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Iraqi says constitution is sectarian { October 15 2005 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.theledger.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051015/ZNYT03/510150435http://www.theledger.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051015/ZNYT03/510150435
Published Saturday, October 15, 2005
Baghdad Quiet as Vote Begins on Constitution
By EDWARD WONG and DEXTER FILKINS
New York Times
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Saturday, Oct. 15 - Iraqis walked through silent streets on Saturday morning to begin voting on a new constitution that, if passed, would mark a major step toward the formation of the country's first full-term government since the toppling of Saddam Hussein.
Some of the voters marched to polling centers with their closest friends or family members, others alone. Blue-uniformed Iraqi policemen with Kalashnikovs guarded the centers, mostly schools, and frisked people while American troops sat in tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles nearby. In Baghdad, helicopters buzzed low over dun-colored rooftops.
Virtually all civilian cars had been banned from the streets because of strict security rules mirroring those put in place during elections last January.
The voting started hours after Baghdad and parts of southern Iraq began emerging from a blackout caused by a disruption to a northern power line, possibly due to an explosion and perhaps an insurgent act of sabotage.
That had little effect on the voting. After the country's 6,100 polling centers opened their doors at 7 a.m., people began lining up to get the paper ballots, check off "yes" or "no" for the constitution and drop the sheets into boxes. They then stamped their index fingers with purple ink to show they had voted.
"I came to vote for Iraq," said Fayek al-Ani, a businessman in a collared shirt walking into a polling center in downtown Baghdad. "The most important thing is that I came to vote."
Passage of the constitution, whose final draft was approved only this week after months of tough negotiations among Iraqi political parties, is seen as crucial for moving the democratic process forward.
The Bush administration says such progress in turn would lead to greater stability and a partial reduction of the approximately 140,000 American troops here.
The document is expected to serve as a legal foundation for wide-ranging issues, from the Islamic character of the state to the powers of lawmakers and government officials. Its approval would lead to elections in mid-December for a full-term parliament with the power to appoint a government.
Several bombs exploded across Baghdad and other cities on Friday, but those assaults and a handful of potshots and mortar attacks at polling stations resulted in few casualties, and by late afternoon the streets of the capital had mostly emptied of people.
The blackout began just as Iraqis were breaking the daily fast that is traditional during Ramadan. It resulted from a disruption, possibly an explosion, on a power line between Bayji and Kirkuk. The electricity minister, Mohsen Shlash, said he was not sure if it was an insurgent attack; guerrillas have sabotaged electrical lines before.
"In the morning, we'll find out more," Mr. Shlash said. "We suspect it was an explosion."
An occasional police patrol drove down Baghdad's wide boulevards, cloaked in darkness except for homes lighted by generators.
Silence blanketed mosques that hours earlier were the sites of fierce exhortations by clerics, their opinions and advice on how to vote generally divided along ethnic and sectarian lines.
At noon Friday, the imam of Baratha Mosque, a prominent Shiite institution west of the Tigris River in Baghdad, stood before a crowd of hundreds gathered beneath the scorching sun and spoke with little subtlety about the upcoming vote.
"Tomorrow, we will have a date with the dawn," the white-turbaned imam, Jalaladeen al-Sagheir, a powerful member of Parliament, told his followers at the sermon. "Tomorrow, we will open the door to freedom."
At moments, the worshippers broke into frenzied chanting, reaching a crescendo with, "Yes, yes to the constitution!"
Across the Tigris, an equally impassioned scene played out, as the imam of Abu Hanifa Mosque, a Sunni Arab stronghold, urged his congregation to reject the document. After the sermon ended, hundreds of worshippers poured into the streets to denounce those few Sunni Arab politicians who had said this week they were supporting the constitution. Iraqi policemen surrounded the crowd and blocked off the streets.
"I haven't read the constitution because it's devoted to sectarianism, denominationalism and the break-up of Iraq according to American and Israeli instructions," said Othman Raheem, 40, a mechanic taking part in the protest. "I'm going to vote against this odious constitution with a 'no.' "
Many Sunni Arabs, who make up about a fifth of Iraq and ruled the country for decades, fear the constitution will allow oil-rich Shiite and Kurdish areas to break off into virtually separate regions, leaving the Sunni Arabs with little more than impoverished land.
At dawn Friday, a bomb detonated at the Baghdad headquarters of the Iraqi Islamic Party, a prominent Sunni group that had said earlier this week that it was supporting the constitution. The party's office in Falluja was also set on fire, but no one was hurt in either attack.
The last-minute backing by that party's officials and by the Sunni Endowment, responsible for maintaining Sunni religious sites across Iraq, has given American officials more assurance that the constitution will pass, a likely prospect in any case given that Shiites and Kurds generally support the document and make up about 80 percent of the population.
A study released Friday by the International Republican Institute, a conservative research group in Washington, said the vast majority of Iraqis planned to take part in the referendum no matter what their views: 87 percent of those polled this week in 17 of the 18 provinces said they would vote on Saturday.
But even if the constitution passes, the future of the American enterprise in Iraq faces immense challenges.
For one thing, the constitution is open to the prospect of far-reaching amendments and does not address the thorniest political issues dividing Shiites, Kurds and Sunni Arabs, like the separation of powers between the central and regional governments, and the allocation of oil resources and revenues. For expediency's sake, the constitution's writers left these up to the next parliament.
By one count, at least 55 issues in the constitution are put off for future debate with the phrase, "And a law shall organize this."
Just as important, the question remains whether the ongoing political process will damp the Sunni-led insurgency, which has been growing in strength and sophistication.
Statistics released Thursday by the American command show that the number of attacks per week has steadily increased since the fall of Baghdad in April 2003, despite the transfer of sovereignty in mid-2004 and the election of a transitional parliament in January 2005, major political events that were aimed at co-opting the insurgents.
In February and March 2004, the American military counted just under 200 attacks per week on average; that number doubled a year later. The first week of October, the military counted 723 attacks, with 165 of those killing or injuring someone.
"I would not want to say realistically that the referendum is going to deal a death blow to the insurgency," said a Western diplomat in Baghdad who has been closely monitoring the political process and who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he wants to lessen any perception of foreign involvement. "I don't think that's true."
Fears of the power of the insurgency were reflected in the security preparations being put in place on Friday.
The constitution can be defeated by a two-thirds "no" vote in three provinces, and American and Iraqi officials say there is a chance, though slim, that violence aimed at Shiite and Kurdish areas in some provinces could hinder turnout by those voters, allowing Sunni Arabs voters there opposed to the constitution to achieve the two-thirds benchmark. Officials say this possibility exists in Salahuddin, a Sunni-dominated province, and Nineveh and Diyala, both mixed provinces. (Anbar, an overwhelmingly Sunni Arab province and the heart of the insurgency, is expected to vote "no.")
"I will take part tomorrow and vote 'no,' and the reason for that is the rejection by Sunnis of the draft, despite the approval of the Iraqi Islamic Party," Basil Abdel Mawjood, a 44-year-old former government employee, said as he sat in his home in Mosul, the capital of Ninevah Province. "I respect clerics a lot, but not all politicians. I think division is Iraq's future. It's obvious in the constitution and in daily life and in the government."
The commander of American forces in western Diyala Province, which includes the provincial capital, Baquba, checked on security centers near polling stations on Friday and spoke with American officers advising Iraqi troops and police. The commander, Col. Steven Salazar, said the Iraqis had deployed 8 to 12 police officers to each of western Diyala's 268 polling sites, and that two brigades of the Iraqi Army, totaling 6,000 soldiers, were on hand.
"Is there anything that can threaten the success of this operation?" he asked. "No."
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