c. 2005 Religion News Service

BAGHDAD, Iraq _ Mishaan Jabouri thought he had come up with a winning political strategy.

The Sunni Arab candidate chose an esteemed Shiite leader as his No. 2, hoping to draw votes from the country’s majority sect. He spoke out for Kurdish rights, hoping to earn support from the Kurds who dominate northern Iraq.

Instead he got a harsh lesson in the fractured political realities of contemporary Iraq.

“One day before the election, I said there is no Sunni and there is no Shi’a,” said Jabouri, leader of the Homeland Party. “But for me that’s over.”

In the end, in general, Kurds voted for Kurds, Sunnis either stayed home or voted for fellow Sunnis, and Shiites voted for Shiites.

Now, with the euphoria of Iraq’s historic elections fading, and the latest unofficial results showing an increasingly fractured political body, Iraqis are awakening to a daunting political task: the forging of a national vision among citizens retreating into ethnic and sectarian identities.

“It is unquestionably true that Iraq has a distance to go in terms of national reconciliation and creating a common vision for the state of Iraq,” said a Western diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Early results show the Shiite-led United Iraqi Alliance and a coalition of Kurdish parties dominating the vote. In southern provinces with Shiite majorities, the alliance garnered four or five times more votes than its nearest competitors. In Kurdish provinces like Dohuk, the Kurdistan Alliance appears to have won more than 95 percent of the vote.

Interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi’s Iraqi Coalition, which spent millions on a slick ad campaign that attempted to draw votes across the demographic spectrum, lags a distant third nationwide.

Jabouri expects his Homeland Party to win a meager four seats in the 275-member National Assembly.

Organizers of an unofficial referendum held among Iraqi Kurds during the election revealed another glaring crack in the edifice of Iraq: Nearly 99 percent of the 1.9 million Kurds who took part in the poll said they preferred an independent Kurdistan over a unified Iraq, according to Aso Kareem, a member of the high committee of the Kurdistan Referendum Movement.

Projected winners concede that they worry about the fragmentation of Iraqis along ethnic and religious lines, but hope such tendencies might fade as the country moves toward democracy.

“It is not a very healthy sign,” said Adnan Ali al-Kadhimi, deputy to Ibrahim al Jafari, who heads the Dawa Party, one of the two main groups making up the United Iraqi Alliance. “But we’re coming out of a dictatorship. This is the first time we’re practicing democracy. It is acceptable for people to lay their trust in someone they can be sure of.”

Indeed, at least among some Iraqis there are the stirrings of a new political maturity.

“I voted for the Kurds this time,” said Ibrahim Khalil, a 29-year-old professor of French in the Kurdish city of Erbil. “But it’s the last time I vote for them. If they don’t improve the economy, I’ll vote for someone else next time.”

Members of the assembly will spend the next year undergoing the painful process of drawing up a constitution that must be ratified in a national referendum by Oct. 15. They must decide on everything from how quickly to move toward a free-market economy to how aggressively to prosecute crimes committed under Saddam Hussein’s regime.

They also have to figure out what kind of political system they want.

“There were people running in this election on a monarchy ticket,” said the Western diplomat. “There were plenty of people running to create an Islamic republic like Iran.”

The old Iraq may be giving way to something new. Said the diplomat, “There are a lot of people, if you say to them the Iraq as I know it is gone, they’ll say, `Good riddance.”’

MO/PH END DARAGAHI

(Borzou Daragahi wrote this article for The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J.)