Iraqis Flock to Polls to Elect Parliament

Millions of Iraqis voted Saturday for a new 250-seat National Assembly, the first step in President Saddam Hussein’s pledged introduction of limited democracy here.

A heavy turnout was reported as the voters, buoyed by the successful conclusion of Iraq’s eight-year war with Iran, went to the polls for the first time in five years.

More than 950 candidates, including 62 women, sought election. No party designations were listed on the ballots, but all candidates had to pass a test of loyalty to the regime, couched in a requirement that they contributed to the war effort.

President Hussein will continue to keep an iron grip on Iraq through his Arab Baath Socialist Party and the ruling, 11-member Revolutionary Command Council, political analysts and diplomats here said.

So strong is Hussein’s control that issues were almost non-existent in Saturday’s balloting. In the northeastern city of Sulaymaniyah, near the Iranian border in the Kurdish autonomous region, Tanya Ali Khadar, a telephone operator, said she voted for one of the women candidates “because I trust her.”

In the countryside, at least, such traditional personal loyalties appeared to take precedence over postwar issues.

Hussein has pledged that the National Assembly elections will be followed by a new constitution, providing for more political parties--there are five now, including the outlawed Communist Party--and a press law. But in the last days of the campaigning, no official was predicting when the constitution, which is being drafted by a special committee appointed by the leadership, would be completed.

Earlier last week, Izzat Ibrahim, vice chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council and head of the Election Organizing Committee, said the new constitution would give Parliament the right to remove Cabinet officers by a vote of no confidence.

And, he said: “In a later stage the president of the republic will be elected by direct ballot of the people. . . . He would be responsible before the people instead of the Revolutionary Command Council and the regional command of the Arab Baath Socialist Party.”

Saturday’s voting was a small step in the promised democratic process, perhaps most important as Iraq’s first peacetime balloting under Husseim. Earlier assemblies were elected in 1980 and 1984, after the war with Iran was under way.

“I cannot recall one bill introduced by ordinary members of those Parliaments,” said one observer. “They all came from the Revolutionary Command Council or the Speaker of the Assembly.”