Allegations of Iraqi vote fraud surface in tense Kirkuk

Mar 14, 2010, 19:30 GMT

Kirkuk - An Iraqi Kurdish politician in the northern city of Kirkuk on Sunday accused election workers in mostly Arab areas of the city of electoral fraud during last week's parliamentary polls.

The allegations, made in a Kirkuk press conference by Kurdish politician Khalid Shenawi, set the stage for a possible battle over poll results in the city, which was left out of previous votes out of fear for the city's stability.

'We have evidence that election committee officials and observers were involved in fraud in order to favour one list over the others, especially in areas with a majority Arab population,' said Shewani, who belongs to President Jalal al-Talabani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan party.

Shewani alleged that poll workers in those areas had manipulated the vote in favour of former Iraqi prime minister Ayad Allawi's Iraqi List.

'We will not give legitimacy to elections so overwhelmed by fraud in the areas of Hwija, Zab, Riyadh and Abbasi, favouring the Iraqi List at the expense of other lists,' he warned.

Many Iraqi Kurds hope to make Kirkuk and its environs the capital of a future independent state, calling it their 'Jerusalem.' Iraqi Arab and Turkman politicians view the area, with its 10 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, as integral parts of Iraq.

The issue of voting in the area has proved so fraught that it was left out of previous votes since the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, and nearly was again in the most recent polls, after Arab politicians threatened a boycott if voter rolls they said had been doctored to show a greater number of Kurdish residents were not examined.

In the end, lawmakers in Baghdad struck an uneasy compromise on the issue to allow the city to participate in the polls at the same time as the rest of the country. According to that compromise, election results from the city and its environs would be provisional, subject to legal challenge after the vote.

Former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein's government sought to drive out the area's Kurdish population and to replace it with Arab Iraqis from elsewhere in the city.

But in the years since his government fell, many Iraqi Kurds have returned to the area.