The assassination on Tuesday of a Sunni candidate in Iraq’s election cast a shadow over expatriate voting for a new Parliament that many hope will restore stability to the war-torn country.
The election has been billed as a critical democratic step for Iraq nearly three years after the United States-led invasion, with officials determined to draw Sunni Arabs back into the political process and undermine support for the insurgency.
But just two days before the main vote on Thursday, Mizher al-Dulaimi became the latest victim in a string of political murders to have marred campaigning.
Dulaimi was shot dead in his car by gunmen in Ramadi, a western Sunni city almost besieged by insurgents, an interior ministry source said.
Head of a list presented by the independent Iraqi Free Progressive Party, he was a leading candidate in the troubled al-Anbar province, which has seen some of the worst violence of the insurgency.
Al-Qaeda has warned people in Ramadi not to vote and threatened to kill those who participate in the election.
Accusation
In an archive interview rebroadcast by pan-Arab al-Arabiya television after the murder, Dulaimi accused Iraqi soldiers of tearing up his campaign posters in al-Anbar and charged that the government wanted to arrest him.
”Some members of the national guard were searching homes in the area and found some of my pictures and posters; they tore them up and told residents not to vote for me.”
Dulaimi said he received information ”there was a concerted effort on the government’s part, especially the interior and defence ministries, to set up a security file on me and to arrest me before the start of the elections”.
Outside Iraq, voting took place on Tuesday in 15 countries where exiles have settled since fleeing the former Saddam Hussein dictatorship or the rampant violence since the 2003 US-led invasion.
Expatriate voting coincided with the second anniversary of the capture of Saddam, pulled from a hole on a farm near his home town of Tikrit, north of Baghdad.
His trial for crimes against humanity, put on hold until December 21 to allow Iraq to concentrate on the vote, has nonetheless cast a further shadow over an election set to consign his regime ever deeper into history.
Ballot
Expatriates have until Thursday to cast their ballot when their homeland will grind to a halt under security measures intended to minimise bloodshed as the 15,5-million electorate chooses a 275-member Parliament.
”We are making every effort to ensure the elections are honest because any problem will have repercussions on the ballot in Iraq as well,” electoral official Farid Ayar told reporters in Baghdad.
The main overseas voting takes place in Jordan, as well as Australia, Austria, Britain, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Iran, Lebanon, The Netherlands, Sweden, Syria, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and the US.
Electoral officials are hoping for higher turnout than in January — the first free elections in half a decade — when only about a quarter of an expected one million émigrés registered to vote for a transitional Parliament.
Around a thousand Iraqis voted in Amman and dozens in the United Arab Emirates, where polling stations were set up with heightened security as men in traditional dress accompanied wives and children to the ballot box.
”We have never witnessed change of this magnitude in all our life,” said 73-year-old Ghanem Nuri.
Pull-out
Many hope that the leaders of the next four years will stabilise the country and set the stage for the roughly 160 000 US troops to leave.
”We hope the occupation forces will leave the country because the Americans have done no good in Iraq,” said Allawi Abed al-Dulaimi.
North of Baghdad, a police commando and businessman working with the US army were killed in attacks.
US President George Bush has warned that the election will not end violence that has killed about 30 000 Iraqis and 2 400 US troops since 2003.
The Times newspaper said Washington and London are planning a phased pull-out of their forces as soon as a permanent government is installed.
Iraqi officials warn that a premature withdrawal of foreign troops could prove catastrophic for a country increasingly enmeshed in deadly intercommunal violence.
Neighbouring Turkey is also hoping for political stability in Iraq, fearing that Kurdish groups controlling northern Iraq will profit from the power vacuum to break free from Baghdad and set a destabilising model for its own restive Kurds in south-eastern Turkey. — Sapa-AFP