Refugees in NZ disappointed they cannot vote in Iraq election

Iraqi-born Australian residents queue to vote in their country's long-awaited national election at a polling booth in Sydney. Picture / Reuters

Iraq's refugees in New Zealand should have been given the chance to vote without having to travel to Australia, Wellington's Iraqi Association said today.

Association spokesman Jafar Abdulghani said interest was high in Iraq's first democratic election since the fall of Saddam Hussein.

There were around 7000 Iraqis in New Zealand who deserved a voice without having to pay the expense of travelling to Australia.

"There is a lot of interest in this election. Not all the Iraqis here have passports yet, so not so many can travel. I'm a little sad that we can't contribute to this," he told NZPA today.

"Our association would have been very interested to invite the organisers to help us with voting."

Iraq's interim president Ghazi al-Yawer has expressed his concern over the low number of Iraqis abroad registering to vote.

In a television interview last weekend with a Lebanese satellite station, he said many Iraqis living outside the country are busy with their work and many cannot afford going long distance to vote.

He gave the example of Iraqis living in New Zealand. The nearest place for them to vote is Australia, where they had to register for voting with the Iraqi Embassy in Canberra.

"This is a four hour flight. It is too much if you compare it to a trip between Baghdad and Hillah," Mr al-Yawer said, referring to a city 96km south of the capital.

A spokeswoman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade said the New Zealand Government had not been asked to provide assistance for Iraqi voters, by the International Organisation for Migration which has organised the ballot-casting outside Iraq.

"The number of Iraqis in New Zealand eligible to vote would be quite small. The Government was not approached by IOM for assistance in any way," she said.

Mr Abdulghani is from Basra in southern Iraq and was accepted as a refugee here just over three years ago, with his wife and two children.

He said his relatives who remained in the southern city were afraid of the escalating violence as the election approached, but they would go out to vote anyway.

In Iraq fear is running so high that most candidates are keeping their names secret and officials are trying to withhold the locations of voting centres.

Candidates feared publicity or public campaigning would make them targets of violence. There was little information about who was running.

Christchurch town planner and architect Mohammed Jabbawi, who left Baghdad 15 years ago, said potential voters had merely a list of candidates' names and no policies or programmes for voters to base their opinions on.

"... so they have no idea. But people want to go to vote... as a process towards democracy," he told National Radio today.

Mr Jabbawi said he would not be travelling to Australia to vote, as he did not agree with voting for a government allied to the occupation forces in Iraq.

Australia is one of 14 countries where Iraqi exiles can vote -- and the first country in the world to begin collecting ballots because of its early time zone. In Iraq, the vote is Sunday; elsewhere, it runs Friday through Sunday.

The 14 countries, which host the largest numbers of Iraqis abroad, are: Australia, Britain, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Iran, Jordan, the Netherlands, Sweden, Syria, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States.

Nearly 12,000 Iraqi exiles are registered to vote in Australia, around 15 per cent of the estimated 80,000 Iraqi nationals eligible to enrol.

- AGENCIES