THE head of the UN body overseeing Iraq’s elections at the end of the month revealed plans yesterday to bring the increasingly disenfranchised Sunni minority to the polls, as insurgents bent on wrecking the vote killed another 19 Iraqi soldiers and several policemen.

Carlos Valenzuela said that the population of Anbar province, the western desert region better known as the Sunni Triangle, would be allowed to register and vote on polling day, even though the rest of the country finished registering its voters weeks ago.

All electoral preparations in the volatile province ground to a halt in November when the US military launched an all-out offensive on one of its most dangerous cities, Fallujah, while fighting running battles with insurgents in Ramadi, the provincial capital. The attack displaced almost the entire population of Fallujah, while thousands of other Sunnis fled their homes for fear of violence.

“They will be given the possibility of registering on the same day, which gives them the possibility of deciding where it is they will be voting,” said Señor Valenzuela. The same conditions will apply for Mosul, Iraq’s third-largest city, which has been racked by violence recently and where an additional 8,000 US troops have been deployed to secure the elections.

Some Sunni leaders have vowed to boycott the vote, arguing that it is too dangerous to stage the elections in the middle of an armed uprising. Shia leaders, however, insist that the vote must take place on time, otherwise the situation will only deteriorate. Señor Valenzuela said that such decisions were “political considerations”, and beyond the remit of the electoral commission, the only body empowered to decide whether to delay voting.

“Nobody has the mandate to postpone the elections. The commission’s own position has been that they will postpone the elections only if it is physically impossible to hold elections. Otherwise they feel they have to do it in the timeframe that was laid down in the law.”

An absence of ballot papers or boxes would be the only thing that could delay a vote, said the Colombian diplomat. Voting slips are being produced outside Iraq to avoid sabotage.

“So far all the technical, logistical preparations are on track, so the commission sees no reason why they should be thinking about postponing. Overall the electoral preparations are going quite well,” he said, emphasising that while some Sunnis will shun the elections, other mainstream groups will be running.

The commission is about to start a campaign to convince the public that the elections are untainted by US influence as well as to explain why they should risk bombings to vote. Iraqis are inherently suspicious of any electoral process, having only been exposed to the rigged ballots of Saddam Hussein. Some of that suspicion has lingered as the electoral commission was set up by order of Paul Bremer, the former head of the unpopular US-led occupation.

“If people feel that this is credible, and it’s important enough, they will take risks and go out and do it. And I think at this moment the Iraqi people don’t have a lot of choices,” Señor Valenzuela said. “A lot of the work will hinge on public information.”

But he conceded that the task would not be simple.

“Certainly there are reasons to be intimidated. When I sound so optimistic, I am, and I’m hopeful. I also don’t want to minimise the challenges.”

Those challenges were all too evident in the Sunni town of Balad, north of Baghdad, yesterday. Nineteen Iraqi National Guardsmen and their driver were killed when a suicide bomber blew up his car next to the bus in which they were travelling. In Samarra, to the north, another four policemen were killed. Other attacks left a local police chief, another police officer and a provincial deputy governor dead.

The wave of killing came after al Qaeda-linked terrorists released a video showing them murdering five kidnapped policemen in a street in daylight, warning Iraqis against joining the security forces or voting. Another Sunni militant group said that democracy itself was un-Islamic, being government by the will of the people rather than by God.

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