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Fallujah sees high sunni turnout Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
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Posted on Sat, Oct. 15, 2005
Fallujah sees high Sunni turnout this time
BY AAMER MADHANI
Chicago Tribune
FALLUJAH, Iraq - (KRT) - The purportedly nonpartisan election judge manning one of the polling sites in this Sunni stronghold couldn't contain his disdain for the proposed constitution.
"I pray to God that everyone votes `no,'" said Udai al-Hatib, the director of a polling site in a north side neighborhood of Fallujah, a volatile city that once was the heart of the insurgency.
Eight months after Sunnis largely boycotted the first national election and nearly a year after insurgents and U.S. troops fought the most pitched battle of the war, tens of thousands of voters in Fallujah and the city's surrounding villages went to the polls Saturday to say "no" to the proposed constitution.
The high turnout in Fallujah fell in line with voting patterns in other heavily populated Sunni areas, including Diyala, Salah al Din and Nineveh. While the final result for the referendum is days away, the high voter turnout in the Sunni strongholds gave some hope to Sunnis that they may be able to block the constitution.
Last November, the U.S. Marines in Fallujah leveled a large portion of the city, which they said was a safe haven for terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his al-Qaida in Iraq insurgents. On Saturday, U.S. diplomats were framing the large turnout as one of the first true signs that this once renegade city is ready for political engagement.
While Fallujah's residents said they primarily voted to express their opposition to the Shiite-dominated central government in Baghdad, the city's mayor and his deputies were ready to use the rare moment of being in the Americans' good graces to their advantage.
With hours to go before the polls closed Saturday, U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad made his first trip to Fallujah since he took over the post in July. The mayor, Dhari Abdul Hadi, and some of his deputies bluntly told Khalilzad the referendum would receive little support in the city.
"We vote against sectarianism, we vote against militias and we voted this way to bring Iraq back to a time before the fall of the regime, when there was no talk about whether one was Shia or Kurd or Arab," the mayor said.
Khalilzad congratulated residents on their participation but cautioned them against being consumed by "nostalgia" for the past.
"The past is finished," Khalilzad said.
Hadi seemed to understand the significance of Khalilzad courting city leaders and the plum opportunity he had before him.
Without missing a beat, Hadi told the ambassador of some of Fallujah's greatest troubles: the failure of Iraq's Shiite-dominated government to send the city hundreds of millions of dollars that were promised for repairs after the November military operations and fear that Fallujah will not be properly represented in the National Assembly.
Khalilzad responded that he would talk to Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari. Hours later, the ambassador broke the Ramadan fast with al-Jaafari and expressed his concerns, a U.S. Embassy official said.
"They understand that politically they have put themselves in a pretty good position," the U.S. official said. "What they have done with the referendum is prove themselves capable of mobilizing a significant voting block."
In the predominantly Sunni province of Anbar, turnout was low outside of Fallujah and surrounding villages. The Independent Electorial Commission of Iraq (IECI) reported 189,000 went to the polls in the province, with the vast majority of votes coming from Fallujah. U.S. Marine officials in Fallujah said turnout was high but believed the commission's count for the city might be overstated.
U.S. and Iraqi forces have run a series of major operations in the Euphrates river valley and have faced heavy fighting in the provincial capital of Ramadi, which may have kept voters away from the polls.
Sunni Arabs, who have largely expressed opposition to the charter, can block the constitution if two-thirds of voters in three provinces vote against it. Anbar, Nineveh and Salhuddin are the provinces where Sunnis have the best shot at reaching that proportion.
Last week, the Shiite-Kurdish bloc struck a deal with the leading Sunni political party, the Iraqi Islamic Party, to include language in the charter that calls for the document to be reviewed and possibly altered by a committee made up of members of the next government, which is to be elected in December. Pressured by Khalilzad, the ruling Shiite-bloc was prodded into courting the Islamic Party in an attempt to widen support.
But in Fallujah the Islamic Party's deal seemed to mean little to the voters.
"I think they are getting away from sending us in the right direction," Harith Abdul Kareem, 46, said shortly before he and his wife, Saha Kamel, went to cast their "no" votes. "I am very disappointed in the IIP. They are the Islamic Party but they did not go to take the advice of the Muslim clerics."
In more than two dozen interviews with voters in Fallujah on Saturday, only one resident said he voted in favor of the document, which much of Iraq's Sunni Arab political and religious leadership views as being a divisive document that is too favorable to the dominant Shiite-Kurdish bloc.
In several polling sites, election judges were given much latitude and seemed to play fast-and-loose with the rules. The IECI allowed unarmed tribal security to watch over the polls along with police in Fallujah because residents do not trust the Iraqi army, which is largely made up of Shiites and people from outside the Sunni city.
In several cases witnessed by reporters, election officials allowed voters to cast multiple ballots. One man, Mufeed Abid al-Gafour, 55, was allowed to cast five ballots - one for himself and the others for his wife and three sons.
Although the lines at the Palestine Elementary School were short, al-Gafour said he kept his family at home because he worried there would be a long wait. The election judges at the polling site where al-Gafour voted didn't mind his voting on his family's behalf.
"We discussed this constitution as a family and we decided that it doesn't meet the ambitions of Iraq as a nation," al-Gafour said.
Voters consistently expressed skepticism about the current direction of the nation and even greater doubt that the minority Sunni population could get a fair shake if the Shiite-Kurdish politicians who now dominate the government hold on to power after the next round of elections.
"This is an illegitimate constitution presented to the people by an untrustworthy government," said Raja Abu Ahmed, 33, a Fallujah resident who decided to vote against the constitution. "Our only hope is that we are able to defeat the constitution and start again with a government that truly represents the Iraqi people."
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© 2005, Chicago Tribune.
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Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.
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