blame for their loss in the elections when the IIP announced early in the week that, against the odds, they had defeated the tribal groups yet again. That announcement was what touched off the storm of accusations and threats from the Awakening leaders. But when the Independent High Electoral Commission released preliminary results a few days later, the political landscape changed. A moderate, more secularist list called the Iraqi National Project took the most votes, with the Awakening tribal coalition in second and the IIP a close third. Met with this mixed result in which neither the tribes nor the IIP won outright, the parties backed off their threats of violence and began the work of negotiating a coalition to run the governing council. Reflecting upon the political upheaval Anbar faced last week, Electoral Commission Chairman Faraj Al-Hayderi expressed frustration, but not surprise. “In Iraq’s elections, you have 14,500 candidates competing for 440 seats. This means that about 14,100 will lose. This is not the United States, where the loser congratulates the winner. They will blame me and the electoral commission for their loss, and will accuse the winning political slates.”

With more voters going to the polls, more parties on the ballot, and better security all around, there is no question that this round of provincial elections was an improvement on the last in Anbar. But it might be a while before concession speeches will replace threats and accusations on the political stage.