Hours before a crucial referendum on a new constitution, voters in western Iraq, where many are expected to say "No", were asking themselves a troubling question: where are the polling stations?
"There are no voting centres in cities like Haditha, Hit, Rawa, Qaim, Ana, Baghdadi and the villages around them," Mahmoud Salman al-Ani, a human rights activist in Ramadi, said on Friday, listing locations across western Anbar province.
"There aren't actually any voting centres or even voting sheets in these cities. Nobody knows how and where to vote if they decide to," he said of the predominantly Sunni Arab region.
Anbar, Iraq's largest province, runs from Baghdad to border Jordan, Syria and Saudi Arabia and is also the heartland of the Sunni-led insurgency. Much of the population is expected to vote against the US-backed constitution on Saturday.
US troops have run a series of operations across the province in the past three weeks, trying to hunt down guerrillas and prepare the generally lawless region for the vote.
They said on Friday conditions were now set across the area, including in cities such as Hit and Haditha, the former rebel headquarters of Falluja, and Ramadi, the provincial capital.
Hussein al-Hindawi, the head of Iraq's Electoral Commission, which is organising the vote, said there were 77 polling centres in Ramadi and around 30 in Falluja, and said that if people couldn't find them, they should call the commission.
Despite those assurances, Anbar residents and officials were not convinced, saying the lack of easily identifiable polling centres meant discrimination against potential "No" voters.
"The Americans intended to isolate the cities in western Iraq to prevent the huge Sunni population from voting," said Thair al-Hadeethi, a human rights activist from Haditha.
In Ramadi, a group of residents said they had walked around their neighbourhood looking for a voting centre and not found one. Parts of Ramadi are essentially in rebel hands.
A Western diplomat in Baghdad said he expected a fair turnout in Anbar, where most voters boycotted elections in January with just two percent turning up on the day.
If two-thirds of voters in three of Iraq's 18 provinces vote "No" in the referendum then the constitution will be rejected, even if more than half of all voters nation-wide say "Yes".
Anbar, where more than 90 percent of the population is Sunni Arab, is likely to be the province with the strongest "No" vote.
Despite their displeasure with the constitution, which they see as favouring Iraq's majority Shi'ites and ethnic Kurds - many of whom are expected to vote "Yes" - Anbar residents still appeared keen to express their disapproval via the ballot box.
"This is a Crusaders' constitution," said Yassir al-Dulaimi, 40, an engineer from Ramadi. "Those who wrote it are people making a living and working for the favour of the occupier and for their own benefit, not for the favour of the country."
Clerics in mosques in Ramadi and Haditha urged people to reject the draft charter, and residents talked about leaflets circulated in the streets calling on voters to vote "No".
Comments
Comments are closed.