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Yawar said
politicians who did not take part in the election should be
allowed to join the government and talks on the new
constitution. (Reuters).
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BAGHDAD, January 29 (IslamOnline.net &
News Agencies) – With the interim government and the US forces
clamping down stringent security a few hours before the general
elections, Iraq’s interim President Ghazi Al-Yawar on Saturday,
January 29, predicted that only a minority of voters would cast
their ballots.
“We hope that everybody will participate,
but most of the Iraqi people will not participate,” Agence France-Presse
(AFP) quoted him as saying in a press conference.
“Most of them will not take part because
of the security situation and not because they want to boycott the
elections,” Yawar argued.
US President George W. Bush and UN
Secretary General Kofi Annan both appealed for Iraqis to vote, with the
election commission anticipating a 57 percent turnout.
Representatives of several Iraqi parties
and leading political figures have been campaigning for a six-month
delay of the vote over the increasing deteriorating security conditions.
UN Iraqi envoy Lakhdar Brahimi also warned
that holding the elections would be impossible unless “first and
foremost security improves.”
The Association of Muslim Scholars, the
highest Sunni religious authority in Iraq, championed the call for
election boycott.
The Islamic Party of Iraq, the main Sunni
political party, had quit the election race also over aggravating
insecurity.
However, Yawar, himself a Sunni, said
politicians who did not take part in the election should still be
allowed to join the future government and talks on the new constitution.
Around 14 million Iraqis are eligible to
cast ballots at some 5,700 polling stations to elect a 275-seat National
Assembly that will in turn choose a Presidency Council and draft the
country’s constitution.
The constitution must then be ratified
through a national referendum – scheduled to take place at the end of
2005.
The vote is based on a single
constituency, proportional closed-list system, meaning that if a party
gets 10 per cent of the votes, it gets 10 per cent of the seats.
Stringent Security
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An Iraqi election
worker sits next to a ballot box at a polling station in Mosul.
(Reuters).
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On the ground, the interim government
closed Saturday the country’s borders and Baghdad airport.
A dusk-to-dawn curfew was also slapped on
most of the country and travel restrictions enforced.
The war-like atmosphere of blasts, razor
wire and rattling army vehicles patrolling empty streets have turned
most Iraqi cities to ghost towns.
Nonetheless, the watertight security
measures failed to stem deadly strikes that killed at least 18 people in
the run-up to Sunday’s vote.
A gun battle Saturday in one of the
best-protected parts of Baghdad heightened the tension for the nervous
seven million people of the capital.
Heavy bursts of gunfire erupted at the
Sanak bridge, which is near the Green Zone, the high security area that
houses the US and British embassies and Iraqi government offices.
The shooting broke a tense silence in
central Baghdad, which has been transformed into a virtual ghost town
because of the stringent security measures.
In Khanaqin, a town near the border with
Iran, a bomber killed four adults, a child and three Iraqi soldiers at a
police security coordinating center, police and the US military said.
In Samara, 120 kilometers (75 miles) north
of Baghdad, a soldier and a policeman were killed in clashes with
gunmen.
Fighters attacked a police patrol at
Salman Pak, just south of Baghdad, on Saturday killing two security
forces, police said.
An Iraqi soldier was killed by a mortar in
As-Suwayrah south of the capital.
Also Saturday, one policeman was shot dead
in an attack on a polling station in Moqdadiya, 105 kilometers (65
miles) north of Baghdad.
Four police were shot dead just before
midnight Friday on the main road between Baiji and Shorgat, about 200
kilometers (120 miles) north of the capital.
US forces clashed with fighters in Ramadi,
west of Baghdad, and one civilian was killed, a hospital doctor said.
Dozens of polling stations have faced bomb
and sniper attacks in the run-up to the elections.
Al-Qaeda's leader in Iraq Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi,
who has a 25 million dollar US bounty on his head, has declared an
all-out war on the vote.
However, the Islamic Front for Resistance,
a leading Iraqi resistance faction, vowed not to target polling stations
or innocent Iraqis.
“We should not be dragged into side
battles which do not affect the true struggle with the enemy occupiers,”
it said in a statement, a copy of which was obtained by IslamOnline.net.
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