Tuesday, October 18, 2005

Why should all the Iraqi participants trust that the election results are actually what was voted for when the occupation army helped transport ballot boxes after the vote?

The current Nobel Prize winner for literature Harold Pinter made an important point in an acceptance speech earlier this year when he had also won the Wilfred Owen Award.

Pinter said:

You may say at this point: what about the Iraqi elections? Well, President Bush himself answered this question when he said: "We cannot accept that there can be free democratic elections in a country under foreign military occupation". I had to read that statement twice before I realised that he was talking about Lebanon and Syria.

(From:"Torture and misery in the name of Freedom", by Harold Pinter at:
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/1014-27.htm )

We also know that areas heavily populated by Sunnis were under sustained attack from the Iraqi army and coallition forces in the weeks and days leading up to the election. This had worried leading Sunnis as is shown by the following:

Meanwhile, Iraqi member of parliament Mishaan al-Juburi told Aljazeera that the US offensive against predominantly Sunni towns in the central Anbar province was a repetition of similar tactics used ahead of the January 2005 elections.

''What we fear most in the governorates that contain mixed residents is the targeting of Sunni Arab neighbourhoods, in order to prevent Sunnis from attaining the two-thirds of the consensus required to vote down the [constitution] at the referendum," he said.

(From "Several killed in Baghdad bomb attack" at:
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/D9C617C8-CF1B-4ACB-94C1-CBBBDF3DCD74.htm Thursday 06 October 2005, 16:13 Makka Time, 13:13 GMT )

So why should Sunnis believe this vote was fair?

What is it about this vote that might reduce the resistance to the occupation?

Or is it just something to give the invaders a figleaf for back home...just part of the propaganda war trying to convince some that Democracy is now happening?





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