Tension around upcoming Iraqi poll

The decision to ban Iraqi election candidates accused of links with the Baath party of executed dictator Saddam Hussein could exclude Sunnis from the political arena and usher in new sectarian tensions.

The move also threatens to damage the March 7 ballot by creating a campaign battleground focused on past quarrels rather than a much needed search for solutions to myriad problems facing the war-torn country, analysts told AFP.

Leading Sunni politicians also voiced anger at an official blacklist that bars 500 candidates including defence minister Abdel Qader Jassem al-Obeidi from the vote, purportedly under a law that bans Baathists from all elections.

However, members of the committee of integrity and accountability whose job is to vet applicants and purge unsuitable contenders are themselves facing charges of illegitimacy as they have not been approved by parliament.

Those banned from the election, the second since the US-led invasion that toppled Saddam but provoked an insurgency that saw tens of thousands die in sectarian bloodshed in 2006 and 2007, include prominent Sunni lawmaker Saleh al-Mutlak, a persistent critic of the government.

"The decision to exclude Mutlak and others means Iraq is getting dangerously close to a repeat of the heated, sectarian political atmosphere seen in the December 2005 elections," said Reidar Visser, a noted Iraq analyst.

"It means Iraqis will be looking to the past, focusing on settling scores, instead of facing the future and the many specific issues that need to be solved," added Visser who runs the Iraq-focused website www.historiae.org.

2005 sunni boycott led to later disenfranchisement

Sunnis largely boycotted Iraq's inaugural post-Saddam parliamentary election in 2005. The decision cleared the way for a dominant Shiite government to take power which exacerbated Sunni disenfranchisement and deepened the insurgency that later took the country to the brink of civil war.

Baath party membership was a key condition for obtaining a job and later gaining promotion in public sector employment during Saddam's regime.

A controversial process of de-Baathication was adopted by Washington diplomat Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provincial Authority, following the invasion which saw thousands of Saddam-era employees lose their jobs.

The decision to ban hundreds of election hopefuls almost seven years later shows fissures are still raw, according to Joost Hiltermann, an Iraq specialist and conflict studies analyst with the International Crisis Group think tank.

"It might well torpedo Iraq's hopes to have relatively free, fair and inclusive elections," he said.

"It shows that political groups are far from accommodating one another, let alone reconciling. If this decision is not reversed, we might well be facing a new and dangerous escalation of violence," he added.

6,500 candidates from 86 parties

According to election organisers around 6,500 candidates from 86 parties, comprising 12 coalitions as well as independents, have registered to compete in the March poll. The election is seen as crucial to consolidating Iraq's democracy and smoothing the path for a complete US military exit by the end of 2011 as planned.

Michael O'Hanlon, a national security and defence policy expert and senior author of the Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan Index projects at the Brookings Institute in Washington, said the candidates' ban was a setback.

"I'm very, very worried about this, the lack of transparency, the quality of the decisions, the huge number of people affected all bode quite badly," he said.

Khalaf al-Alayane, a Sunni MP, meanwhile, insisted the ban was illegal, because "the committee itself is not professionally approved, and MPs refused to vote positively for anyone on the committee."

"Those decisions will affect the national reconciliation process and the national interest, especially after all this time and being able to pass many obstacles," he said, alluding to past sectarian violence between Sunnis and Shiites.