Educating the young about elections in the north

"In 1978, the Iraqi constitution described Kurds and Arabs as equal partners in Iraq. In reality, that was a lie. Why would these January elections change that?" The speaker, Lokman Abdullah, is a final year student at Sayyid Sadiq secondary school, 45 minutes south of the northern Iraqi city of Sulaymaniyah. Having turned 18, it will be the first time Abdullah will be able to cast a vote as he has reached the legal age. "A fair question," replied Pakhshan Mahmood. "But it's only by voting that you can be sure you're representatives will attend negotiations on a new constitution." The class of 30 boys and girls nodded. A lawyer by training, Mahmood works for an NGO that, perhaps more than any other in Iraq, has voters' civic education as its primary concern. Set up in Sulaymaniyah in 2002, the Kurdistan Institute of Elections (KIE) turned its attention to the upcoming Iraqi elections last December. It collaborated with local experts to prepare educational TV adverts. It has published brochures and posters. But its favoured means of communication remains the lecture. "We have three parallel programmes running, sponsored by the US-based National Endowment for Democracy [NED], USAID [US Agency for International Development] and RTI [an international development consultancy organisation]," KIE director, Amina Mahmood, told IRIN in Sulaymaniyah. "By December, when the programmes end, we should have talked face to face with at least 20,000 people." One of 10 trainers working on KIE's Iraq-wide NED-funded programme, Pakhshan Mahmood has organised over 35 conferences already. Her audiences vary: party officials, civil servants and students. So do attitudes towards her work. "One party member told me I was wasting my time; another said I was only doing it for money," she said. "But one old peshmerga [Kurdish fighters] said our programmes were as important as the 35 years he had spent fighting in the mountains." Faced with widespread ignorance about the nuts and bolts of the electoral process, KIE's priority is to explain how it works. In her talk at Sayyid Sadiq, Pakhshan Mahmood described what proportional representation was and how the closed list system designed by the UN for January differed from earlier elections held in the Kurdish-controlled north in 1992 and 2001. Under proportional representation, parties, groups and independent candidates are elected to the parliament in proportion to their support in the electorate. In the closed list system, parties put up lists of candidates, which can equal the number of seats to be contested. The voter casts one vote for a party and seats are allocated in proportion the parties' share of votes. Mahmood also told students how to ensure their names were on the electoral roll based by Iraq's new electoral commission on the countrywide rationing system. In a question and answer session, she touched on more controversial issues: the power of party-controlled militias in Iraq and widespread allegations of vote-buying. Out in the corridor after the discussion, the students were enthusiastic. "She's been to the school twice now," said Barzan Jamal, 18. "You should have seen how ignorant we were the first time round." For KIE staff, though, job satisfaction goes beyond imparting knowledge. When she first came to Sayyid Sadiq, Pakhshan Mahmood said, most students not only knew little about the up-coming elections, they tended to be dismissive of them. This time, every one of the 20 students old enough to vote said they intended to do so. Amina Mahmood put the point differently. "Two months ago, the local satellite station televised a debate about the elections - of the 15 participants, 12 called for a boycott," she said. "I was invited again a week ago, and asked the producer to find me a pro-boycotter to debate against. He rang me yesterday to say he had found nobody."