This time, Iraqis hear and see candidates

It was a cool winter morning in Baghdad on Monday, just a few miles from the Shiite mosque where a suicide bomber killed or wounded 112 people the day before. But Abdul Kareem, 50, a real estate developer and independent Shiite candidate, was on the street hustling for votes anyway, passing out campaign cards and gluing his posters to walls. "If you think I'm a good man, campaign for me," Mr. Kareem told an elderly man, handing him a stack of laminated cards. The nation's provincial elections on Jan. 31 are the first in which the government has deemed it safe enough for the names, instead of simply the political affiliations, of officeseekers to appear on the ballot. It is also the first time that large numbers of candidates like Mr. Kareem have decided for themselves that Iraq is sufficiently safe to campaign publicly and put their oversize pictures on posters and banners around the city. It sometimes seems that every square inch of blast wall in Baghdad is covered with them. The elections are part of a series of votes scheduled in Iraq this year, including parliamentary elections and a referendum on the withdrawal of American forces. Taken together, they are expected to shape the political future of Iraq as it emerges from an extended period of sectarian violence and continues to wrestle with such basic questions as whether it will be a single nation or several. The provincial election also takes place against the backdrop of a wave of departing foreign troops, most significantly from Britain and the United States. The United States has agreed to pull its combat troops, now numbering about 145,000, from cities by June 30, and to withdraw entirely from Iraq by the end of 2011. Provincial councils are roughly the equivalent of state legislatures in the United States, and the balloting for them is expected to correct underrepresentation in local governments among Sunni Arabs, particularly in areas where there has been heavy insurgent and sectarian violence, including Baghdad, Anbar, Diyala and Nineveh Provinces. Sunni Arabs largely boycotted the 2005 provincial elections. There is widespread fear, however, that the vote may set off a new round of clashes. At least one candidate has been assassinated by political rivals and a number of opposition candidates have been arrested, several of whom are being investigated for terrorism-related charges in Diyala. The election will be delayed in the restive Kirkuk Province, where some 40 percent of Iraq's oil reserves lie, and in the three provinces of Kurdistan, a semiautonomous region. Further complicating the vote are the estimated 5.1 million Iraqis who remain displaced, according to the International Organization for Migration. Only about half of the refugees–those still living within Iraq's borders–are eligible to vote. The provincial elections could prove to be a referendum on the religious parties that have dominated Iraqi politics in recent years, including Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki's Islamic Dawa Party. "There is widespread dissatisfaction with the performance of the governing religious parties, but Maliki is clearly trying to mitigate this by playing the nationalist and centrist card," said Reidar Visser, a research fellow at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs in Oslo, who runs www.historiae.org, a Web site focused on Iraqi affairs. While Mr. Maliki is not running, his Dawa Party has organized a group of political organizations into a coalition called State of Law, which is playing down Dawa's Shiite roots and emphasizing improved security, nationalism and economic development. During interviews across Iraq during the past two weeks, voters said they associated the nation's sectarian violence with the rise of religious parties. Provincial governments had done little, they said, to provide basic services like electricity. Now, four years after a raised purple index finger became a symbol of Iraqi democracy, the hope that a single vote could restore peace and order has been replaced by a fatalism common in far older democracies. "I won't participate in the election, because those whom we elected last time failed us," said Iman Karkaz, a 50-year-old academic from the war-torn city of Falluja. "Most of the parties used religion and Islam as a cover and then created sectarianism and riot in our society." The government has sought to limit the influence of religion for the provincial elections by prohibiting appeals for candidates in mosques and other places of worship and by barring political signs with pictures of religious figures–strategies that religious parties employed in previous elections with great success. Two of the nation's most influential Shiite clerics, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the reclusive 78-year-old cleric revered by many of Iraq's 15 million Shiites, and Moktada al-Sadr, 35, whose armed supporters have clashed with American and Iraqi forces in the past, have said they plan to stay largely neutral during the elections. Instead of attaching his name to a slate of candidates as in previous elections, Mr. Sadr, whose standing is far weaker than it was during the 2005 elections, said he might endorse only specific candidates this time. "We didn't want to lose the trust of the people by politicizing the provincial councils," said Salah al-Obeidi, a spokesman for Mr. Sadr. It may be too late. Karrar Ali, a 28-year old laborer from Maysan Province in heavily Shiite southern Iraq, which continues to be Mr. Sadr's base of support, said he planned to vote only for candidates running on secular platforms. "I won't elect any of the religious lists," he said. "The lists that think art is forbidden, that sports are forbidden and that freedom of expression is forbidden won't be elected by me because it ties me up with the chains I've always been with, and I want to be free now from those chains." There are other signs that voters have grown tired of Iraq's politics. In a government poll of 3,000 eligible Iraqi voters in November, nearly one-third said they supported the idea of a single-party state, and a 46 percent plurality said the existing provincial councils had done a poor job. Still, 75 percent of respondents said they were optimistic about Iraq's future, and 69 percent said they intended to vote. But while religious parties may not fare as well as they have in past elections, analysts said their access to money, their grip on local and national seats and their ability to form political coalitions will virtually guarantee them a large following in the provincial contests. And some voters say Iraq needs Islam to help bind it together. "We're an Islamic country that will never accept a person who distributes immoral alcohol and urges our sons to be effeminate," said Kareem al-Muhammadawi, a 57-year-old taxi driver from Maysan Province. The government, which has budgeted $225 million for the election, has made a major push to match the 63 percent turnout of the 2005 local elections–which were held on the same day as balloting for the National Assembly. And in an effort to avoid fraud, 46,000 nonpartisan election observers and thousands of other monitors will be allowed inside polling stations.