IRAQ THE MODEL

The Birth of Democracy Continues...


Saturday, December 10, 2005
Elections update.
We were thinking of taking a day off from blogging but there are some new developments concerning the upcoming elections that I think are important.There have been several press conferences in Baghdad today for many of the heads of major lists and political parties.The first one I saw was for Abdulaziz al-Hakeem head of the UIA. Al-Hakeem expressed his concern over the possibilities of fraud.He apparently wasn’t worried about fraud in the thousands of voting station pread all over the country but he is more afraid from fraud in the main offices of the IECI when the boxes reach the headquarters and computers start handling the counting.“There were serious incidents of fraud in the January elections” said al-Hakeem, a much unexpected thing to hear from the biggest winner in that round of elections!This could be aiming at preparing the atmosphere for future complaints and conspiracy theories if his lists loses because logically, there are less chances for fraud to happen the closer we move to the center where monitoring is at its highest and strictest level. Abdulaziz told his supporters that they “should not allow the loss of any single vote”. This makes one feel that the UIA are getting aware of the tough competition they’re about to face from other lists, particularly from Allawi.Allawi had a press conference too, nothing impressive or new. He again emphasized the extreme importance of this election for Iraq and he urged Iraqis to be very careful in their choices. In my opinion he was trying to say “do not listen to what clerics say and follow your brains”.It is noticed that so far, Allawi is the only candidate who is leading a professional campaign, and I mean really professional; the TV ads, the posters and the signs are very well produced and the words are carefully chosen and they’re attracting good attention among the people here.