c. 2005 Religion News Service

WASHINGTON _ Voter registration for the upcoming vote on Iraq’s constitution was reported as low on Thursday (Aug. 4) as the document continued to undergo changes to de-emphasize the role of Islamic law would play in the new government.

More than a quarter-million Iraqis living abroad, who represent the moderate vote and many minority religions, will not be permitted to vote Oct. 15 on whether to ratify the constitution.

The revised constitutional draft now includes an amendment allowing individuals to decide whether to be tried by Shariah Islamic law courts or civil courts, said Yonadam Kanna, a Chaldo-Assyrian Christian member of the National Assembly.

“So of course the liberals will go to civil courts and others will choose Shariah courts,” said Kanna, who was elected with the support of expatriate religious minorities.

The National Assembly will meet Friday to discuss remaining key points of federalism and dual citizenship. Dual citizenship is accepted in the current draft but is being challenged by the Sunnis. And future provinces of a federalist state continue to be redefined, with Sunnis fearful of losing Kirkuk to a Kurdish province in the North.

A final draft of the constitution is slated to be unveiled on Aug. 15, said Fareed Ayar, a spokesman for the Electoral Commission, in a telephone interview from Baghdad.

The voter sign-up process that began Wednesday will also serve as the official registration for parliamentary elections which will take place by the end of the year.

Turnout to register to vote on the constitution, which will continue through Aug. 31, was reported to be low at the 550 polling sites. “People don’t know,” Kanna said. Official results were unavailable due to a fire and evacuation in one of the administrative buildings.

While expatriate Iraqis will not be allowed to vote on the constitution in October, Ayar said the commission has not yet decided whether to exclude them in the parliamentary elections. That will “depend on the law of the elections which is now the transitional assembly and then we will decide,” Ayar said.

But no Iraqis outside the country are registering. Nor are they likely to, Ayar said, because the commission spent more than $90 million on the expatriate vote in the Jan. 30 elections and only 250,000 of a projected 1.5 million expatriates actually voted. About 400,000 Iraqis live in the United States.

But the International Organization for Migration, hired to run the out-of-country voting just two months before the election, said it had minimal time to prepare to accommodate voters scattered over 14 countries.

Excluding expatriates from the ratification vote is certain to alienate several minority groups who comprise most of Iraqi exiles. Community leaders said the votes of exiles _ most of them minorities _ counteracted the widespread voter fraud seen in some Iraqi villages last January.

Hunain al Qaddo, an assemblyman and representative of the Shabak _ a minority group whose religion has elements of Islam and Christianity _ said he witnessed the fraud firsthand when ballots never arrived at his village on Jan. 30. He said he and his family walked more than six miles to the next city to vote.

“I contacted the Electoral Commission and complained to everybody but nobody has listened to me,” said the national assemblyman, who held the local Kurdish leadership responsible. “To prevent breaking (in) or forgery, we desperately need these elections to be supervised by the United Nations or a nonaligned party.”

The commission denies all allegations of voter fraud.

“We didn’t get anything official that there was any fraud in any place in the last election, and we will do our best to make our next election very pure,” Ayar said. “We will open all our centers in all our cities of Iraq, including in the Chaldo-Assyrian cities and Sunni areas, too.”

Expatriate groups in the United States, like the Chaldo-Assyrians, are taking preventive measures to ensure the rights of their people back home.

“In the disbursal of aid, so many of our people are in northern Iraq, in what some call Kurdistan,” said Rep. Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., the only Assyrian-American member of Congress. “And because they are such a minority, those that are in charge of the villages control the dollars, and Assyrians are really getting the short end of the stick.”

KRE/JL END MARCUS