At the same time, the elections have further highlighted the greater political isolation of the Baathist-led insurgency in Iraq. These forces failed to make good on their promise to disrupt the elections. As a result, some political figures and groups in the Sunni Arab minority that had earlier participated in the call for a boycott of the elections have since begun to take a conciliatory stance toward the newly elected government.

The Kurdish population inhabits a territory that spans across northern Iraq, southern Turkey, and sections of Iran and Syria. The 20 million Kurds that live in the region have been fighting for decades for an independent state. Their struggle has faced brutal repression at the hands of the local capitalist regimes and the imperialist powers that back them.

Based on partial results from 13 of Iraq’s 18 provinces, a slate headed by the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), the two main Kurdish parties, received 1.1 million votes. This was the second-largest bloc of votes in part because of the boycott called by the largest parties based in the Sunni Arab minority. With 4.6 million votes counted, the Shiite-led United Iraqi Alliance had captured the largest vote total with just over 50 percent, while the Kurdish bloc had 25 percent, the February 8 New York Times reported.

While the KDP and PUK are on record for a united and federated Iraq, there is widespread support for independence among Iraqi Kurds, who comprise 20 percent of the country’s population. During the election, in tents set up outside polling places, the Kurdish Referendum Movement held an unofficial vote on independence for Iraqi Kurdistan. Nearly 2 million Kurds—almost 99 percent of those who participated—backed independence, reported Agence France-Presse February 7. Only 1 percent voted to remain a part of Iraq. Shamal Huaizi, one of the organizers of the referendum, said it was conducted with the agreement of the Kurdish regional government.

The Iraqi flag can hardly be found in the region except on a few government buildings. The Kurds do not allow Arab units of the U.S.-trained Iraqi military into the northeastern provinces they control, nor do they allow Baghdad ministries to open offices there. Border posts in Iraqi Kurdistan fly the Kurdish, not the Iraqi flag.

Baghdad also acceded to a demand to allow thousands of Kurds to register and vote in the province that includes the oil-rich city of Kirkuk. They had been forcibly removed from the region by the Hussein regime in the 1980s.

None of the governments in the region, nor Washington and London, are happy with the referendum or the Kurdish push for control of Kirkuk.

Last December the referendum organizers handed the chief United Nations envoy for the elections in Iraq a petition calling for a referendum on independence signed by more than 1.7 million Kurds, almost half the Kurdish population in northern Iraq.

In a column printed in the February 1 New York Times, former U.S. diplomat Peter Galbraith reported that when organizers of the Kurdish Referendum Movement asked to meet with Paul Bremer, then Washington’s overseer of Iraq, to show him their petition before presenting it to the UN, neither Bremer nor any of his deputies would see them.

In the wake of the elections, U.S. secretary of state Condoleezza Rice made a stop in Ankara to assure the Turkish government that Washington opposes an independent Kurdistan. “I’m here really in part to say to the Turks that we are fully committed, fully committed, to a unified Iraq,” Rice said, according to the BBC.

Rice also said Washington was “very determined” to make certain that Kurdish rebels from Turkey would not be allowed to organize attacks on Turkish military forces from mountain bases in northeastern Iraq. Since 1984 some 37,000 people have been killed in Ankara’s brutal war against guerillas organized by the Maoist-inspired Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).  
 
Sunni groups make conciliatory moves
The insurgents “made fools of us,” Mahmoud Ghassoub, a Sunni businessman in Baiji, a town north of Baghdad, told the Washington Post. “They voted to disrupt the elections but failed. Now we have lost both tracks. We did not vote, nor did they disrupt the elections.”

The elections and their aftermath have highlighted the fact that the insurgency, while it has continued to mount deadly attacks—which have increasingly targeted Iraqi security forces and civilians—has never been a movement capable of advancing a struggle for national liberation against the imperialist occupiers. A wealthy section of the Sunni Arab minority in Iraq was the social base of the party-police state run by Hussein. Defense of the privileges lost by that thin social layer has been at the heart of the guerilla campaign led by former military units of the Hussein regime.

Calling themselves the “Party of Return,” these forces have pressed for a one-point program: the restoration of the Hussein regime through the same brutal and unpopular methods that it used to hold on to power. Their attacks in the lead-up to the election were directed against Shiites—who comprise 60 percent of Iraq’s population—and their unfulfilled promises to “wash the streets with the blood of voters” on election day only served to further their political isolation.

As a result, some of the Sunni Arab groups that called for a boycott of the elections are now hedging their bets and signaling a desire to work with the new government.

“We are taking a conciliatory line because we are frightened that things may develop into a civil war,” Wamidh Nadhmi, the leader of the Arab Nationalist Trend and a spokesman for a coalition of Sunni and Shiite groups that boycotted the elections, told the Washington Post.

A group of 13 Sunni parties have agreed to take part in drafting the constitution, according to the February 6 Post. The most prominent forces in the group are the Association of Muslim Scholars and the Iraqi Islamic Party. While they supported the boycott, neither of these groups has historical ties to the Baathists, which did not base themselves primarily in the Muslim clergy. The Sunni clerics’ association was formed within a few days after the U.S. invasion. The Iraqi Islamic Party was suppressed by the Baath regime and was part of the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council under the U.S. occupation regime headed by Bremer.

The slate headed by Iyad Allawi, prime minister of the U.S.-backed interim government, has come in a distant third with 13 percent of the votes counted. Allawi, a former Baathist who worked abroad for Baghdad’s intelligence agency before running afoul of Hussein, has a thuggish reputation and is not a popular figure in Iraq.  
 
 
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