Electoral law - a parliamentarian Anfal?

"In the 80s we had Anfal in the mountains. Now it is in the Ministry of Trade." Those words by Shaho Saed, a representative of the Kurd opposition party Goran at Erbil's regional assembly on the 18/11/2009, give an idea of the anger in Iraq's autonomous Kurdistan.
Anfal is the series of military campaigns Saddam Hussein launched against the Kurds in the 80s. Thousands of villages were destroyed, their population sent in hostage camps. It culminated with nerve gas attacks on Halabja town in 1988.
In cause is the electoral law for the january election. It was voted the sunday 08/11/2009 after weeks of wranglings, missed deadlines, to be finally pushed through the Iraqi parliament under heavy pressure from the USA. Public interventions from US forces in Iraq, general Odierno, an high-profile visit from vice-president Joe Biden, finally resulted in the law being adopted by 141 of the 195 lawmakers present, out of the 275 the Baghdad parliament has, a number of them not attending in a way of protest. So crucial are these elections for the Obama administration that the US ambassador Christopher Hill allegedly ordered some delegates he found outside the assembly chamber to go to vote. But the relief the international community expressed immediatly was short lived. The Sunni vice-president al-Hashemi vetoed the law, making doubtfull that the elections could be held before the end of january deadline.

According to al-Hashemi the law denies Iraqi refugees living in Syria or Jordan to be fairly represented. But the Kurds, in their autonomous enclave in Northern Iraq, feel directly threatened by this law as well.
From 275, the number of representatives must raise to 323. To decide how to allocate the new seats, the Iraqi High Electoral Commission took the statistics used by the Ministry of Trade to issue food rations. It appears to the Kurds as a blatant attempt to marginalise them. Some Kurd families didn't apply for ration cards and so are not registered in the Ministry of Trade statistics. More, the different factions inside Iraq engineered after the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime huge movements of population to alter the balance of power or challenge the presence of other groups. There is as well the black market around the ration cards, complicating the guesswork. Rather than giving accurate numbers, Ministry of Trade datas are so biaised. They give the Kurds only three new seats, while Nineveh province, where some Arab Sunni parties won a large audience in stirring anti-Kurdish resentment, will receive 13 new seats, to reach a total of 31. The total number of seats for the Kurds will amount at 38, or 12% at the new parliament, when they represent 17% of the Iraqi population.
That's what prompted Shaho Saed to compare the use of the ministry's records in the electoral law to an attempt to eliminate the Kurds from the Baghdad assembly, similar to the Anfal campaign.

For in the parliament to come, the Kurds' influence will be diluted, undermining their efforts to have the contentious article 140 implemented.
This article of the Iraqi constitution proposes a roadmap to solve the issue of the oil-rich city of Kirkuk. Originally a Kurd city, it has been arabised by the successive Iraqi regimes, eager to keep its strategic assets in the hands of the central government. The article proposes a census, followed by a referendum, to decide if the city will go under control of the Kurdistan Regional Government. But the application of article 140 is endlessly reported - the referendum was supposed to take place before the end of 2007. It is a serious issue. The weeks of delays before the 08/11/2009 vote were caused by a dispute around the town. The Arabs and Turkmens, fearing to be marginalised if Kirkuk comes under KRG administration, wanted to have the electoral law taking the 2005 voters lists as references - when Kurds didn't massively come back yet. The Kurds wanted the voters lists to reflect the present population, which advantages them. In its present form, the electoral law doesn't solve anything about the how must be conducted the vote in Kirkuk anyway. It reports the problem, saying that while the 2009 register will be adopted, the results of the vote will be open to contestation during one year. The purpose of this provision is obviously to have the vote taking place in january at any costs, regardless of the multiplicating problems it is sure to bring.
And the Kurds feel that the more they wait, the less likely they are to gain control of the town. They fear to have the situation of non-resolution becoming an accepted one, and so to see Kirkuk escaping them. How to have the article 140 implemented with a diminished representation in Baghdad? And how to oppose, then, amendments of the constitution which would delete the project of a federal state for a strong central government favoured by Nouri al-Malik?

Massoud Barzani, president of the Kurdistan region, said tuesday 17/11/2009 that unless the electoral law was deeply modified, the Kurds would not take part to the january election, depriving it to any legitimity.
Now, saturday 21, Iraqi lawmakers are meeting again to try to bypass vice-president veto, and have the national elections taking place in january. But for the Kurds, the issue remains.