Worldfocus looks at this Sunday’s Iraqi parliamentary elections, which could exacerbate sectarian divisions. They also examine what has changed in the seven years since the Iraq invasion. Daljit Dhaliwal interviews Gideon Rose, managing editor of Foreign Affairs, and Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University.
Since campaigning officially began on February 12, cities across Iraq’s northern Kurdish region have been waiting for the election in anticipation.
Posters depicting a number of candidates and officials festoon the streets and lamp posts are strewn with banners and bunting.
Traditionally there have been two main Kurdish parties, but as Zeina Khodr reports from Sulaimaniyah, there is now a powerful, new force to contend with.
Most ethnic Kurds in Iraq’s northern region known as “Iraqi Kurdistan” see the national elections on March 7 as about safeguarding their hard-won political gains since the US-led war ousted the Baathist government in 2003.
The upstart opposition party Goran, or Change, is giving the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan a tough fight in Sulaymaniya, in northern Iraq’s semiautonomous Kurdistan region. More on the Goran party from the Los Angeles Times:
The party machine of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan is pulling out all the stops. On-duty security forces string up PUK banners, and young men break curfew to hang out of cars waving ivy-colored pennants. The streets of Sulaymaniya are a sea of green.
But in the final days before Iraqis vote for a new national parliament, flags of another color are grabbing all the attention. They’re blue, and emblazoned with a burning candle and one word: Change.
The PUK, the longtime ruling party of Sulaymaniya, in northern Iraq’s Kurdistan enclave, is in a fight for its life against the upstart Change movement. And with nerves rattled by a shootout between the two sides, the electoral battle could threaten the stability of a region long deemed the “success story” of Iraq.
“I am ready to die for this flag,” said Change supporter Anwar Omar, 21.
The PUK and the Kurdistan Democratic Party, in a sometimes uneasy alliance, have had a 19-year monopoly on power in Iraqi Kurdistan. At the least, the elections Sunday probably will shatter the PUK’s dominance in Sulaymaniya and chip away at the KDP’s hold in the neighboring provinces of Irbil and Dahuk. The three areas make up the semiautonomous region.
Change party supporters, harnessing anger over “business as usual” politics not unlike the “tea party” movement in the United States, say they’re fed up with endemic corruption and what they call the two parties’ autocratic ways and suffocating grip on economic life in the north.
Mohammed Tofiq once belonged to the PUK’s politburo. Now he’s one of the leaders of Change. He said PUK corruption dated to 1991, when the Kurds first established their semiautonomous enclave, protected from Saddam Hussein. He sharply criticized the PUK leader, Jalal Talabani, now the Iraqi president.
“After the uprising, he became interested in his own power and wealth and his family went into business and he surrounded himself with ‘yes’ men,” Tofiq said.
He disputed Bush administration assertions that Kurdistan was a model for the rest of Iraq.
“The American administration had to say . . . that one part of Iraq was a genuine democracy. They had nothing else,” he said. “I don’t say that. It’s not true. It’s a lie.”
Talabani bristles at the notion that the new party represents genuine reform. “Those who were corrupt are now in Change,” Talabani said in an interview this week.
Billed as “the other Iraq” for its relative absence of suicide attacks and sectarian bloodshed, the Kurdish region has wooed foreign investors since 2003 and enjoyed an economic boom.
But shattering the status quo has the potential to trigger major internal Kurdish violence for the first time since 1998, when Talabani and the KDP’s Massoud Barzani formally ended a four-year civil war that followed the collapse of a power-sharing arrangement.
Mindful of history, Kurdish leaders have vowed to act swiftly to quash any unrest.
The people “have the right to be worried about the situation but the whole context has changed,” Barzani, now president of the region, said in an interview.
“Even if there is a small incident here and there, it will be easily and quickly controlled.”
No one wants to be blamed for jeopardizing the hard-won gains of the enclave, and PUK and KDP officials downplay the strife in Sulaymaniya as the fruit of an emerging democracy.
“It is a scary game sometimes. In Iraq and the new Kurdistan, it is not easy, but I feel blessed that we are part of that generation who in the years to come will be looked at as the founding fathers of democracy,” said Iraqi Kurdistan Prime Minister Barham Saleh, a senior PUK leader.
“Look, we’ve asked for democracy and it has happened, not in its mature sense in every way, but nonetheless it’s politics. . . . People compete for votes. This is good and that is the fundamental story of the place.”
For residents of Sulaymaniya, such assurances are not enough.
Turkey has recalled its ambassador to the United States “for consultations” after a US congressional panel narrowly voted to brand the mass killings of Armenians by Turkish forces in World War One as genocide.
