Focus on election preparations in north

With Iraqi elections scheduled for January, no part of the country will be busier than the Kurdish-controlled north. Voters there will be asked to visit the polling stations three times - for national and governorate elections and to choose representatives of the Kurdistan Parliament, based in Arbil. Officials here say that the great activity is likely to be made easier by the fact that the Kurds have been here before, first in 1992 to elect parliamentary deputies, then in February 2001, for municipal elections. "If we had to, we could be ready for elections in a week's time," Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) politburo member Mahmud Sor told IRIN in Arbil. "We have the ballot boxes, we have recent voting lists, and we have no security problem." Others boast that the Kurdish experience had a decisive effect on United Nations and Coalition officials debating how next year's elections should be run in the absence of a full census. A small team of UN staff are working on the elections from Baghdad at the moment. "For the municipal elections, we based voter lists on statistical information the World Food Programme [WFP] gathered for its countrywide food distribution programme," said Zirar Haji Mirkhan, manager of the Regional Statistics Office in Arbil. "It was our suggestion the same method should be used for the whole of Iraq," he added. The only Kurdish member of the commission set up this June to prepare for and oversee elections, Safwat Rashid, agreed that elections were likely to be easier to organise in the north than elsewhere in Iraq. But he also hinted that the Iraqi Kurdish area's recent dabbling in democracy could be a double-edged sword. "We are working with Kurdish politicians to ensure that elections in Iraqi Kurdistan meet the demands of Iraq's new electoral law," he told IRIN by telephone from Baghdad, referring to the decree presented by outgoing Coalition boss Paul Bremer this June. On three points in particular, former Kurdish electoral practice seems to be in conflict with the new rules. Both the 1992 and 2001 elections used the party slate system that is to be employed throughout Iraq early next year, but with one major difference. Under Iraqi election rules, slates are fixed - the first name on a party's list is the first to be elected and so on. Under existing Kurdish rules, on the other hand, parties are permitted to select representatives from anywhere on the list, once they know what percentage of votes - and therefore seats - they have won. The effect, according to Amina Mahmud, executive director of the Kurdish Institute for Elections, an independent NGO based in Sulaymaniyah, has been to turn the Kurdish parliament into an institution representing party interests directly and the people's interests not at all. Party control of the legislative branch has been further strengthened by the tendency of party leaders to change deputies as they see fit. "Barely a single deputy in parliament today was on the party lists back in 1992," said Hama Kerim Mawat, a senior member of Islamic Union, which secured around 20 percent of the Kurdish vote at municipal elections in 2001. Asked about such discrepancies between local practice and new Iraqi rules, officials from the two major Kurdish parties are coy. But most independent observers are confident they will put up little opposition to change. They are less sure, however, about the issue of the electoral hurdle. One of the main aims of Iraq's new electoral law, as well as the UN's choice of the so-called closed list, single district voting system, has been to make elections more inclusive by offering smaller parties the chance of representation. In the north, on the other hand, smaller parties have largely been excluded from legislative bodies by a 1992 decision to impose an electoral hurdle of 7 percent. With the third largest party winning a meagre 5 percent of those elections, the hurdle has effectively polarised the region between the KDP, in Arbil, and the Sulaymaniyah-based Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). "So far I have seen little evidence of a serious discussion of this issue," Assos Hardi, editor of the independent weekly Hawlati, told IRIN in Sulaymaniyah. "Understandably, since a change would not be in the interests of the two big parties." In Arbil, Hama Kerim Mawat told IRIN that inter-party discussions were now centred on reducing the hurdle from 7 percent to 3 percent. "Even that is too high," he said, adding that he thought it highly unlikely the hurdle would be totally removed. It is perhaps because of these difficulties, local politicians say, that official preparations for the January elections have not yet moved beyond theoretical discussions. In the absence of any government-led initiatives to prepare people for polling day, that job has largely fallen to independent institutions such as Amina Mahmud's Kurdish Institute for Elections (KIE). With its main aim the improvement of what Mahmud calls "voters' civic education", KIE started the first of three ongoing courses this July. Funded largely by the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the NGO plans to have given direct training to a minimum of 8,000 members of the public - mainly in Kurdish areas but also in Basra in the south and Baghdad - before January. "It is a start, and only a small one," Mahmud said.