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Few Sunnis Found in Iraqi Military Tally of Voters Underscores Concern Over Ethnic Imbalance

Posted on: Wednesday, 28 December 2005, 09:00 CST

By Richard A. Oppel Jr.

An analysis of preliminary results released from the Iraqi parliamentary election suggests that in contrast to the remarkable surge in Sunni Arab participation in the political process, the Sunnis still have comparatively little representation in the Iraqi security forces.

The indication is troubling because Sunni Arabs, who are about 20 percent of Iraq's population, came out in greater numbers largely as a response to the recent domination of the government by Shiites and Kurds. In particular, Sunni Arabs say they fear that the security forces will be used against them.

U.S. military commanders say that it is crucial in Iraq to build an army representative of Iraq's ethnicity and that the alternative is to risk the consequences of attempts by Shiite and Kurdish forces to pacify insurgent hotbeds dominated by Sunni Arab militants.

It has been suspected that Sunni Arabs are severely underrepresented in the new military and police forces. Election officials believe that a special tally collected from the Dec. 15 vote helps to detail the disparity, mostly because voting in Iraq has almost completely been along ethnic and sectarian divisions.

In the special tally which the officials said overwhelmingly consisted of most of the ballots cast by security forces but also included votes from hospital patients and prisoners about 7 percent of the votes were cast for the three main Sunni Arab parties. Officials have estimated that overall voting for Sunni Arab candidates will turn out to be 20 percent.

Along the same lines, the tally also suggested that Kurdish pesh merga militiamen seemed to have a heavily disproportionate presence in voters from the security forces.

The figures, which are preliminary, are far from exact and are nothing like a census of the security forces. And it is impossible to know whether Sunni Arab soldiers and police officers turned out to vote to the same high degree as the overall population of Sunni Arabs. A spokesman for the U.S. military command that oversees training of the Iraqi forces said that while he did not know the security forces' ethnic mix, he believed that there were more Sunni troops than the election data suggested.

The results provide some clues to the composition and political sympathies of Iraqi soldiers, a crucial but elusive factor in a country struggling to overcome deep sectarian divisions and defeat an insurgency mostly consisting of Sunni Arabs, who dominated security forces under Saddam Hussein.

The voting data released Monday were just one sliver of preliminary results indicating that although Sunni Arabs will play a larger role in the new Parliament than they did in the interim government, where they were almost completely shut out, Shiites will once again dominate Parliament.

The Sunni Arabs have accused the Shiite-dominated government of widespread voting fraud and demanded a new election. Sunnis and some secular Shiites have threatened to boycott the new government. But any chance of a large-scale election rerun has been all but ruled out. Officials from the independent electoral commission said Monday that they saw no reason for new elections, an opinion seconded by Craig Jenness, the chief UN election official here.

"We do think there might have been fraud in a few isolated places, but we don't see this widespread fraud people are talking about," Jenness, head of the UN electoral assistance team in Iraq, said in an interview. "It wasn't perfect, but it was pretty credible given the circumstances. "There's nothing we see that would suggest a rerun is warranted."

Though more attention has been focused on the ethnic makeup of the government, the U.S. military is very sensitive to the perception that the Iraqi forces include few Sunni Arabs, especially in the north, where Kurdish officials have made plain their desire to expand their territory into Arab and Turkmen regions. To many U.S. commanders, a proportionate representation of Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish soldiers is vital to Iraq's long-term stability and cohesion.

But on that score there still appears to be a way to go, according to the numbers from the special election tally. In the north, 45 percent of the ballots were cast for the main Kurdish slate of candidates, as against a combined total of just 7 percent for the three main Sunni Arab political parties. The principal Shiite political alliance received 30 percent.

The heavily disproportionate votes for the Kurds and the slight showing for the Sunnis primarily reflect their relative numbers in the security forces, election officials said.

By contrast, while final election results will not be available for another week, Iraqi news reports have estimated that Kurds and Sunni Arabs each received perhaps 20 percent of the overall national vote for seats in Parliament. The main Shiite political alliance is expected to take slightly less than 50 percent of the seats. Those estimates more closely follow Iraq's demographic makeup.

Lieutenant Colonel Fred Wellman, spokesman for the U.S. military command that oversees training of Iraqi forces, said some Iraqi soldiers voted near their homes on Dec. 15 and would not have been included in the special tally, though he said he did not know whether those included a disproportionate number of soldiers from any one ethnic group.

Wellman said he did not have detailed estimates of the ethnic composition of the Iraqi military, though he said Sunni Arab representation "clearly lags" behind that of the other ethnic groups. He also emphasized the efforts being made to recruit Sunni soldiers, including more than 4,000 who have been signed up in the past six months.

"One of the biggest goals of this enterprise is to build an army that reflects the national makeup of Iraq and deploys those units away from their home," he said. "There are great efforts to bring Sunnis into the fold and balance out the army as much as possible."

Source: International Herald Tribune

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