The Daily Background

BAGHDAD, Iraq - An Iraqi court has ruled that some of the most prominent Sunni Muslims who were elected to parliament last week won’t be allowed to serve because officials suspect that they were high-ranking members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party.

The ruling is likely to dampen Bush administration hopes that the election would bring more of the disaffected Sunni minority into Iraq’s political process and undermine Sunni support for the insurgency. Instead, the decision is likely to stoke fears of widening sectarian divisions in a nation already in danger of descending into civil war.

[…]

The commission is still counting ballots and said it would have the final list of winners sometime next month.

But preliminary results showed that some of the prominent Sunni politicians on the list had likely won seats. Among those who could lose their seats are: Adnan al-Janabi, the second-highest ranking member of the constitutional committee and a top candidate on U.S.-backed former prime minister Ayad Allawi’s slate, and Rasem al-Awadi, a National Assembly member and also on Allawi’s slate. Five members of the Iraqi Accord Front, the principal Sunni electoral slate, also were on the list.

[…]
On Friday, thousands of Sunnis demonstrated in Baghdad, charging that the election was rigged in favor of the majority Shiite Muslims. The demonstration wasn’t a reaction to the court decision because the Iraqi people hadn’t learned of it.

“I came to protest against the fraud. There are some Shiites in my neighborhood who told me that they voted twice,” said Omar al-Samaraee, a 25-year-old taxi driver who marched in the demonstration. “Should a government be formed based on the current results of the elections, then I think it will be illegitimate.”

So those wonderful great, groundbreaking no-these-ones-are-the-big-ones elections have got a problem. Iraqis already feel that the results were largely illegitimate, and even though it seems that several Sunnis were elected to high offices, they’re almost all about to be disqualified because judges suspect they were former Baathist regime members from Hussein’s day.

Full Aricle here.

Filed under: Iraq Related, Z-TDB Blog