The move came despite warnings from both the White House and Turkey that it could harm US-Turkish relations and impede efforts to normalise ties between Ankara and Armenia.
The measure now goes before the full House of Representatives, but it is not clear whether it will actually go to a vote there.
In Armenia, the country’s foreign minister says the vote’s a boost for human rights.
Early voting has begun in Iraq’s parliamentary elections.
Security personnel, detainees and hospital patients were among those allowed to vote ahead of Sunday’s election, when most Iraqis will cast their ballots. Security is also tight after Wednesday’s suicide bomb attack in the city of Baquba, which killed at least 32 people.
These are only Iraq’s second elections for a full parliamentary term since the US-led invasion in 2003.
The weekly wrap-up of the week’s top stories with James Rubin, an adjunct professor at Columbia Universitys School of International and Public Affairs, joining Martin Savidge to discuss the implications of the killing in Dubai and the NATO offensive in Afghanistan.
Mohamed El Baradei, the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, has returned to his native Egypt saying he wants to serve the country. Could he become the next president of Egypt? Can he overcome the current political and constitutional restrictions to be elected president? And in a country where the vast majority of the population do not vote and many do not trust the ballot box, will Egyptians see El Baradei as a long-awaited for saviour?
Inside Story looks at the obstacles that confront Mohamed El Baradei and the prospects for an opening of Egypt’s political process.
Dubai’s police chief says he’s almost certain Israel was involved in last month’s assassination of a senior Hamas official.
Dahi Khalfan Tamim says if proven then an arrest warrant should be issued for Israel’s top spy, the man who’s in charge of Mossad.
Robert Fisk is the Middle East correspondent for the British newspaper the Independent. He says, if Israel is behind the assassination, then Tel Aviv could find itself in a diplomatic crisis with some of its European allies.
More on the growing row between London and Tel Aviv from the UK Guardian:
Britain today declared its “outrage” at the use of forged British passports by a hit squad that killed a Hamas official in Dubai, and dispatched police investigators to the Gulf emirate to collect evidence.
The officers from the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) arrived in the United Arab Emirates as the investigation focused increasingly on Israel. The Dubai police chief declared that he was “99%, if not 100% certain” of Mossad’s involvement, and called on Interpol to issue an arrest warrant for the Israeli spy chief, Meir Dagan. While SOCA is concentrating specifically on the misuse of British passports, it is understood that MI6 is conducting a broader, parallel probe into Israeli involvement.
Britain, Ireland and France stepped up diplomatic pressure on Israel, demanding explanations on the use of forged European passports by the assassins who targeted Mahmoud al-Mabhouh on 19 January.
However, the initial response from the Israeli envoys in London and Dublin was that they had nothing to say about the affair, bringing closer the prospect of a high-level diplomatic row. The Israeli embassy made no comment on its meeting at the French foreign ministry, which “expressed its deep concern about the malicious and fraudulent use of these French administrative documents.”
The US also looked likely to be drawn into the affair for the first time, after the Wall Street Journal reported that Mabhouh’s assassins had used American-registered credit cards to buy plane tickets.
The foreign secretary, David Miliband, said the Israeli ambassador to London, Ron Prosor, had been asked to shed light on how the identities of six British citizens living in Israel had been stolen and used by the assassins. The foreign secretary said any tampering with British passports was “an outrage”. Miliband said: “We wanted to give Israel every opportunity to share what it knows about this incident and we hope and expect that they will cooperate fully with the investigation.”
Prosor, however, said he was “unable to add information” on the matter, and his counterpart in Dublin, Zion Evrony, delivered a similar response to a top Irish diplomat. “I told him I don’t know anything about the event – beyond that it is not customary to share the content of diplomatic meetings,” Evrony said.
Ireland’s foreign minister Michael Martin revealed that a further two Irish passports were used in the assassination, bringing the total number of Irish travel documents involved to five as speculation grew that the size of the hit squad was bigger than the 11 originally reported.
British diplomats in Israel have been meeting the six British nationals caught up in the assassination plot when their identities were used by the hit team. Foreign office officials said that none of the six had reported their passports stolen so the documents used by the killers appeared to be sophisticated clones. SOCA said the numbers on the fake passports were the same as the genuine ones. It confirmed the photographs and signatures on the passports used in Dubai do not match those on passports issued by British authorities.
Miliband is to meet in Brussels on Monday with his Israeli counterpart, Avigdor Lieberman, who has insisted there is no proof of Israeli involvement, and stressed that his government employed a “policy of ambiguity” on intelligence matters.
