Iraqis say ‘Yes’ to new Constitution

BAGHDAD—Iraqi voters have ratified a new US-backed constitution, officials said on Tuesday, despite opposition in Sunni Arab areas where insurgents are battling the Baghdad government.
Iraq’s Electoral Commission, revealing final results from the October 15 referendum, said 79 percent of voters backed the constitution against 21 percent opposed in a poll split largely along Iraq’s sectarian and ethnic lines.
Several Shi’ite and Kurdish regions voted between 95 and 99 percent “Yes”; in rebellious, Sunni Anbar 97 percent said “No.” At least one Sunni leader complained of “massive fraud” but U.N. and Iraqi election officials said the vote was fair.
The results came as the US military death toll in Iraq rose to 1,999 — closing on the headline-grabbing 2,000 mark expected to spur new calls for US President George W. Bush to outline an exit strategy for the Iraqi conflict. Anti-government insurgents, who struck in dramatic fashion on Monday with a triple suicide bomb attack on a Baghdad hotel used by foreign journalists, pressed the offensive on Tuesday with new bomb blasts in Baghdad and the normally tranquil city of Sulaimaniya, killing at least 11 people in total.
The constitution’s final results confirmed that only two of Iraq’s 18 provinces, the insurgent stronghold of Anbar in the west and Saddam Hussein’s home region of Salahaddin, had mustered a “No” vote of at least two-thirds — one short of the three provinces necessary to veto the measure nationally. The northern province of Nineveh, thought to represent a third possible “No” due to its large population of Sunni Arabs, ended up with only a 55 percent of voters rejecting the charter.
Passage of the constitution is a boost for Washington and the Shi’ite- and Kurdish-led government in Baghdad, paving the way for a parliamentary election on December 15 that both hope will mark Iraq’s emergence as a stable, federal democracy.
But much will depend on Sunni Arabs, who represent 20 percent of Iraq’s population and have fought the charter as a plot to deprive them of power and access to Iraq’s oil wealth in Shi’ite- and Kurdish-dominated areas.
“I have just prayed to God that he will expose the truth about what is happening in Iraq,” Hussein al-Falluji, part of a Sunni Arab team that negotiated the constitution, told Reuters. “We all know that this referendum was fraud conducted by an Electoral Commission that is not independent”.
A senior U.N. election specialist said she was confident the election had not been fixed: “The result is accurate. It has been checked according to the processes that we all follow when we have elections,” said Carina Perelli, who heads the U.N. team providing technical assistance to the Iraqi government. Amid fears that Sunni insurgent violence is pushing Iraq into outright civil war, both Washington and London emphasize that the constitution is open to amendment and that Sunnis must take part in the December elections to make their voices heard.
Proof of Sunni anger was displayed this week with the bombing of Baghdad’s Palestine and Sheraton hotels, the base for several international media organizations and a symbol of the foreign presence in the capital since the 2003 invasion.
The bombings, at dusk in front of rolling television cameras that guaranteed global media coverage, broke a relative lull in insurgent violence over the past two weeks. Body parts were still strewn outside the hotel complex on Tuesday morning after the blast, which police said killed at least 12 Iraqis and injured 22. On Tuesday, a suicide car bomber targeted a US military convoy in Baghdad’s Mansour district, killing one civilian and injuring five, police said. A roadside bomb exploded near a Baghdad children’s hospital, killing one person and injuring another.
In the northern city of Sulaimaniya — a Kurdish area rarely troubled by the violence of the past two years — another car bomb killed at least nine people, hospital sources said. Iraq’s National Security Adviser Mowaffaq al-Rubaie blamed the hotel attack on Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s al Qaeda in Iraq — a militant group that has claimed responsibility for spectacular attacks including the August 2003 bombing of the U.N. compound in Baghdad.
“This attack had all the fingerprints of Zarqawi all over it ... We have seen evidence that the plan was to bomb through the hotel defenses and then kidnap foreign journalists,” he told reporters, although he did not say what that evidence was. Other security experts have questioned that theory.
The official US death toll in Iraq increased by two to 1,999 on Tuesday as the military announced that two marines had been killed last week by a roadside bomb in the town of Amariya outside Falluja, where Sunni insurgents are active. The US death toll has become an issue of increasing political significance in Washington amid waning public support for the conflict.—Agencies