The "New" Iraq -- Bwahaha...
Rising Violence and Fear Drive Iraq Campaigners Underground
By DEXTER FILKINS
Published: January 16, 2005
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Jan. 15 - The threat of death hung so heavily over the election rally, held this week on the fifth floor of the General Factory for Vegetable Oil, that the speakers refused to say whether they were candidates at all.
"Too dangerous," said Hussein Ali, who solicited votes for the United Iraqi Alliance, a party fielding dozens of candidates for the elections here. "It's a secret."
And then Mr. Ali and his colleagues left, escorted by men with guns.
So goes the election campaign unfolding across Iraq, a country simultaneously set to embark on an American-backed political experiment while writhing under a guerrilla insurgency dead set on disrupting the experiment.
With only two weeks to go to before the vote, scheduled for Jan. 30, guerrillas have stepped up their attacks and driven most candidates deep indoors, and on Saturday, the authorities said they would restrict traffic and set up cordons around polling places on election day. [Page 12.]
A result, in large swaths of the country, is a campaign in the shadows, where candidates are often too terrified to say their names. Instead of holding rallies, they meet voters in secret, if they meet them at all. Instead of canvassing for votes, they fend off death threats.
Public campaigning is still possible in much of southern Iraq and in the Kurdish areas to the far northeast, where the threat of violence does not loom so large.
But in much of the center and the northwest, including two of the country's three largest cities, Baghdad and Mosul, candidates reveal themselves only at great personal risk.
Of the 7,471 people who have filed to run, only a handful outside the relatively safe Kurdish areas have publicly identified themselves. The locations for the 5,776 polling places have not been announced, lest they become targets for attacks.
The predicament for candidates was spelled out on a flier passed around town by the United Iraqi Alliance. The flier listed the names of 37 candidates for the national assembly. The 188 others, the flier said, could not be published.
"Our apologies for not mentioning the names of all the candidates," the flier said. "But the security situation is bad, and we have to keep them alive."
Some political leaders here say they are not much bothered by the candidates' lack of visibility; they point out that Iraqis will be voting for political parties, not individual candidates.
Each party has a list of candidates and will be given seats in proportion to the number of votes it receives. At this rudimentary stage of democracy, some say, it is remarkable enough that the Iraqis are voting at all.
"This will be an election of constituencies, not of programs like you have in America," said Adil Abdul Mahdi, the finance minister and a candidate in the United Iraqi Alliance. "The Iraqis know their people. They know who they are voting for."
But the larger issue, for many political leaders, is that the guerrilla assault to scuttle the elections has truncated political discourse and, as a result, the heart of the elections itself. If candidates can't campaign, they can't debate, and if they can't debate, voters will hardly be in a position to chart their country's destiny.
"An election is not just putting a piece of a paper in a box; it's a whole process," said Nasir Chaderji, chairman of the National Democratic Party, with 48 candidates. "We don't have that here. Candidates can't campaign because of the security situation.
"I call it the secret election."
Raja al-Khuzai, a candidate for the assembly who has joined a slate headed by Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, spends nearly all of her time inside Dr. Allawi's heavily fortified compound, surrounded by armed guards. Instead of campaigning, she sends volunteers into the streets to talk to voters on her behalf.
"They come back and tell me the vision of the people," Dr. Khuzai said.
Dr. Khuzai knows well the dangers facing Iraqis trying to build a new democratic order; two of her colleagues on the Iraqi Governing Council, which has since been disbanded, were killed. On Dec. 24, American soldiers found the broken and bullet-riddled body of a relative, Wijdan al-Khuzai, also a candidate.
Rawaf Abdul Razak, a candidate for the National Democratic Party, awoke one morning to find a slip of paper tucked into the front gate of his Baghdad home.
"The game is over," the handwritten note said. "If you do not go back to your God honestly and stop being a traitor to your country, then we will send you to hell."
Mr. Razak is still a candidate, but he does not campaign in public anymore.
