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Iraq results trickle out, Maliki rivals cry fraud | ASHARQ AL-AWSAT English Archive 2005 -2017
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An Iraqi electoral official counts votes at the Independent High Electoral Commission (IHEC) headquarters in Baghdad on March 11, 2010 (AFP)


An Iraqi electoral official counts votes at the Independent High Electoral Commission (IHEC) headquarters in Baghdad on March  11, 2010 (AFP)

An Iraqi electoral official counts votes at the Independent High Electoral Commission (IHEC) headquarters in Baghdad on March 11, 2010 (AFP)

BAGHDAD, (Asharq Al-Awsat and Agencies) – Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki posted mixed results in initial returns on Thursday from Iraq’s parliamentary election, and a rival grouping complained of serious fraud.

Results from five provinces, the first to be posted by the electoral commission, were in line with expectations and did not include Baghdad and other hard-to-predict areas that could prove pivotal for the Shi’ite premier’s bid to remain in power. They showed Maliki ahead in the largely Shi’ite south, while secularist rival Iraqiya, led by former prime minister Iyad Allawi, was polling well among Iraq’s Sunni minority.

Iraqiya, which has emerged as a major challenger to Maliki, listed a series of alleged violations, saying some of its votes had been removed from boxes, thrown in the garbage and replaced by other ballots.

“Insistence in manipulating these elections forces us to question whether the possibility of fraudulent results would make the final results worthless … We will not stand by with our arms crossed,” an Iraqiya statement said.

Rahim al Shemmari from the Iraqiya List told Asharq Al-Awsat that Iraqiya believes that the regulatory process for the elections “has been below the required standard, especially with regards to performance and the level of movement of observers of political bodies throughout Iraq. The regulatory process witnessed chaos as a result of the [Independent High Electoral] Commission’s procedures itself, which resorted to removing many observers from some centers whilst other centers were switched to observe [specific] competing bodies,” indicating that many centers, especially remote centers, were not covered at all. “There are some political entities that have large influence on the Commission, and this is what makes us say that it is a politicized body and does not operate independently and every day it shows some results and announces others.” Al Shemmari added, “Some results are prepared in advance.”

Iraqiya said over 250,000 members of Iraq’s military were excluded from voting before election day because their names were not on voter rolls.

The largely Shi’ite Iraqi National Alliance (INA), which includes many former political partners of Maliki, issued a statement expressing “worry about signs of premeditated intentions to alter the results.” It called for greater transparency from IHEC in calculating and posting results.

A clear victory by any of the blocs is unlikely and negotiations to form a coalition government could take months, leaving the possibility of a dangerous political vacuum as U.S. troops prepare to leave Iraq by the end of next year.

Results are anxiously awaited by foreign oil companies making plans to invest billions of dollars and vault Iraq into the top echelon of global producers, and by Washington. But results from across Iraq’s 18 provinces were again delayed, four days after the parliamentary election Iraqis hope will bring stable government and help end years of sectarian conflict.

Iraq’s Independent High Electoral Commission (IHEC) said it will release remaining early results as they become available. Final results may take weeks. “We are continuing with this procedure … until we’re finished,” said Faraj al-Haidari, Iraq’s top electoral official.

One observer who spoke to Asharq Al-Awsat on the condition of anonymity and refused to name the list he represented said that the presence of the head of the Iraqi National Congress and candidate for the Iraqi National Alliance, Ahmad Chalabi, near to the vote-counting center, and the fact that he was denied entry to the hall by employees caused a problem within the Commission, which was compelled to announce only partial results and to delay the remaining results until further notice.

With about 30 percent of votes counted in Najaf and Babil, Shi’ite provinces south of Baghdad, Maliki’s State of Law bloc was ahead with about 124,700 votes, followed by 103,600 for the INA.

The Iraqiya list got almost 41,000 votes there. The picture was reversed in Diyala and Salahuddin, where Allawi’s list got more than 77,000 votes, compared to about 17,000 for Maliki’s bloc and almost 16,000 for the INA, the early results showed.

In northern Arbil province, seat of the largely autonomous Kurdistan region, early results showed an alliance of two powerful Kurdish parties far ahead of a reformist challenger.

With 28 percent of votes counted in Arbil, the two ruling parties — Iraqi President Jalal Talabani’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and Kurdish President Masoud Barzani’s Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) — got more than four times the number of votes cast for the upstart Goran party. The vote counts made public so far represented only a small fraction of about 12 million votes cast.

Sixty-two percent of Iraq’s nearly 19 million voters turned out at the polls on Sunday despite death threats from the al Qaeda-linked Islamic State of Iraq and a spate of election-day attacks by Sunni Islamist insurgents that killed 39 people.

Officials had not yet released a vote count for Baghdad, a major prize for the coalitions with about 8 million people.

Maliki’s State of Law, an alliance of his Dawa party and some Sunni tribal leaders, Shi’ite Kurds, Christians and independents, was the big winner in January 2009 local polls, running on a platform of security and strong central government.

Even if Maliki allies make up the biggest bloc in Iraq’s next parliament, they will have to unite with one or two other coalitions to form a government, and Maliki may face challenges from coalition partners opposed to giving him a second term. Ad Melkert, the U.N. special representative to Iraq, lauded the vote count on Wednesday as an “honest process” and urged candidates and parties to accept the results.

Iraqi journalists and representatives of Iraqi political blocs and entities look at a screens showing the partial preliminary results from four of 18 provinces in Iraq in Baghdad, March 11, 2010 (AP)

Iraqi journalists and representatives of Iraqi political blocs and entities look at a screens showing the partial preliminary results from four of 18 provinces in Iraq in Baghdad, March 11, 2010 (AP)

Faraj al-Haidari, head of the Iraqi electoral comission, announces on March 11, 2010, the first results of national elections from two provinces (AFP)

Faraj al-Haidari, head of the Iraqi electoral comission, announces on March 11, 2010, the first results of national elections from two provinces (AFP)