Staged election; staged trial. posted by Richard Seymour

Jonathan Steele in The Guardian this morning:

With the issue out of the spotlight, it is a fair bet that when the official result is declared - perhaps today - the announcement that the constitution has passed will be treated as pretty dull since we already "know" that from the weekend leaks by Condoleezza Rice, Jack Straw and the Iraqi government.

...

Turnout figures in such cities as Najaf doubled from an initial figure of 45%. In Nineveh and Diyala, another province with a Sunni Arab majority, officials initially talked of startling yes votes of up to 70% in each. Later, they changed the Nineveh figure to say the no votes had won - but the figure was only 55%, and so below the crucial 66% threshold for rejection

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Gareth Porter for the Inter Press Service reports:

According to the widely cited preliminary figures announced by the spokesman for the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq (IECI) in Nineveh, 326,000 people voted for the constitution and 90,000 against. Those figures were said to be based on results from more than 90 percent of the 300 polling stations in the province.

...

However, according to the U.S. military liaison with the IECI in Nineveh, Maj. Jeffrey Houston, the final totals for the province were 424,491 "no" votes and 353,348 "yes" votes. This means that the earlier figures actually represented only 54 percent of the official vote total – not 90 percent, as the media had been led to believe. And the votes which had not been revealed earlier went against the constitution by a ratio more than 12 to 1.

...

The final figures revealed by the U.S. military liaison with the IECI suggest a voter turnout in Nineveh that strains credibility. On a day when Sunni turnout reached 88 percent in Salahuddin province and 90 percent in Fallujah, a total of only 778,000 votes – about 60 percent of the eligible voters – in Nineveh appears anomalous. Even if the turnout in the province had only been 70 percent, the total would have been 930,000.

...

A total of 350,000 votes for the constitution in the province is questionable based on the area's ethnic-religious composition. The final vote breakdown for the January election reveals that the Kurds and Shiites in Nineveh had mustered a combined total of only 130,000 votes for Kurdish and Shi'ite candidates, despite high rates of turnout for both groups.

To have amassed 350,000 votes for the constitution, they would have had to obtain overwhelming support from the non-Kurdish, non-Arab minorities in the province.

And those minorities were, suffice to say, hugely against the constitution, particularly the Assyrian Christians who are frightened of a clause that will allow Kurds to expropriate their lands, a process already under way, and which the Christians call ethnic cleansing. So, did they suddenly decide that they were eager to meet such a fate?

Finally:

Today Hussein is being prosecuted only for 19 charges relating to the massacre of some 150 people in the village of Dujail in 1982. The murders followed a failed assassination attempt on the Baathist leader by alleged members of the Shiite fundamentalist Da’awa organisation—the party of the current Iraqi prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari.

The Dujail massacre has been carefully chosen, instead of other Baathist crimes that were encouraged or sanctioned by the major powers. These include the slaughter of Iraqi Communist Party members in 1979; the murder of thousands of Shiites in the lead-up to the 1980 US-backed Iraqi invasion of Iran; the use of Western-supplied chemical weapons against Iranian troops and civilians during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war; the pogroms against the Kurdish population in the late 1980s; and the butchery of tens of thousands of Shiites and Kurds following the 1991 Gulf War.

It seems that the 'trial' will proceed rapidly, Saddam and a few of his former cronies will be sentenced to death and thus a large amount of evidence destroyed. Perhaps, who knows, the twenty-minute tape delay on the broadcasted proceedings will allow the odd aperçu from Saddam to slip by. "Ah, David Mellor - the Mr Melon we used to call him - how nice of him to double our export-credits after we put down the Kurdish traitors! Please extend my condolences for his electoral misfortune - he should have taken a leaf from my book..." All of which inept farce will unfold to the soundtrack of car bombs, bullets, tortured screams and airjets pounding people to pink mist. "Yes," Saddam will say, "I love the smell of mass murder in the morning".