Rising Violence and Fear Drive Iraq Campaigners Underground
By DEXTER FILKINS
Published: January 16, 2005
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Jan. 15 - The threat of death hung so heavily over the election rally, held this week on the fifth floor of the General Factory for Vegetable Oil, that the speakers refused to say whether they were candidates at all.
"Too dangerous," said Hussein Ali, who solicited votes for the United Iraqi Alliance, a party fielding dozens of candidates for the elections here. "It's a secret."
And then Mr. Ali and his colleagues left, escorted by men with guns.
So goes the election campaign unfolding across Iraq, a country simultaneously set to embark on an American-backed political experiment while writhing under a guerrilla insurgency dead set on disrupting the experiment.
With only two weeks to go to before the vote, scheduled for Jan. 30, guerrillas have stepped up their attacks and driven most candidates deep indoors, and on Saturday, the authorities said they would restrict traffic and set up cordons around polling places on election day. [Page 12.]
A result, in large swaths of the country, is a campaign in the shadows, where candidates are often too terrified to say their names. Instead of holding rallies, they meet voters in secret, if they meet them at all. Instead of canvassing for votes, they fend off death threats.
Public campaigning is still possible in much of southern Iraq and in the Kurdish areas to the far northeast, where the threat of violence does not loom so large.
But in much of the center and the northwest, including two of the country's three largest cities, Baghdad and Mosul, candidates reveal themselves only at great personal risk.
Of the 7,471 people who have filed to run, only a handful outside the relatively safe Kurdish areas have publicly identified themselves. The locations for the 5,776 polling places have not been announced, lest they become targets for attacks.
The predicament for candidates was spelled out on a flier passed around town by the United Iraqi Alliance. The flier listed the names of 37 candidates for the national assembly. The 188 others, the flier said, could not be published.
"Our apologies for not mentioning the names of all the candidates," the flier said. "But the security situation is bad, and we have to keep them alive."
Some political leaders here say they are not much bothered by the candidates' lack of visibility; they point out that Iraqis will be voting for political parties, not individual candidates.
Each party has a list of candidates and will be given seats in proportion to the number of votes it receives. At this rudimentary stage of democracy, some say, it is remarkable enough that the Iraqis are voting at all.
"This will be an election of constituencies, not of programs like you have in America," said Adil Abdul Mahdi, the finance minister and a candidate in the United Iraqi Alliance. "The Iraqis know their people. They know who they are voting for."
But the larger issue, for many political leaders, is that the guerrilla assault to scuttle the elections has truncated political discourse and, as a result, the heart of the elections itself. If candidates can't campaign, they can't debate, and if they can't debate, voters will hardly be in a position to chart their country's destiny.
"An election is not just putting a piece of a paper in a box; it's a whole process," said Nasir Chaderji, chairman of the National Democratic Party, with 48 candidates. "We don't have that here. Candidates can't campaign because of the security situation.
"I call it the secret election."
Raja al-Khuzai, a candidate for the assembly who has joined a slate headed by Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, spends nearly all of her time inside Dr. Allawi's heavily fortified compound, surrounded by armed guards. Instead of campaigning, she sends volunteers into the streets to talk to voters on her behalf.
"They come back and tell me the vision of the people," Dr. Khuzai said.
Dr. Khuzai knows well the dangers facing Iraqis trying to build a new democratic order; two of her colleagues on the Iraqi Governing Council, which has since been disbanded, were killed. On Dec. 24, American soldiers found the broken and bullet-riddled body of a relative, Wijdan al-Khuzai, also a candidate.
Rawaf Abdul Razak, a candidate for the National Democratic Party, awoke one morning to find a slip of paper tucked into the front gate of his Baghdad home.
"The game is over," the handwritten note said. "If you do not go back to your God honestly and stop being a traitor to your country, then we will send you to hell."
Mr. Razak is still a candidate, but he does not campaign in public anymore.