KHALID MOHAMMED / Associated Press
Sunni lawmaker Osama al-Nijaifi , talking to reporters in Baghdad after yesterday's session: "This will cause more delay and a higher possibility that there will be a constitutional void."
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Iraqi election dispute worsens
A January vote for parliament "might slip," Clinton said. That could affect both Iraq's stability and U.S. troop-pullout plans.
BAGHDAD - Iraq's national elections, scheduled for January and vital for the country's stability and for U.S. troop-withdrawal plans, could be delayed for weeks, or even longer, as parliamentary efforts to adopt electoral legislation that would apportion seats among sectarian groups broke down yesterday.
The United States has linked the pace of its military drawdown from Iraq to the elections, though the top U.S. commander there has said the schedule is on track for now. U.S. combat troops are supposed to be out of Iraq by August, and the rest of the forces are scheduled to leave by the end of 2011. A total of 115,000 U.S. troops are still in Iraq.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said the election date "might slip" as a result of the dispute but expressed confidence that polling would be held.
Sunni Arabs boycotted the last national elections at the height of the insurgency in 2005, ceding all clout in the parliament to the Shiite and Kurdish blocs. The Sunnis are unlikely to sit out the 2010 elections.
Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi, a Sunni Muslim, vetoed the legislation last week, saying it underrepresented Iraqis living abroad. Most of the exiles are believed to be Sunnis - once a privileged minority in Shiite-majority Iraq - who fled the sectarian violence that followed the fall of dictator Saddam Hussein, a Sunni.
The United Nations has estimated that there are two million Iraqi refugees in neighboring Jordan and Syria.
Yesterday, Kurds and Shiite politicians banded together and rebuffed Hashemi. They passed an amended version of the legislation with a formula that essentially would decrease Sunni voting power in several major provinces.
More than 50 parliament members walked out in protest, most of them Sunnis, but also a smattering of secular lawmakers and Shiites.
Many predicted that Hashemi would use his power as a member of Iraq's three-person Presidency Council to again veto the legislation.
"This will cause more delay and a higher possibility that there will be a constitutional void" and a government in limbo, said Osama al-Nijaifi, a lawmaker from the secular Iraqia list.
"This injustice is still in the amended law," said Abdulilah Kathum, a spokesman for Hashemi. "In fact, it has become even more unjust."
The breakdown - after several recent moves and countermoves over the election law's constitutionality - underscores how sectarian politics still dominate Iraq, despite the security improvements of the last two years.
Ideally, the White House wants to disengage on schedule and let Iraq repair and rebuild itself, but tensions remain high on several fronts.
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite, has launched a campaign warning that forces loyal to Hussein are trying to regain power.
On Sunday, Maliki's government put on television three suspects it said were behind Oct. 25 bombings that killed more than 150 people in Baghdad. They said remnants of the former dictator's Baath party were behind the attacks.
Others said that Maliki's allegations of a Baath resurgence were overblown and aimed at scoring political points with his constituency.
"He thinks he will gain some votes from the street through this. . . . He may gain a bit of votes [from] the Shiites," Mahmoud Othman, an independent Kurdish legislator, said in an interview. "But he is destroying his state."
Iraqi politicians, and especially Shiites who were severely repressed under Hussein, lack a "mentality of reconciliation," Othman said.
If Hashemi again vetoes the election law, it would take a three-fifths majority of parliament to override it.
Time is running short. The elections are supposed to be held by the end of January, but because of a major Shiite holiday, they cannot be held in the last week of that month, and another multiday holiday, when work stops, is approaching at the end this week.
Hashemi vetoed the initial version of the election legislation because it gave 5 percent of the parliament seats to Iraqis abroad. He wanted the share raised to 15 percent.
In response, Kurdish and Shiite lawmakers agreed to give a share of votes from each province to the exiles. However, they added a poison pill: The elections would be conducted using 2005 voter rolls.
Because of demographic changes and the Sunni boycott of the 2005 elections, that would disadvantage the provinces of Ninevah, Diyala, and Salahaddin, with large Sunni populations.
The original law was passed weeks late, after nearly a dozen delays because of a dispute between Kurds and ethnic Arabs over control of the oil-rich city of Kirkuk.
Under Hussein, the city was resettled with Arabs, and rebellious Kurds were forced out of it. Since his removal, Kurds have returned in large numbers.
Nasreen Khalid Whab, a Kurdish member of Kirkuk's provincial council, said in an interview that political interference by Iraq's neighbors, Iran and Syria, also was making the situation difficult.
"It's impossible to be satisfied 100 percent," she said of the election law. "There's no such thing."
This article includes information from the Associated Press.
