Terrorists made every effort to derail Iraq’s parliamentary elections on Sunday, but Iraqis were undeterred as they made their way to cast their ballot and decide the political fate of more than 6,000 candidates competing for just 325 parliamentary seats.

As I made my way in the morning to the various polling stations around Baghdad, I was greeted by the sounds of more than 15 mortar attacks and a barage of attacks were launched throughout the day. 38 people were killed nationwide but it was a weak, albeit persistent, attempt to discourage Iraqis from voting. Estimates suggest 60% of the 19 million eligible voters took to the polling stations.

There was a great desire among Iraqis to vote; those I spoke to – from your average voter to electoral officials and political observers from various parties – were keen to exercise their vote, knew who they were voting for and seemed to be well informed and educated about the whole democratic process. They understood, appreciated and enjoyed the fact that their vote can punish parties and individuals who have failed to perform, thanks all to the open-list system that was adopted this time round.

In some instances the environment was even festive, music blaring in the backgrounds and voters cheerfully waving their purple ink-covered index finger in the air. Contrary to some of the reporting out there, the problem for the voters was not security at all but instead procedural incompetence; Iraqis would turn up to their polling station to find that their names were not on the voter registration lists. They would be turned away to go to a special polling station to check for their names there, and in some cases these were nearby. As a result you would find a minor but loud argument taking place between official and the keen voter. Further, a huge number of security personnel names were not given to the Iraqi High Electoral Commission in the months before the elections; more than 200,000 names had been provided just two days before, resulting in confusion and, therefore, many being unable to vote.

The other problem that prevented Iraqis from voting was the curfew and major security operation that stopped them from driving to the polls or catching local buses, many lived far away and the government-run shuttle service was inefficient and is generally poor.

Tensions were apparent to me in Kirkuk on the day of the voting process for members of the security forces, which took place on Thursday with varying degrees of intimidation and attempts to manipulate the vote, but hardly suprising given the explosive state of affairs in the area.

Sunday proved to be a victory for Iraqi democracy. There are tough times ahead with the next phase revolving around coalition building and the issue of who becomes prime minister, something that may turn out to be as controversial and tumultous as events before the elections and which could drag on for at least three months.

Security is also still a matter; the elections required around 1 million security personnel, meaning it is not yet the sort of democracy that exists in the West. Yet, there are few in the West who enjoy the comfort of security and stability, probably none, who would be willing to go out, exercise their vote and embrace democracy in the same way Iraqis did on Sunday in what was less than normal and comfortable circumstances.

It is ugly, looks like a toy and has cost the Iraqi government nearly 90 million dollars. And it does not even work. This is the controversial, so-called bomb-detecting wand produced by a British company, ATSC, and its director Jim McCormick.

Used at checkpoints around the country, the device, known as ADE651, is supposed to detect explosives at up to 1km away. Yet, it fails to detect them from even 1m away. The Iraqi government may have paid $45,000 for each one, but Iraqis have paid with their lives. Hundreds have been killed by the recent wave of bombings in Baghdad, bombings that were supposed to be prevented by the device that has been described as nothing more than “an empty plastic case”.

A BBC Newsnight investigation recently put the wand to the test by some of the best technical, explosives and electronic experts in the country. The result? It does not work and operates using the most basic technology available, so basic that it is the sort of anti-shoplifting technology you find on the back of your products at the local supermarket.

The report shows an Iraqi demonstrating the device in front of a live audience and television cameras. Making a mockery of the intelligence of the Iraqi people, he walks along carrying the device and supposedly unaware of the grenade to his left. He stops, looks at the device and dramatically points to the grenade. Convincing it is not, tragic and comical it most certainly is.

To add insult to the injury, the Iraqi government on Tuesday announced that it will in fact be keeping the devices on. After carrying out an investigation, the government declared that the devices “generally” work, though it remarkably still went on to admit that some were faulty or, worse still, fake. The UK has halted the export of the products since last month and McCormick, although arrested and later released, continues to be investigated. The US, meanwhile, warned the Iraqi government back in June 2009 that the devices did not work, after carrying out its own investigation and extensive testing of the device.

