Between June 6 and 10, the political life in Iraq has witnessed political, judicial and security developments with regard to correcting the results of the Iraqi elections, which have been plagued by a lot of fraud .Between the two dates, on the sixth of this month, the Iraqi Council of Representatives issued a decision to re-freeze the work of the Electoral Commission, naming nine judges to oversee the counting and sorting of more than ten million votes manually, after the government and political blocs confirmed that the election accompanied by “grave breaches” . On the tenth of this month, the Supreme Judicial Council issued the decision to appoint judges to carry out the powers of the Board of Commissioners who stopped working in the Independent Electoral Commission and supervise manual counting and sorting. Since these two resolutions represent the last opportunity to expose the rigging and manipulation of the voices that reflect the will of the Iraqis in the parliamentary elections held on the last 12 May, influential political parties in Iraq saw these decisions as a painful blow in countering their illegitimate political ambition and false access to Dome of the Iraqi Council of Representatives. So they decided – in yesterday – to set fire to the largest ballot boxes located in Rusafa on the eastern side of the city of Baghdad before the start of manual recount.
For his part, said Iraqi Prime Minister Haider Abadi said that the burning a storage site for the ballot boxes in Baghdad, “a plan to hit the country and its democratic approach,” and the demolition of all the achievements achieved during the past years, foremost the defeat of the terrorist organization ISIS in Iraq, so ordered the security services to open an investigation and to tighten the custody of the Warehousing stores of the ballot boxes, threatening to pursue what he described as “terrorist gangs trying to tamper with security and elections.” Where the speaker of the House of Representatives Salim al-Jubouri called for the re-election. For his part, Iyad Allawi, head of the National Electoral Coalition and Vice President renewed the call for the Iraqi political parties to form a caretaker government to conduct new legislative elections away from fraud. For his part, the leader of the National Alliance, Kazem al-Shammari, said that “the Ballot boxes did not burn only after the manual counting and sorting decision and after hours of the proceedings of the Judicial Council,” and added, “This confirms the fact that the elections are rigged and contain serious manipulation and Prime Minister Haider Abadi must deal with the event very seriously.”In turn, the head of the political body of the Sadrist movement Zia al-Asadi said that” the fire of Baghdad stores is the tampering with the capabilities of Iraq and added ” that the intent to burn the equipments of verification and the location of the election data aims at two things: either to cancel the elections, or to destroy the fake ballot papers that were counted within the election results, in which the head of the Electoral Commission removed by parliament has warned of the presence of hundreds of thousands of them two days ago. The leader of the Sadrist movement, Moqtada al-Sadr, warned on Monday of the outbreak of civil war, and said that “Iraq is in danger.”
In turn, a member of the provincial council of Baghdad, Mohammed al-Rubaie announced, “the burning of all the boxes of parliamentary elections of the Rusafa side,” amid sources confirmed that “burned stores contain more than 3 million forms of voters.” He said in an audio recording carried by Iraqi media that “the stores of the Ministry of Commerce containing the boxes of the Electoral Commission in the Rusafa side burned completely.” He added that “the civil defense teams went to the stores to put out the fire and remove the ballot boxes safe from them.” For his part, a member of the Commission of Inquiry tasked with investigating the manipulation of the results of the election, Adel Nouri said , “The fire is fabricated and done by members of the Commission, which was frozen.” He pointed out that “criminals and forgers burned the traces and signs of their crime and forgery, the crime of fraud because we know and God knows before us that the results are unrealistic and forged, so they burned the boxes,” stressing that “this crime is not a transient crime but a scandal must be pursued and ask the Prime Minister and the judiciary to deal with the subject as a Sovereign file and threatening national security and the political process in Iraq as a whole.”
In the meantime, the legal committee in the current Iraqi Council of Representatives did not rule out going to the judiciary to cancel the electoral process throughout the country because of the fire. The committee member, Zana Said, said that the judiciary has the authority to cancel the results of ballot boxes exposed to the fire in Baghdad or cancel the results of a full province, and expected to cancel the electoral process in full in the event of a second fire in a warehouse of the Commission after a fire of Kilani in central Baghdad. He pointed out that “the House of Representatives has a new option after the amendment of the election law by merging the parliamentary elections and doing it again with the provincial councils at the end of this year.”He explained in a press statement that the process of manual counting and sorting will reveal the falsity of many of the political blocs participating in the electoral competition.
And in the face of this dangerous development, which is a blow to the Iraqi parliament to face the rigging of the electoral process, we wonder: Is it possible to re-election as a whole, a risky move in a country that has been plagued by divisions for 15 years? Will Washington and Tehran accept this? And when will Iraq be liberated from the spoilers who have continued to wreak havoc in it?
Iraqi Studies Unit
Rawabet Center for Research and Strategic Studies