BAGHDAD — Iraq’s election commission announced on Saturday that most of the 515 candidates disqualified from next month’s parliamentary elections would in fact remain off the ballot because of accusations that they retained links to Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party.
Supporters of Iraqiya, a secular coalition, rallied Saturday in Baghdad. Prominent candidates from the coalition have been barred from an election.
The announcement came after a month of political turmoil, threats, an appeals court reversal and backroom negotiations among the country’s political leaders and its chief justice that prompted complaints of political interference in what is supposed to be an independent judiciary.
The decision left Iraq where it was when the issue unexpectedly surfaced in January: with Sunni candidates fuming about injustice and American and other foreign diplomats fearing that the elections would not be viewed as entirely legitimate.
“It has become clear to Iraqis that this political campaign is a fake,” one of those barred, Saleh al-Mutlaq, said ahead of the announcement in an interview on Arabiya, a private television station based in the United Arab Emirates. “The international community should not recognize any government that emerges from it.”
Mr. Mutlaq, a member of Parliament since 2006, held the No. 2 spot on the ballot of Iraqiya, a secular coalition of Sunnis and Shiites that has emerged as a strong rival of the election bloc led by Iraq’s prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. The No. 3 candidate on the Iraqiya list, Dhafir al-Ani, was also barred from running.
They were among 171 candidates who appealed their disqualification last month by a parliamentary body, known as the Accountability and Justice Commission, charged with purging the country’s government of loyalists of the Baath Party, which has been banned since soon after the American invasion in 2003.
On Feb. 3, an Iraqi appeals court consisting of seven judges postponed all the disqualifications, saying there was not enough time to review the evidence against the candidates. Two days later, however, it resumed hearing the appeals after Mr. Maliki met with senior leaders of the Parliament and the chairman of Supreme Judicial Council, Medhat al-Mahmoud. Mr. Maliki and his aides denounced the appeals court’s initial ruling.
“We have seen an almost total reversal of the position of the special appeals court within less than one week, suggesting that considerable political pressure has been brought to bear on its members as they tried to navigate the utter legal chaos that is the Iraqi de-Baathification process,” Reider Visser of the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs wrote on historiae.org, a blog that follows Iraqi politics.
In the end, the appeals court reversed the disqualification of only 26 candidates, according to the chairman of Iraq’s election commission, Faraj al-Haidari. Another 145 were rejected. The rest of the initial 515 did not appeal or were replaced by their parties with other candidates. “As far as we know,” Mr. Haidari said, the court’s decision “is final.”
The court did not did not publicly announce its decision.
The election commission later published a list of those returned to the ballot. They included six members from Iraqiya, among them the deputy governor of Babel Province, who this week was suspended from his post because of his suspected ties to the Baath Party. Others included three from Mr. Maliki’s bloc, the State of Law, three Kurds and another from another predominantly Shiite alliance, the Iraqi National Alliance. None were prominent national figures like Mr. Mutlaq and Mr. Ani.
The Baath Party dominated Mr. Hussein’s government for decades as the Communist Party once dominated the Soviet Union, with membership required for government jobs and the most advanced education.
Mr. Mutlaq, for example, was an agronomist and a member of the Baath Party until he was expelled in 1977. Mr. Ani, a former political science professor at Baghdad University who has served in Parliament for nearly four years, complained in a telephone interview that he still did not know what evidence the commission cited to justify his disqualification as a Baathist.
“I don’t know why I was banned,” Mr. Ani said. “What is the charge against me?”
The disqualifications have raised the specter of a Sunni boycott of the elections, something that happened during the last elections in 2005. That left Iraq’s Sunnis disproportionately underrepresented in Parliament, and despite threats of a new boycott, many Sunni politicians appear unwilling to carry them out.
The Iraqiya list, led by a former Shiite prime minister, Ayad al-Allawi, announced Saturday that it would suspend campaigning for three days and called for an emergency session of Parliament and a meeting by the country’s Presidency Council in the next three days.
At a minimum, the disqualifications have overshadowed an election campaign that is widely viewed as a measure of Iraq’s new democracy.
At a rally held at his headquarters on Saturday morning before the announcement, Mr. Allawi warned that the disqualifications would inflame sectarian tensions. “If we marginalize or disenfranchise a sect,” he said, “it is a road that once we start down, we cannot stop.”
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