The questions Iraqis will, therefore, be asking now are how many more lives will it take to convince the government to discard the ADE651? Admitting that the products were entirely faulty could, of course, be embarrassing and lead to a floodgate of lawsuits, and there will be questions as to whose pockets the devices are really filling. The nation is currently gripped by campaigning and preparations for the national elections in less than two weeks, a good time to release unpopular news – little wonder then that the Iraqi government chose to release its ‘”findings” at this time.

http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/23/in-iraq-campaigning-101/?src=twt&twt=nytimesatwar

BAGHDAD — With Iraq’s short election campaign already under way, eight candidates met in a hotel conference room the other day for a late primer on something that is still a novelty here: getting themselves elected.

“Even if you’re well known, you have to campaign,” the instructor began in an introductory course intended to teach what many Americans begin to learn as schoolchildren in their first vote for class president. She went on to caution them about what many of those same Americans often forget by the time they enter professional politics.

“You’ve got to be short, credible,” she said of campaign pledges. “You cannot promise what you cannot fulfill.”

The candidates – six men, two women – belong to an electoral coalition called Iraqi Unity, one of the major blocs competing for seats in the country’s new Parliament on March 7. The course is run by the International Republican Institute, which with its sister organization, the National Democratic Institute, has promoted democracy around the world for years and in Iraq since 2003.

Iraq’s election is widely seen as a measure of the country’s progress toward democratic government. It’s a high-stakes, high-power contest between the big coalitions that will decide whether Nuri Kamal al-Maliki wins enough seats to return as prime minister.

The conduct of the campaign thus far has raised some doubts about the country’s democratization, but this small conference room with Arabesque moldings and tapestries of stylized women is where the grassroots of democracy are.

These candidates may not win – in fact, they probably won’t – but their embrace of the fundamental promise of representative government is sincere to the point of poignancy.

Karim Radhi al-Khafaji lifted his sleeve and unbuttoned his shirt to show the horrific scars he bears from an explosion in a market in 2006. He limps badly. He’s the head of an organization that advocates for those the war has left wounded.

“I consider myself the candidate for the disabled and the deprived and those who are marginalized,” he said during a break for tea. He said 15 percent of Iraqis suffer handicaps – grievous injuries, missing limbs – compared with a world average of 2 percent, and yet they have no elected voice.

“We have not seen anyone pay attention to us, including the prime minister.”

First things first.

The course teaches the “T4 campaign system.” In English the T’s are target, touch, track and turnout, a step-by-step plan for winning over voters. In Arabic, the words were changed slightly to preserve some of the alliteration: istehdaf, etisal, mutaba’a, tahfiz.

The instructor, an Iraqi who asked that she not be identified because of fear for her safety, went through the basics of direct contact (door-to-door campaigning, text messaging, e-mail) and indirect contact (the campaign posters that festoon most of the country’s walls and streetlights at this point or television ads, which are beyond these candidates’ means).

To get elected, she explained, you don’t have to win over every voter. You have to focus on a core base, as well as those who might be inclined to vote for you once they know you. You have to tailor a message differently for Baghdad, say, than for Basra, depending on the issues important to voters in each place.

It’s not enough to promise better health care. You have to focus “sub-issues” that are concrete: how to acquire better equipment and more medicines. Most important, you have to follow up with those you meet. “Every party needs a database,” she said.

These are ideals. The candidates wrestled with realities.

Obaid Agab Ahmed, an engineer educated in the former Yugoslavia, complained about what he called in Arabic, literally, “counter-corruption.” To translate: mudslinging, dirty tricks, going negative.

“When you run as a candidate, you should expect this,” interjected Ghassan Jawad Kadhum, the International Republican Institute’s program officer.

The institute has conducted 127 courses since October with 2,737 participants – amounting to 40 percent of the registered candidates. They’ve included candidates from all parties, including those with explicitly anti-American campaign rhetoric, which in an Iraqi election campaign means most of them.

Mr. Kadhum, the program officer, was dressed dapperly. He has an infectious smile, an acute political mind and the polished manner of a candidate himself. In fact, he said, he might just seek office one day. For now, he is content to groom others.

“Democracy,” he told the candidates at one point, “has reached our houses.”

A lively debate ensued over the power of incumbency and the corrupting influence of money. Learning democracy means learning its shortcomings. “It’s new to Iraqis,” Wissal Abdullah al-Amiri, one of the women, said of what might be called Campaigning 101, “but we are trying.”