In Dubai, however, the emirate’s police chief, Dahi Khalfan Tamim, called on local television for Interpol to issue “a red notice against the head of Mossad … as a killer in case Mossad is proved to be behind the crime, which is likely now.”
British officials said last night it was too early to speculate on what measures Britain might take against Israel if the government remained uncooperative.
One possible consequence could be Britain’s response to an Israeli request to change its ‘universal jurisdiction’ law on war crimes, under which a London magistrates court issued an arrest warrant in December for Israel’s former foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, for her role in the Gaza offensive a year earlier.
Livni cancelled her planned visit to London as a result, leading Miliband to promise the law would be changed. “Israel is a strategic partner and a close friend of the UK. We are determined to protect and develop these ties,” Miliband said.
However, there have been growing calls for the relationship to be reassessed if Israel is proved to have been involved in the forging of British passports in the Mabhouh assassination. Sir Richard Dalton, Britain’s ambassador to Iran from 2003 to 2006 said: “All this just says how pathetic and ludicrous the claim is that Israel is Britain’s strategic partner.”
The Conservative leader, David Cameron, said Israel must provide assurances it would ban Mossad from using UK travel papers. He also called on the government to make clear when it knew about the use of falsified British passports.
The Dubai authorities said they had asked Britain for assistance at the end of January, but the foreign office insists it was only informed of the British connection hours before it was made public.
The trailer to a new documentary, Remnants of a War. The documentary looks at the efforts to rid southern Lebanon of the cluster bombs dropped by Israel during its 2006 war with Hezbollah.
A 2006 report from Ha’aretz points to the scope of the problem:
“What we did was insane and monstrous, we covered entire towns in cluster bombs,” the head of an IDF rocket unit in Lebanon said regarding the use of cluster bombs and phosphorous shells during the war.
Quoting his battalion commander, the rocket unit head stated that the IDF fired around 1,800 cluster bombs, containing over 1.2 million cluster bomblets.
In addition, soldiers in IDF artillery units testified that the army used phosphorous shells during the war, widely forbidden by international law. According to their claims, the vast majority of said explosive ordinance was fired in the final 10 days of the war.
The rocket unit commander stated that Multiple Launch Rocket System (MLRS) platforms were heavily used in spite of the fact that they were known to be highly inaccurate.
MLRS is a track or tire carried mobile rocket launching platform, capable of firing a very high volume of mostly unguided munitions. The basic rocket fired by the platform is unguided and imprecise, with a range of about 32 kilometers. The rockets are designed to burst into sub-munitions at a planned altitude in order to blanket enemy army and personnel on the ground with smaller explosive rounds.
The use of such weaponry is controversial mainly due to its inaccuracy and ability to wreak great havoc against indeterminate targets over large areas of territory, with a margin of error of as much as 1,200 meters from the intended target to the area hit.
The cluster rounds which don’t detonate on impact, believed by the United Nations to be around 40% of those fired by the IDF in Lebanon, remain on the ground as unexploded munitions, effectively littering the landscape with thousands of land mines which will continue to claim victims long after the war has ended.
Because of their high level of failure to detonate, it is believed that there are around 500,000 unexploded munitions on the ground in Lebanon. To date 12 Lebanese civilians have been killed by these mines since the end of the war.
According to the commander, in order to compensate for the inaccuracy of the rockets and the inability to strike individual targets precisely, units would “flood” the battlefield with munitions, accounting for the littered and explosive landscape of post-war Lebanon.
What’s particularly galling is that the Israeli Defense Forces dropped most of these bombs during the last 72 hours of the conflict — after a UN ceasefire deal had been reached, but before it came into effect. Of the over one million cluster bombs dropped, an estimated 35 percent failed to detonate. As of late 2008, 40 people had been killed and another 270 injured by unexploded cluster bombs. About a third of the victims are children.
UN figures show that 26 percent of southern Lebanon’s cultivatable land has been affected, and that 34 million square meters – or 13 square miles – are contaminated.
The Washington Post recently put together a multi-media presentation on the ongoing impact of indiscriminate carpeting of southern Lebanon with cluster bombs as well.
There remains considerable mystery over why Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, the Hamas military advisor, was targeted and over Mossad’s alleged involvement. The traces left an uncharacteristically amateurish trail for a killing by the Israeli intelligence service. For more, Daljit Dhaliwal interviews David Schenker, director of the Program on Arab Politics at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, in conversation with students at Carnegie Mellon University in Doha, Qatar. Hosted by Al Jazeera’s Abderrahim Foukara.