JULY 1 ELECTIONS LAW UPDATE

C O N F I D E N T I A L BAGHDAD 002029 SIPDIS E.O. 12958: DECL: 07/01/2023 TAGS: PGOV PREL IZ IR SUBJECT: JULY 1 ELECTIONS LAW UPDATE Classified By: Political Counselor Matt Tueller for reasons 1.4 (b, d). ¶1. (C) POL/C met July 1 with CoR Speaker Mashadani, who was obliged to take the election law off the CoR,s agenda both because Deputy Speaker Aref Tayfur was delayed in getting to the session, and -- more importantly -- because the parties remain stuck on Kirkuk. Mashadani said that unless progress is made soon, SRSG Steffan De Mistura will announce next week that elections cannot be held in 2008. Mashadani expressed some sympathy with the Kurdish position (i.e., to delay elections in Kirkuk),but claimed not to be the "decision maker." He noted that the Sunni Arab/Turkomen demand for a 32-32-32-4 split of the Kirkuk Provincial Council would be very difficult to implement. POL/C encouraged the Speaker to help the parties reach a consensus, and suggested he explore with UNAMI the possibility of conducting a voter registry validation study in Kirkuk while elections proceeded elsewhere. POL/C also noted the consensus view among international elections experts that absentee voting in Iraq's provincial elections was unworkable; Mashadani said he understood the problems but claimed it was imperative to find a mechanism to allow Sunnis displaced from Baghdad and currently residing in Jordan or Syria to vote, in order to offset Iranian influence in the capital. ¶2. (C) In a subsequent discussion with UNAMI Political Director Andrew Gilmour, Pol/C got a readout of SRSG Steffan De Mistura's July 1 elections law meeting with CoR bloc leaders. De Mistura made clear that little time remained for passage of a law if elections were to be held in 2008. In the ensuing discussion, bloc leaders were uncompromising on Kirkuk. After much acrimonious debate, Deputy Speaker Khalid al-Attiyah proposed that UNAMI draft an article for the elections law that would delay elections in Kirkuk until one condition from a list of possible conditions was met. The bloc leaders would reconvene and select which condition from UNAMI's list could be put into the final version of the law. Various parties then made uncompromising arguments for what the single condition should be: for example, implementation of Article 140 or creation of a single list based on the 32/32/32/4 formula. De Mistura agreed to pass to Khalid al-Attiyah by July 2 a draft amendment with options for a single condition that would allow elections in Kirkuk to take place. Attiyah will re-convene the bloc leaders later in the week to continue the debate. ¶3. (C) We also received a readout from Muhammad al-Bayati, a Turkoman MP, of Sunday,s meeting of MPs on Kirkuk. Bayati said the Kurds offered a 50/50 split of the PC seats (50% for the Kurds and 50% for non-Kurds); the Arabs and Turkomen rejected these numbers, but Bayati found the Kurds, willingness to discuss fixed percentages somewhat encouraging. The Turkomen and Arabs counter-offered 35% for Kurds and 31% for Arabs and Turkomen (the remainder going to smaller minorities). Bayati professed continued optimism that the election law can pass in the next week. CROCKER