The richer candidates hand out cash and blankets, several complained, speaking over each other at times. “The same people harmed by him are voting for him because he’s buying their souls,” Mr. Ahmed said, referring to one of the country’s two vice presidents, though he didn’t specify which.

Sabieh Jabur al-Kaabi pointed that campaign posters are being torn down, though not of those of the top candidates — that is, those with influence and power.

Mr. Ahmed reprised, probably unintentionally, a campaign motif Hillary Rodham Clinton used in 2008 to question Barack Obama’s readiness to handle a crisis in the middle of the night. “Let them tear down the posters,” he replied, “as long as they don’t come for me in my house at 3 a.m.”

Some 20 countries had urged Iraq to end the death penalty that has been used against high-profile members of the former regime of Saddam Hussein and in the country’s crackdown against insurgent groups.

Iraq has also dismissed suggestions that it should reduce the number of crimes for which the death penalty can be imposed.

The country told the Geneva-based U.N. Human Rights Council on Friday that it also wouldn’t commit to investigating abuse against gays or decriminalize homosexuality.

Neither would it raise the age of penal responsibility to 18 years. It is currently 9 in most of Iraq and 11 in Kurdistan.

http://www.kurdistaninvestment.org/files/sitecontents/040210022043.pdf

The first train service in decades has set off from northern Iraq to Turkey.
Both countries hope the re-opening of the historic rail link will contribute to the fast-growing trade between them.
Germany began building the Berlin to Baghdad railway a century ago, hoping to open a route through Turkey to the Gulf. It took three decades to finish.
But the two recent conflicts in Iraq have taken a toll on the rail network. There has been no regular service to neighbouring countries since the 1980s.
But that should change now, with the first train leaving the city of Mosul on Tuesday and due to arrive in the eastern Turkish city of Gazientep 18 hours later, before making the return journey.
For a distance of just 500km (311 miles), that is pretty slow going; running through Syria, the train has to cross two international borders.
But the revived rail link symbolises the increasingly close ties between the three countries.
Having overcome its fear of Kurdish nationalism, Turkey now does about $10bn of trade with Iraq’s Kurdish regional government every year – about 80% of goods sold there are Turkish.
Relations between Iraq and Syria are more fragile – in the past Syria has been accused of backing the insurgents behind several big bomb attacks in Iraq.
But trade between them – and between Syria and Turkey – is growing rapidly.
Turkey is gradually upgrading its railway network with high-speed routes and Iraq also plans big investments in its railways.
The Turkish government is now talking of a fast rail link running all the way to Pakistan.

Iraqi Kurdistan attracts $12 bln over 3-1/2 yrs-board

Iraq’s troubled elections

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/feb/15/iraq-elections-baath-ban

Iraq’s national elections will go ahead in a few weeks’ time without one of the most prominent Sunni politicians in the country. Salah al-Mutlaq, who had been seeking to stand as part of Ayad Allawi’s recently formed Iraqi National Movement (INM), had his appeal rejected on Friday. The decision was made after judges, as a result of an outcry among the great and powerful of Iraq’s political actors, reversed their earlier, US-sponsored decision to postpone the appeals process until after the elections.

Fierce critics of the ban on candidates formerly tied to the Ba’ath party have called it a sectarian, pre-election tactic on the part of the Shia parties – particularly the largely sectarian and Iranian-backed Iraqi National Alliance, which also happens to have its own electoral candidates heading the commission that banned the candidates in the first place. The INM has, for the time being, chosen to suspend its campaigning in protest, but this is unlikely to lead a full boycott of the elections.

The general conclusion has been that Mutlaq’s ban represents the liquidation of the threat to the “Shia” hold on power, but it is not yet certain which groups stand to gain the most from the affair. Individuals like Mutlaq may end up being political martyrs, which could then translate into votes for the INM, whose leader Ayad Allawi is predicted to also attract the secular Shia vote. More broadly, it could turn out to be advantageous for other Sunni and secular groupings, most of whom did not appeal the ban imposed on their candidates (and instead voluntarily replaced them) and who would benefit from the reduced competition, as well as from the heightened sense of nationalistic/anti-sectarian feelings in the tribal Sunni heartlands.

