Police Protests Raise Pre-Vote Fears in Najaf

Just when officials in this Shiite Muslim-dominated city say they need thousands of additional police to protect voters in the Jan. 30 election, they are facing sometimes violent demonstrations by disgruntled officers who they fear may quit or join the insurgents.

As many as 4,700 officers haven’t been paid since they were recruited in August, and commanders worry that the prospect of thousands of armed men with police uniforms and a grudge is a recipe for election day bloodshed.

At the very least, they say, many of the unpaid officers who have continued to report for duty might not show up on Jan. 30. On Tuesday, a protest by about 150 of the men turned violent when they waved sticks, attacked a cameraman from an Arabic-language television station and tore down campaign posters.

“It’s very serious,” said Police Chief Ghalib Jazaari, who said he would like to provide back pay to the officers but needed permission from the central government.

After months without pay, Jazaari said, these officers “don’t have money, and the terrorists are willing to give every one of them a daftar” -- local slang for $10,000.

Nine days before Iraq’s landmark national election, organizers here and across the country are struggling with plans to ensure the safety of voters at the polls. Here, in addition to needing more officers, they need hundreds more females on the force to handle searches of women entering polling places in Najaf province, a conservative region in southern Iraq.

And officials are preparing a plan, as are organizers in cities across Iraq, under which security forces are to fire on sight at any unauthorized vehicle.

That’s not a surprise in the so-called Sunni Triangle, the heart of the insurgency against U.S.-led forces and the interim government. Sunni Muslims, the ruling minority under ousted President Saddam Hussein, stand to lose the most in the election.

But officials are also worried in comparatively safe areas such as Najaf, the center of Shiite culture, where voters stand to gain the most because Shiites are the nation’s majority population. The fear is that Shiite cities could prove fat targets for election day violence, making a competent and motivated security force all the more important.

Jazaari said the unpaid police, whom he describes as “unofficial” officers, were recruited in a drive launched last summer after most of Najaf’s old police force was either routed by the militia of renegade Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr or defected and joined the rebels.

Jazaari said he reached out to tribal leaders for new recruits and, unbeknown to him, some of his senior officers launched a parallel recruitment effort, offering police jobs to anyone who could provide $200 and a gun of his own.

He said he originally disowned the group back in October and forced out many of the officers involved in the under-the-table recruitment drive. But now he talks of co-opting them.

The chief says he’d like to add the unpaid officers to Najaf’s 10,000-member police force, because he needs about 4,000 more officers to adequately protect voters on election day.

Election day plans here call for all voters to undergo body searches in separate single-file lines for men and women. Around each polling station, Jazaari hopes to provide as many as 22 police officers. All but one of the access routes to the polls, many of which will be at schools, will be blocked.

A massive deployment of security forces is to begin Tuesday, and residents will find their movements tightly restricted.

Vehicle traffic around the country will be banned beginning three days before the election, except for cars authorized by the electoral commission. In Najaf, even those seeking to bury their dead in the city’s massive and revered cemetery, the site of fierce clashes in August between U.S. forces and Sadr’s militia, will require a police escort to avoid being shot at, Jazaari said.

Local electoral commission officials are working on the assumption that the nation’s cellphone networks and land lines will be shut down, also starting next Thursday. The commission is distributing satellite phones to branch offices and providing two cars to the province’s 235 voting centers to serve as runners for information and results, said Wael Waeli, the deputy head of the Najaf electoral commission.

The intention of electoral officials to live independent of cell and land phones comes on the orders of the national electoral commission in Baghdad, Waeli said.

Iraq’s central and southern cellphone networks, run by Egyptian and Kuwaiti companies, have become increasingly unreliable in recent weeks, fueling rumors of the preelection shutdown. U.S. officials have quietly dismissed the rumors.

Waeli says the commission’s memo merely states that it “expects” a communications blackout, but doesn’t indicate that an official decision has been made.

“The Americans say no and the government says no, but the electoral commission says yes,” he said.

As organizers prepare for the election, a banner festoons a roadway leading to the sacred shrine of Imam Ali, proclaiming, “The guiding marjaiyah” -- the powerful Shiite religious leadership -- “point you toward righteousness. Protect your identity and future by electing the best.”

But this Shiite Muslim centerpiece still bears the 5-month-old scars of the lengthy siege against Sadr that ended when his militia was allowed to leave the mosque in freedom. Bullet holes pock the walls of storefronts, alongside campaign posters bearing the simultaneously stern and serene image of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the nation’s leading Shiite cleric.

Jazaari’s top priority in the next week will be placating the thousands of unofficial police officers, addressing their financial complaints and making them official members of the force. He says he has enough money to cover a large part of the estimated $40,000 the group is owed in back pay.

Now he says he is waiting for official permission from the government in Baghdad and has written to the interior minister and to interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi’s office seeking a solution within the next week.

One Najaf police officer, an official one, expressed worries Thursday about the repercussions of not paying the police. “If they are going to leave their posts, then this will affect the protection procedures during the elections and will cause us problems.”

An unofficial officer, who says he participated in one of the recent protests, complained of a desire to serve on election day, but not for free. “How can we defend our city and the coming elections when our families are hungry?” he asked.

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Special correspondents Saad Fakhrildeen and Raheem Salman in Najaf and Salar Jaff in Baghdad contributed to this report.