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Upcoming Baghdad elections: Registration centres due to open today

BAGHDAD: Any Iraqi wanting to vote or run in the country’s upcoming elections must ensure that their name is registered from Monday as organisers pave the way for the landmark poll in three months’ time.

But some people doubt whether credible elections can take place nationwide with violence still raging in rebel-held towns such as Fallujah, west of Baghdad.

Dismissing such misgivings, Iraq’s electoral commission insists that preparations for the vote, promised by January 31, are running smoothly with help from a handful of experts from the United Nations. Voters and candidates, whether party-sponsored or independent, have six weeks to register from November 1, according to an election calendar. They will be able to do so at some 550 registration centres throughout Iraq set up in the same location or near where Iraqis are accustomed to receiving their food rations — a leftover from a UN oil-for-food programme..

“Holding free and fair elections in today’s Iraq is a must and everybody is looking forward for such an important step,” said Salah Omar al-Ali, a veteran Iraqi politician and ex-member of the former Baath party.

“It would be a first step towards exiting the occupation quagmire in Iraq,” said Ali, who set up a political group with Prime Minister Iyad Allawi in the early 1990s while in exile before the pair fell out. Without an official census, election organisers approached Iraq’s trade ministry, which is in charge of distributing subsidised food parcels, to use its ration card system as a starting point to create an electoral register. The government took over the cost of providing food rations after the oil-for-food initiative — implemented as a humanitarian tool while international sanctions were slapped on the former regime — officially ended last year. afp

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