ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Ahead of parliamentary elections in Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan Region, opposition groups accuse the two ruling parties of looking for an excuse to postpone the polls.
The ruling parties --the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) – are themselves divided over the elections. The PUK says the polls should not be held due to irregularities in the lists of registered voters, and its partner insists they should go ahead as planned.
The PUK says serious problems exist with the lists, with names of deceased people registered as qualified voters.
Led by the main opposition group, the Change Movement (Gorran), leaders of Islamic parties say that raising the issue of irregular voter lists “is only an excuse to delay the elections.”
Khasraw Goran, the head of the KDP’s election commission, said that “The KDP is absolutely against the postponement of the vote.”
“If the issue is really about the registered dead people, then the election commission can solve it and prevent anyone from casting a vote in place of someone else,” Goran said.
The autonomous region’s parliamentary elections are set for September 21.
Immediately following the announcement of the election date by Kurdistan Region President Massoud Barzani, the PUK criticized the election commission for failing to provide an up-to-date voter list.
Official statics show that since the 2009 parliamentary elections until March this year, around 90,000 people have died in Kurdistan, but the Iraqi election commission says that they have received the names of only 440 people, which have since been removed from the voter roll.
“Finding out the names of the dead isn’t the work of the commission,” said it head, Sarbast Mustafa. “The ministry of health is supposed to give us those names.”
But health minister Rekawt Rashid told reporters earlier that the election commission should formally request such a list from his ministry.
Though the KDP and PUK run the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in a joint coalition and together occupy the majority in parliament, the KDP echoes the opposition’s concern that delaying the elections might mean the vote may not be carried out at all.
Abdulsatar Majid, a senior official of the Kurdistan Islamic League (Komal), told Rudaw that his party would not accept any delay. “It is not fair to play with people’s feelings just days before the election date,” he said.
Majid said that Komal doubts there is a clean voter roll, but that this should not become an excuse to postpone the elections.
As the majority of Kurdistan’s political groups seem to be gearing up for the vote, Fazil Mirani, a top KDP official indirectly asked the PUK not to ask for a postponement of the vote.
“We ask our friends not to ask the KDP to delay the elections,” Mirani said. “The elections must go ahead as planned on September 21.”
According to parliament spokesman Tariq Jawhar, the election commission has asked the Kurdish legislature to postpone the elections by two months, until November 21.
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