Polling stations open for Iraqi diaspora in Turkey

As ballot boxes open in Ankara and Istanbul for Iraqi diaspora, upcoming elections are full of anticipation and potential surprise. A main factor in the last elections, the alliance among the ethnic Kurds in 2005 has come undone and raises many new questions, says the International Crisis Group.

Some 30,000 Iraqi voters in Turkey are expected to go to the polls for parliamentary elections as the ballot boxes are opened for the diaspora during three special days of voting. The U.N. says that 300,000 to 3 million Iraqis may cast their ballots in 16 countries.

“Approximately 25,000 voters participated in the elections of 2005. We expect more than 30,000 voters to cast their ballots this time,” Ali Ekber, working for the Iraqi Independent High Electoral Commission’s Turkey branch.

Four polling stations – one in the capital Ankara and three in Istanbul – have been set up in cooperation with the Iraqi Embassy and the U.N. The electoral committee in Baghdad also sent a delegation that will be on duty during the election period. The electoral officials contacted the Iraqi diaspora here thanks to U.N. contacts and held two conferences to inform about the process.

Though tens of thousands are expected to cast ballots, approximately 6,000 Iraqis are registered as refugees or asylum seekers in the U.N. database.  As for the situation of those who do not official registration but are illegally in Turkey, Ekber assured there would be “no security-related problem.”

“We’ve agreed with the government that Turkish security forces will not get involved in the process nor ask for any ID cards of those applicants in the stations. Only Iraqi officials will be in charge,” he said.

He called on all Iraqis “to celebrate this election festival together.”

Meanwhile, a string of blasts ripped through Baghdad targeting early voters and killing 17 people Thursday, authorities said, raising tensions in an already nervous city as early ballots are cast for Sunday's parliamentary elections.

The Iraqi capital was a tense city Thursday as thousands of troops deployed across the capital, and convoys of army trucks and minibuses ferried soldiers and security personnel to and from polling stations. "Terrorists wanted to hamper the elections, thus they started to blow themselves up in the streets," said Deputy Interior Minister Ayden Khalid Qader, who's responsible for election-related security across the country.

The upcoming elections may result in a different picture from the 2005 elections, according to Joost Hilterman, deputy program director of International Crisis Group, or ICG, for Middle East and North Africa.

The U.S.-backed Kurdish community will not run for office as an alliance this time. The last major coalition, announced in November 2009, was the Kurdistani Alliance. It combines the main parties, the Kurdistan Democratic Party, or KDP, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, or PUK, and an array of smaller groups, but, notably, it does not include the two parties’ main challengers in the July 2009 legislative elections in Iraqi Kurdistan: the secular Goran, or Change, Movement of Nowshirwan Mustafa and the two principal Sunni Islamic groups, the Kurdistan Islamic Union, or KIU, and the Islamic Group in Iraqi Kurdistan. The KIU was not part of the Kurdistani Alliance when it ran in December 2005. The alliance won 53 parliamentary seats against the KIU’s five so combined they would have had 58 seats, a distant second to the UIA’s 128 but well ahead of other competitors.

“The departure of Goran and Islamists could be a significant setback for the alliance,” noted the ICG in a recently released report titled “Iraq’s uncertain future: Elections and beyond.”

The Regional Kurdish Administration’s envoy to Turkey, Ömer Merani, admitted the division but outlined the possibility of joining forces after the elections. “There is no division stemming from political differences but personal disagreements. So we will able to form a coalition together after the elections,” Merani told the Daily News.

A Goran official, however, said in the ICG report: “I expect that we may win as many as 20 seats, consistent with the Kurdish election results in July. All options are still open for the post-election period. It will not be easy to work with the PUK.”

A senior Kurdish official also opined, “If Goran gets more than five seats, it could mean trouble. It could lead to a collision between us and them, and this would weaken the Kurds’ position on a range of issues.”

The ICG report asks if the Kurds will reprise their kingmaker role as “eggs on the scale” (beidhat al-qubban), and if their parties will reunify in an attempt to re-elect a Kurd as president of the republic and press for advantage on issues of Kurdish national concern such as Kirkuk. The Kurds want to be in the federal government to secure the Kurdish region’s powers and very existence.

A Kurdish lawmaker, Mahmoud Othman said in the report, “The winners will need the Kurds because politically they cannot afford to have a strictly Shiite government.”


/Hurriyet Daily News/