Will Iraq's Upcoming Elections Bring Stability, or More Turmoil?

WASHINGTON, Jan 11, 2010 (IPS) - Iraq's upcoming parliamentary elections are widely considered a barometer of the country's progress and march toward stability, but they could also have a serious destabilizing impact, as the U.S. prepares for a major reduction of its troops by August.

A volatile and divided nation, Iraq is desperately attempting to recover from decades of war and dictatorship. Washington has promoted elections in the hope that the ballot box will become the medium through which political scores are settled.

The U.S. is hoping to see a more stable Iraq emerge from the March elections to allow for its timely withdrawal of troops, but increasing tensions in parts of Iraq threaten to add to the country's myriad problems.

The abrupt decision by Iraq's Accountability and Justice Commission (AJC) on Jan. 7 to bar 14 political groups, mostly representing Sunni Arabs, from running in the upcoming elections could turn the much-awaited polls into a vehicle for more instability.

The AJC, in charge of ensuring that high-ranking former and current Baath Party officials of former president Saddam Hussein will not return to government, said its decision was based on new "evidence" showing connections between the 14 groups and the Baath Party.

The most prominent among these groups is the National Dialogue Front, led by the secular Sunni politician Salih Mutlak who has been part of the country's political process over the past seven years despite his uneasy relations with many Shia Arab and Kurdish groups.

Elections have been viewed as especially crucial in reintegrating the Sunni Arab minority into Iraq's political process by giving them a proportional representation in the country's governance to compel them to renounce the insurgency.

Sunni Arabs who held most of the senior jobs in Saddam Hussein's government saw their regions become the primary battleground of a bloody struggle between insurgents on the one hand and the Iraqi government and U.S. forces on the other.

Central to the national reconciliation plans in Iraq, as Washington hopes, is the return of more moderate elements of the Baath Party to the current political process. Although outlawed in Iraq, the party is said to have a presence outside Iraq's borders, particularly in Syria.

If approved by the country's electoral commission, the decision to exclude the 14 parties from the elections could alienate significant sections of the Sunni Arab population, especially in light of Mutlak's rising popularity among Sunni voters, as the provincial elections in late 2008 showed. Mutlak's faction also did well in the provincial election last year, managing to come second among several Sunni groups.

"It will have serious consequences and will reduce Sunni representation and especially change their attitude toward the powers that be," Joost Hiltermann of the International Crisis Group, which has issued several reports on resolving Iraq's internal conflicts, told IPS.

Since late 2007, major Sunni insurgent groups have abandoned the insurgency in the hopes of finding a foothold in the country's politics, but their relations with the Shia-led government in Baghdad remain relatively tense.

Calling the decision by the AJC "political and linked to foreign will", Mutlak also appeared to implicitly accuse Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki of standing behind the decision.

A statement by the head of the European Parliament's delegation for relations with Iraq, Scottish lawmaker Struan Stevenson, cited Mutlak's "uncompromising positions" against Iran's "meddling" in Iraq as the "true" reason behind the decision.

In an ambitious strategy, Mutlak had joined forces with former secular Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, a Shia Arab, and current Vice-President Tariq al-Hashemi, a Sunni Arab, to create a powerful cross-sectarian coalition for the future elections known as al-Iraqia.