The road to hell is paved with good intentions

Six months ago, I wrote in an opinion column that “how events unfold in South and West Asia this summer will have immense implications even for those of us halfway around the world.”

The two main events I referred to then were the presidential elections in Iran and Afghanistan.  But, it was beyond my wildest imagination that both the incumbent presidents and their governments would engage in massive electoral frauds in order to skew the results in their favor.  Particularly in Afghanistan with the entire world watching, and with the United Nations helping with the logistics of the elections.

Yet, that is how the story unfolded. 

In Iran, protests spontaneously erupted immediately after the rigged election results were made public.  But, the reports of arrests of dissidents since then, and their torture and even death in jails, are absolutely depressing developments.

In Afghanistan, the ineffective Hamid Karzai successfully cooked up the election books.  His main challenger, Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, has withdrawn from a runoff election that was hastily scheduled for November 7^th, which has now been cancelled.

Meanwhile, neighboring Pakistan seems to be speeding down towards anarchy.

Thus, mid-autumn it is now, and I am all the more worried.

Try as I might to be cheerful about the outcomes in these three countries, I am unable to because there is now yet another electoral signpost that we are rapidly approaching—general elections in Iraq.

January 16, 2010 is the date when Iraqis will cast their votes in the parliamentary elections.  Iraq’s election commission will need at least 90 days to carry out the elections in accordance with the law.  However, the parliament is yet to approve of the electoral law that will govern these elections and the deadline for a final election plan has come and gone. 

The key disagreement is over voter registration in the oil-rich Kirkuk.  Kirkuk is in northern Iraq, which is a Kurd-dominated part of the country.  The question that remains unresolved is how to count the city’s Kurds, Arabs, and the Turkmen, who are the main ethnic groups there.

It is not as simple as a head count.  Because, when Saddam Hussein was in power, his regime unlawfully evicted Kurds and encouraged Arabs to settle there.  So, naturally, after the US removed the dictator, the Kurdish population returned home in huge numbers.

The parliament has to decide whether only the current population and their residencies count, or whether voter registration records from a few years ago are valid.  A current one would favor the Kurds, while using older registration data would, obviously, be advantageous to Arabs and Turkmen. 

It appears that the Kurds have drawn the metaphorical line in the sand.  Their demand for current data and for Kirkuk as one single constituency has no possible middle ground with the demands from the other sides that records from 2004 or 2005 be used, or that Kirkuk be split into two constituencies.

Kurdish representatives, therefore, boycotted the discussions.  If, on the other hand, the parliament approves a plan that overrules the objections raised by the Kurds, then there is a possibility that it will be vetoed by the Iraqi president—who is Kurdish!

If elections are not held as scheduled, then technically the current government has no legality to continue on past January. 

To review then: Iran’s elections were rigged.  Afghanistan’s elections were rigged.  Pakistan is in disarray.  Iraq’s elections in January are in doubt.

If there is a common thread to all these, it is simply that all these are countries that have been experiencing internal strife for decades now.  Iran is yet to recover from the disastrous coup d’etat in 1953 that overthrew the democratically elected government, and the later theocratic revolution led by Ayatollah Khomeini.  Afghanistan was practically in a civil war that only worsened after the Soviet tanks rumbled in back in 1979.  Pakistan has never really been stable ever since its creation in 1947.  And Iraq needs no introduction to the American audience.

Despite all these, if we expect elections to somehow magically transform these countries, well, that is worse than naïve optimism