Court disqualifies winning MPs from Parliament

ARBIL - An Iraqi court has disqualified two members of the country's newly elected Parliament in a move which puts in doubt the outcome of last month's election and is likely to increase political instability in the country.

The winning candidates who have been barred are among 52 candidates disqualified for past association with Saddam Hussein's Baath Party.

The ban on them appears to be part of a campaign by the Government of Nouri Maliki, the Prime Minister, to change in its favour the unexpected results of the election, which saw Malaki's State of Law bloc narrowly beaten by Iyad Allawi's al-Iraqiya coalition.

Yesterday, Allawi said that his party had instructed lawyers to appeal against the decision, saying: "We are very concerned about certain groups controlling the political process in Iraq."

Maliki has successfully demanded a recount of votes in Baghdad which his supporters hope might yield him an extra four seats.

In the March 7 poll, Allawi won 91 seats to Maliki's 89, giving Allawi the right to have the first opportunity to form a government.

Fraud is much more likely to take place during the recount than it was during the closely monitored election, according to senior Iraqi political leaders who did not want to be named.

They say that the Sunni Arabs who voted overwhelmingly for Allawi and the followers of the anti-American cleric, Moqtada al-Sadr - who also did well - are not going to accept the election being stolen by Maliki.

The special court reviewing election complaints is now likely to receive demands for recounts of the poll in other parts of Iraq, which will long delay final results in the election.

The Kurds are likely to demand a recount in the two northern provinces of Nineveh and Kirkuk, where territory is in dispute between Arabs and Kurds.

Some fraud probably did take place in the election because of the lack of a census and unrecorded population movements. Each coalition manipulated its share of the vote upwards in areas where it was strong.

But Maliki and his followers were nevertheless surprised by the strong showing by their opponents, whose popularity they had underestimated.

Given that Maliki is in charge of the government machinery, only he was in a position to falsify the outcome of the poll, something he now appears intent on doing retroactively.

The United States is pushing Maliki and Allawi to form a coalition government, allowing each man to serve two years as Prime Minister, or half of the four-year term. This solution has been adopted with success by the two leading parties in Kurdistan.

But a coalition of the two main parties is unlikely to work in the rest of Iraq because Maliki's voters were overwhelmingly Shiite and Allawi's, though he himself is Shiite, are mostly Sunni.

It would also be hard to try to marginalise the Kurds and the Iraqi National Alliance (INA), the other Shiite bloc.

Neither the Kurds nor the Sadrist movement, which dominates the INA, wants to see Maliki remain Prime Minister.

Aside from the US, Iran has met Iraqi political leaders and would like to see its Shiite co-religionists retain power.

Backed by money from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, Turkey helped Allawi during the election and his control of the purse strings is one factor holding his disparate coalition together.

- INDEPENDENT