Iraqi president warns over low turnout
Iraq’s president said today that many Iraqis would stay away from the polls in his country’s historic election because of security fears and warned the vote will fail if Sunnis don’t participate.
“What we hope is that everyone will take part,” President Ghazi al-Yawer said at a news conference the day before the vote.
“But if the majority of the Iraqi people does not take part, and we know that the majority will not take part because of the security situation and not because they are boycotting the elections,” said al-Yawer, a Sunni Arab.
“There are only very few who will boycott, but the majority has decided not to participate out of fear that their voters will not go to ballot centres in places that lack security,” he said.
It was not clear whether al-Yawer meant that the majority of Iraqis eligible to vote will not do so or that most of those who don’t vote will stay away out of fear, rather than political reasons.
Insurgents, based mainly in the Sunni regions north and west of Baghdad, have launched a campaign of violence to wreck the election and have threatened to kill anyone who participates. Some Sunni clerics have also called on their followers to boycott the vote.
Those two factors are likely to mean a low turnout by Iraq’s Sunni Arab minority, while Shiites and Kurds have been eager to vote.
Al-Yawer warned that “any political process that does not have the participation of the Shiites, the Sunnis and the Kurds will not be fated to succeed.”
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