Iraq election plans hit as Sunni party quits

IRAQ’S election plans were thrown into turmoil yesterday when the country’s leading Sunni Muslim party declared it was withdrawing because of security concerns.

Announcing its pullout hours after a leading Shiite politician survived a suicide car bomb attack which killed 13 people in Baghdad, the Iraqi Islamic Party said the relentless bloodshed would keep people from voting in the long dominant Sunni north and west of Iraq.

It is a serious blow to the legitimacy of the elections and signals growing concern among Sunnis that they will be sidelined in a new Iraq dominated by the Shiite majority.

"The Iraqi Islamic Party is withdrawing from the elections because we do not think the situation will improve in the next few weeks to give conditions for credible elections," the party’s secretary-general Tareq al-Hashimi said.

Persistent violence in Sunni cities, most of which are under curfew, has raised fears that voters there will be too intimidated to cast their ballots, skewing the poll in favour of Iraq’s 60 per cent Shiite Muslim majority.

The Islamic Party’s list of 275 candidates would still appear on ballot papers which were already being printed, a spokesman for Iraq’s electoral commission said.

Farid Ayar said the commission had received no formal request for withdrawal, but if it did, any votes cast for the Iraqi Islamic Party would be considered "invalid".

The leading mainstream Sunni religious party, along with at least 16 other Sunni and secular parties, had threatened to boycott the poll unless it was postponed by up to six months to ensure that voters across the country could take part.

But most, including the Islamic Party itself, later fielded lists of candidates for the poll to elect a 275-seat National Assembly that will draft a constitution and appoint a cabinet.

Iraq’s long-oppressed Shiites are keen that the poll, expected to cement their political power after the ousting of Saddam Hussein, takes place.

The New York Times quoted unnamed US officials on Sunday saying Washington was considering giving Sunnis extra seats in parliament should Sunnis fail to vote, to avoid marginalising the 20 per cent minority that was dominant under Saddam.

The electoral commission dismissed the suggestion and the Islamic Party itself said it would be undemocratic.

"There cannot be comprehensive elections unless they include all of Iraq’s provinces. These provinces cannot accept that... they have people appointed. This will not convince us or others," said the Islamic Party leader Mohsen Abdul Hamid.

Yesterday’s suicide bomb took place outside the Baghdad head office of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), a party set up in exile in Iran to oppose Saddam Hussein and one of the strongest groups contesting the 30 January election.

Victims of the bombing, in which police said about 50 people were wounded, included several receptionists and guards at SCIRI’s headquarters. None of the party leaders was hurt.

The office is also home to party leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, who was there at the time. He called it an assassination attempt but said SCIRI’s militia would not retaliate.

"We have chosen the path of non-violence and we will stick to it," he said from his damaged compound.

The SCIRI leader blamed the attack on a Sunni insurgent alliance of former Saddam loyalists and Islamists.

Iraqi Islamic Party leader Hamid also condemned the bombing.