results" show a Shi’te Islamist alliance won the country’s January elections followed by a coalition of two main Kurdish parties, despite complaints among Iraqi Christians about alleged "irregularities" and as suicide bombings killed at least 27 people.
The partial results, which were announced on the deadliest day since the ballot, showed that in 13 of Iraq’s 18 provinces the Shi’ite alliance received 2.3 million votes, with the Kurds winning around 1.1 million and a bloc led by interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi roughly 620,000.
But a team of independent lawyers reportedly continued an investigation into apparent vote rigging in and around the turbulent northern city of Mosul, where a man wearing an explosive-laden vest walked into a crowd of police officers on a hospital compound and blew himself up Monday, February 7, killing 12 people.
The deadliest attack came in the town of Baquba, 50 kilometers (about 31 miles) northeast of Baghdad. A car bomb exploded near a police station, where a large crowd of people were apparently waiting to enlist in the police force, the Voice of America (VOA) network reported.
AL-QAIDA RESPONSIBLE
The al-Qaida group of Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian-born militant who carries a $25-million-bounty on his head, claimed responsibility for the attacks in an Internet statement. The latest violence added to concern among Iraq’s Christians, who have already complained about being left out of the political process in the country.
On Sunday, February 6, hundreds of Iraqis shouted slogans and waived Iraqi flags outside Baghdad’s heavily guarded Green Zone to protest alleged voting irregularities, which they claimed prevented tens of thousands from casting ballots in Iraq’s first multi party elections in half a century. Turkomen and Yazidis — members of a small religion in the north, also participated in the protest.
Church leaders and news reports said that the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) deprived thousands of Assyrian Christians in northern Iraq of voting, BosNewsLife monitored earlier. KDP reportedly also blocked the delivery of ballot boxes to six major Assyrian towns and villages around Mosul, after initial promises they would be opened later.
PROTESTING ELECTIONS
"We are protesting because we have been deprived of our right to participate in the elections," said Shameil Benjamin, a member of a Christian party called the Christian Democratic Assyrian Movement, the Associated Press (AP) news agency reported. "There were irregularities, and we felt that the injustice was inflicted on us," the party representative was quoted as saying.
Electoral commission officials in Baghdad have acknowledged that many polling sites never opened on January 30, or opened late because of what they said were security concerns. Some sites that opened could not be supplied with ballots and other election materials, officials have said.
"There are centers that opened and yet did not get enough ballots, which proves there were bad intentions," said Meshaan al-Jubouri, a Sunni Arab politician told AP. The reports of irregularities was expected to come as a disappointment for tens of thousands of Iraqi Christians who are believed to have fled Iraq in recent months because of ongoing violence and fears about their future.
DWINDLING COMMUNITY
"The Christian community was 1.5 million people. Today it numbers around 700,000, with about 30 to 40,000 Christians a month fleeing the country – to Syria, to Jordan," said Carl Moeller, president/CEO of Open Doors USA, which investigates the plight of persecuted Christians, in a recent interview. "It’s a desperate situation for most Christians in Iraq," Internet website Crosswalk.com quoted him as saying.
"For ChaldoAssyrian Christians, Turkomen and Yazidis, as far as the voting is concerned, it’s over," said commentator Gordon Lake of the Internet website ChristianIraq.com. In reference to the expected victory of a Shi’te Islamist alliance, he concluded that "the United States is so happy that the elections even took place, they’ll accept a new term, ‘Themocracy’," which he said was "50% Theocracy mixed with 50% Democracy."
Interim prime minister Allawi and other officials have played down such fears, saying that any new government will have to obey the rule of law and respect of human and religious rights. (By: Stefan J. Bos, International Correspodent with BosNewsLife News Center and reports from in and outside Iraq).
