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Allegations of Iraqi vote fraud surface in tense Kirkuk
Published in Saudi Press Agency on 14 - 03 - 2010

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, according to dpa.
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.


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