Electoral law: the Sunni veto

The electoral law for Iraq's national election has still not yet been approved. As a result the vote, originally scheduled in january, will have to be reported, possibly in mid-march.
The delay is the result of a veto from vice-president al-Hashimi. After weeks of difficult negotiations at the Baghdad parliament, the law was at last drafted, but was immediately contested by the Sunni vice-president. According to him, the refugees, mainly Sunni, living in Jordan and Syria were not given a fair representation in the new parliament.

The Sunni Arabs were the dominating force in Iraq during Saddam Hussein's regime, but lost their power after the 2003 American invasion. They fear to be further marginalised in the new parliament.
A first version of the law was adopted the 08/11/2009. A delicate matter was the repartition of 48 additional seats, supposed to reflect the population growth since the previous 2005 elections. The Nineveh province, where Kurds and Sunnis are competing for control, was to be given 13 new seats, to reach a total of 31. By contrast the total of seats in autonomous Kurdistan would have amounted to 38. The Kurds threatened to boycott the elections if the system of attribution of the new parliamentary seats was not modified, and as a result a second version of the electoral law was voted on the 25/11/2009. In it, the seats previously given to the Sunni Arabs are de facto re-attributed to the Kurds. It caused the Sunni Arab parliamentaries to refuse to attend the vote, and the law was passed with only 152 parliamentaries present on the 275 the assembly has.
The Eid celebration put the dispute on hold, providing a respite used for further negotiations before the Baghdad parliament to re-open.

It remains that the Sunnis appear to be used as a barrage to Kurdish ambitions. The Nineveh province is one of the disputed areas, that the Kurds want to see integrated to their autonomous region. The provincial council there is dominated by al-Hadba, a formation born after the 2005 elections, which gained a lot of support with an anti-Kurdish agenda. Resolutely nationalist, it supports a strong central state and so would have been very useful to oppose the project of a federal state the Kurds want to push forward, would have the number of representatives the electoral law was originally giving Nineveh been approved. Its leadership includes several Iraqi army former high-ranking officers linked to the Baath party. Kurdish peshmergas and security forces faithful to the al-Hadba governor are facing each other in the volatile province, a hotbed of insurgents.
Of some concerns as well are the comments of Sheikh Ahmed Abu Risha, a leader of the al-Sahwa militia. In an apparent reaction to the electoral law passed the 25/11/2009 at Baghdad's assembly, amended to respond to Kurds' demands, he accused them to be the cause of Iraq's nowadays problems. The campaigns waged against them by the successive Iraqi regimes have been caused, he said, by their permanent efforts to undermine Iraq's unity.
Al-Sahwa is a 95000-strong force of Sunnis, most of them former insurgents the Americans turned as pro-governmental militias. 20% are supposed to be, at term, integrated in the security forces, while the others are to be reinserted in the civilian society, but their fate is still uncertain.

Would they be used to oppose Kurdish claims on the disputed areas?
The question can be asked. Sheikh Risha accuses the Kurds of trying to steal Kirkuk, and so once again the problem returns to the disputed city. Kurds were chased from it by Saddam Hussein, who replaced them by Arab settlers. The Kurds came back in the wake of the Americans in 2003 and are now claiming the town as theirs. They demand a census and a referendum to be held, as stated in the constitution, to decide of the town's integration in their autonomous region. They face strong opposition from Arabs and Turkmens, who are denouncing the mass return of Kurd refugees in Kirkuk as an attempt to make it a Kurd colony.
In this perspective the Sunnis are becoming valuable auxiliaries for Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who refuses to let Kirkuk escape the control of the Baghdad government and made no mystery of his plans to change the constitution and establish a strong central state.

Anyway the electoral law issue is not solved yet. Tariq al-Hashimi may use his veto once again. Wranglings have been going during all the Eid period; they include interventions from the USA and the United Nations, who are pressing the different sides to reach an agreement. Joe Biden, the american vice-president, spent the weekend phoning the key protagonists, showing how important were the elections for the USA. It led Ammar al-Hakim, head of the powerful Shia Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, to warn yesterday against any foreign interference into the political process. The consensus, he said, had to be made for the benefit of the Iraqi people, not to comply to the agenda of a foreign power.