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POLITICS: Iraqi Body Softens Stance on Banned Candidates

Mohammed A. Salih

WASHINGTON, Jan 26 2010 (IPS) - A decision by Iraq’s controversial Accountability and Justice Commission (AJC) Monday to remove 59 candidates from a list of over 500 candidates banned from running in the March parliamentary elections appears to be a sign that the AJC is softening its stance following widespread domestic opposition and a visit by U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden to Baghdad last week.

The AJC has not released any details to the press regarding the identity of the candidates allowed to run again and it is unclear whether the two most notable Sunni Arab politicians, Salih al-Mutlak and Abdulqadir Jassem al-Obeidi, the country’s defence minister, are among those taken off the list of banned candidates.

The Iraqi press quoted the AJC as saying the initial evidence linking the 59 candidates’ to the Ba’ath Party of former President Saddam Hussein was not correct. The majority of candidates were banned because of their alleged past or present connections to the Ba’ath Party, which ruled the country from 1968 to 2003. Many of the banned candidates are also awaiting results of their appeals to Iraqi courts.

Although several Iraqi leaders had rebuked the U.S. for trying to interfere in Iraq’s internal affairs and had vowed not to succumb to pressure to reverse the ban, Monday’s decision has generated a sense that the AJC might be more susceptible to pressure and reconsider more candidates even as time is running out fast for the elections, scheduled for Mar. 7.

“It seems to me though it’s too little, too late. It’s a response not only to Biden’s visit and American pressure but also to the (Iraqi) presidency council,” said Juan Cole, an analyst who comments frequently on Iraqi affairs on his blog.

Alarmed by the potential consequences of the ban, the U.S. administration dispatched Biden to Baghdad to pressure Iraqis to revoke the decision, which Washington fears might complicate the situation on the ground as it prepares to pull out its combat troops by the end of August 2010.

Washington has also pushed hard for the inclusion of the more moderate elements of the Ba’ath Party and the insurgency in Iraq’s political process as part of national reconciliation plans. Sunni Arab groups constituted the bulk of the armed insurgency that emerged in Iraq in the aftermath of U.S.-led invasion in 2003.

Disagreements over the ban had reached the highest layers of the Iraqi government, with President Jalal Talabani and Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki expressing sharply contradictory views in public.

Talabani, a Kurd, told reporters in Baghdad last Thursday that he had sent a letter to the head of the country’s Supreme Court inquiring not only about the legality of the AJC’s decision but also the very “legitimacy” of the AJC.

Two days later, following a meeting with Biden, Maliki lent his support to the AJC’s ruling.

“The application of accountability and justice law was in line with constitutional and legal mechanisms and included all the lists running for elections and no particular group was being targeted without others being subjected (to the law), as some claim,” said Maliki following a meeting with Biden in Baghdad last week.

Reaffirming the government’s position on the AJC decision, Hassan Sneid, a lawmaker from Maliki’s Dawa Party, told al-Iraqiya state television that “Biden’s visit will not change anything from the reality” and that the current pressures “will have no effect” on the AJC’s decision.

Many in Iraq and outside fear that if the AJC’s decision is upheld, and major banned Sunni candidates are not allowed to run, it will deal a major blow to the perception among many Iraqis, especially Sunni Arabs, that the elections are credible. This would undermine Iraq’s nascent democracy, which Washington has repeatedly promoted as a main goal behind its invasion of the country in 2003.

Although there are concerns that the ban might discourage portions of the Sunni Arab population from participating in the elections or potentially generate more violence, it is unlikely that it will have significant impact on the overall Sunnis’ representation in the future parliament.

The new election law in Iraq that divides the country into 18 districts, on a provincial basis, and ensures that in any case the Sunni-dominated provinces will have their candidates in the future parliament. However, in more mixed areas like Baghdad and Nineveh, they might be facing challenges.

The exclusion of secular and more nationalist Sunni politicians means the more “tribal and fundamentalist” Sunni candidates might make it to the parliament, Cole believes.

Calling the AJC’s decision “illegal” in an interview with IPS, Mutlak pointed fingers at Ahmed Chalabi and Iran for standing behind his exclusion from the elections. Chalabi was a one-time Iraqi ally of Washington who later fell out of favour with the U.S. administration for his alleged connections to Iran.

“They know that the momentum is on our side in the streets,” Mutlak said. “They want to bring back sectarianism… because the unity of Iraq will be only achieved through non-sectarianism.”

Mutlak’s Iraqi National Dialogue Front has 11 seats in the current parliament, but his party did well in last year’s provincial elections, emerging as one of the major voices of Sunni Arabs.

Mutlak claims he left the Ba’ath Party in 1977 and had no connections with it thereafter, but he has made statements that have been interpreted as promoting Ba’ath Party. He has been also a vocal critic of Iran’s role in Iraq and has called on Iraqi rulers in numerous occasions to stand up to Iran and adopt a more Arab nationalist line.

He recently entered a large coalition of mostly secular and nationalist Iraqi candidates called al-Iraqiya that was expected to fare well in the March elections, but it is unclear to what extent his exclusion will affect al-Iraqiya’s performance.

“The step (by AJC) is taken to ensure that the Shia religious parties will retain their dominance of the parliament,” said Cole, saying those parties had been alarmed by the performance of secular and nationalist elements in last year’s elections.

The AJC, tasked with weeding out high-ranking Ba’athists from the public service sector, was established in 2008 following widespread criticism of the former de-Ba’athification committee that was headed by Chalabi.

Chalabi’s de-Ba’athification committee was accused of randomly removing thousands of Ba’athists, particularly Sunni Arabs, from public service without proper evidence and investigation.

The AJC’s current head, Ali al-Lami, is known to have close ties to Chalabi and is himself a candidate running in the parliamentary elections. Although at the time of the AJC’s formation, the Iraqi parliament was supposed to appoint a new set of individuals to run it, it never did so.

As a result, the AJC’s top officials mostly continued to be trustees of Chalabi and ruling Shia religious parties, leading to objections over the legitimacy of the administrators’ body.