Conversely, Iraq’s leading Shia parties may benefit the threat of Ba’athism becoming an electoral issue: protests in the Shia south suggests that it could end up dictating the vote in place of other issues such as the lack of basic services and employment and security – the latter which, but for the recent terror attacks, would have been the main campaign platform of Nouri al-Maliki, the prime minister.

Having the politics marred by an apparent Shia battle against the Sunnis, supplemented by an overarching power struggle between Iran, the US and the Arab world, could be in the interests of essentially sectarian groupings ISCI and the Sadrists. This may then prompt Maliki and his Islamic Dawa party to move away from its secularist, and relatively successful stance that proved fruitful in the provincial electionsin January last year. All in all, it could constitute regression for the Iraqi state, given that it would fix the much-needed cracks that were starting to appear in the rigid sectarian dynamics of the political arena.

Meanwhile, the Kurds are preparing themselves for yet another electoral face-off between the powerful PUK-KDP alliance and political newcomer Change, but they will look on with a smile on their faces as they watch their Arab competitors in the south tear themselves apart. Increased division in the south makes the Kurds – who are largely united on the outstanding disputes – the all-important post-election ally and which, in turn, could give them the upper hand on disputes related to power, oil and land.

—–

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/iraq/article7003347.ece

Farewell to Yasser, The Times’s driver: an unsung hero of the Iraq war
James Hider, The Times

Another day, another round of bombs in Baghdad. A blip that barely
registers in the news after so many years of bloodshed, and quickly
blurs into the endless images of familiar carnage.

Except this day was different for me and many of my colleagues who
have covered the Iraq war. This was the day that my friend Yasser
vanished in that inevitable cloud of grey smoke that you see on your
television screens or newspaper pages.

Yasser was The Times’s driver for the past seven years, since the fall
of the regime that he had hated so much. He joined the newspaper
pretty much the same week I did, and together we worked through the
bloodiest periods of the war. Yasser — whose surname I cannot put in
print, even now, because of the danger to his brother, who also works
as a Times driver — was one of the thousands of Iraqis who have made
the media coverage of the war possible: uncredited, unsung heroes of a
war most people would rather forget.

He had survived some terrifying episodes, from being “ethnically
cleansed” with his family by Sunni insurgents from their home in 2006,
when they moved into our hotel but did not stop working, to blocking
the road with his car as a vehicle full of armed kidnappers tried to
abduct a Times reporter one evening near the Tigris river. He saved my
life and the lives of colleagues at the risk of his own, only to step
out of The Times office at exactly the wrong moment on Monday, the
moment when a suicide car bomber fought his way into the compound and
blew himself up.

Over the years Yasser and his brother became close to all of us: they
would be waiting at the airport when we flew in to drive us along the
notorious Route Irish road when it was still a daily death trip; they
would hug us like brothers when we left, always with a promise to
return. But they did not just drive us into battle zones: they bought
us cakes on our birthdays, invited us, when it was safe, to their home
for meals cooked by their mother. Through the years we went to their
weddings, saw Yasser become a proud father of two girls and, recently,
hope for a better future for the country.

Yasser was a kind and funny man who had seen too much misery but
retained his ability to crack a wicked joke. When we met, he told that
me he had learnt English when training as a vet, but had never
practised because he did not like any animals except for sheep. He was
sweet and courteous, and called my girlfriend “Prince” until we
pointed out that it was a male name. He cackled at his own mistake.

On one of my first outings with him through the lawless streets, he
suddenly executed a U-turn through gridlocked traffic and sped off: he
had spotted a gang of looters pulling people from the cars ahead,
stabbing them and stealing their vehicles. Another time, when we were
grabbed by the notorious al-Mahdi Army militia, masked gunmen dragged
me and my translator off to an unknown destination in Sadr City. As a
Shia from the area, Yasser could have driven off and no one would have
blamed him: instead, I was hugely relieved to spot him through the
rear window belting after us. He stayed with me until we managed to
negotiate our release.

The last time I was in Baghdad, almost a year ago, Yasser made me
promise to return. I will, very soon, but too late to see his smiling
face. He was buried by his family yesterday in the Shia holy city of
Najaf.

Instead, I will be greeted by his inconsolable brother, who was too
devastated to do anything more than cry when I phoned him yesterday. I
cried with him, because Yasser was not just another faceless
statistic. He was a friend and a heroic colleague who will be missed
forever.