Youth Poll Boycott Worries Kurdish Leaders

As the hours ticked by on referendum day, election officials at Kurdish polling stations noticed one group of voters was clearly missing – young people.

From Halabja to Erbil to Sulaimaniyah, young Kurds said they had no interest in voting on an Iraqi constitution which, they claim, did not support Kurdish rights or self-determination. But rather than endorse the political process by voting against the constitution, they chose to stay away from the polls.

"There is nothing good for the Kurds in the constitution that would make me vote for it,” said Barzan Muhammed Naseem, a 23-year-old student in Erbil. “The Kurdistan parties wanted to mislead people.”

Imad Ahmed, the Kurdistan region deputy prime minister in Sulaimaniyah and a Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, PUK, official, said the youth boycott was “an alarm bell for Kurds”.

“The lack of youth participation in voting is a warning for those in power in Kurdistan," he said.

Kurdish Iraqis in their late teens and twenties have spent at least half of their lives under semi-autonomous rule. Since 1991, the PUK and the Kurdistan Democratic Party, KDP, have run the three Kurdish provinces and are now facing disgruntled youth who don’t believe the parties represent their interests.

Ahmed acknowledged that many young people did not believe Kurdish leaders pushed hard enough for Kurdish rights in negotiating the constitution and stayed away from the polls as a result. Many specifically wanted the constitution to guarantee Kurds, who make up about 20 per cent of Iraq’s population, the right to self-determination if they experienced discrimination in the new system.

“They are wary of going to the polls time after time without seeing any results,” he said.

The constitution, which the Kurdish political parties played a major role in drafting, was widely expected to pass in Kurdish areas ahead of the referendum. As a result, some said young people did not believe votes against it would impact the results.

Still, in Sulaimaniyah, many were sceptical of the turnout and approval figures.

Officials with the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq initially reported a 72 per cent voter turnout in Sulaimaniyah, with 98 per cent of the voters approving the constitution. It has not released figures for Erbil and Duhuk, the two other Kurdish provinces.

The electoral commission said it is recounting ballots from provinces where extraordinarily high number of voters cast their ballots for the constitution.

While the commission did not track voters by age, election workers and Kurdish leaders said they believed the youth had the lowest participation rates of any group at the polls.

Ako Khalil, a 28-year-old electrical engineer who managed one of the voting centres in Sulaimaniyah, maintained that young people were fed up with the Kurdish political parties, which have been accused of corruption and of not providing basic necessities such as water, electricity and affordable housing.

Asos Hardi, editor-in-chief of the weekly newspaper Hawlati in Sulaimaniyah, said young people “did not vote on the constitution because they wanted to take revenge on the Kurdistan political parties".

“They blotted out anything in the constitution that benefited the Kurds,” said Shaho Taha, a 22-year-old student at the central teachers’ institute in Sulaimaniyah.

He maintained that he could not vote for a constitution that did not recognise Kurdish as an official language in Iraq.

The constitution in fact declares Arabic and Kurdish as Iraq’s two official languages. But many young people never read the document, said Kamal Ghambar, director of the electoral commission’s Erbil office.

Khalil noted that few people in Kurdistan received copies of the proposed constitution. The draft was distributed throughout the country - and then amended - just days before the October 15 referendum.

While many in the Kurdish territories - and Iraq as a whole - may not have read the constitution in its entirety, young Kurdish voters said they knew enough to determine it would not serve them.

"I won’t vote for a constitution that is drafted on a religious and sectarian basis,” said Saiwan Kareem, a 25-year-old university student in Sulaimaniyah. “The rights of the Kurds are not realised in this constitution."

“I don’t believe in the process at all,” said Seever Kamal, 26, a Halabja resident whose father and two brothers died when the Ba’athist military launched chemical attacks in her town in 1988. She refused to vote, because the constitution did not compensate Halabja victims and their relatives.

"The constitution is drafted in the interest of the Arabs,” she said. “In order for us not to be exposed to more chemical bombings, I won't vote for it. I want Kurdistan be independent and not to stay with Iraq."

Amanj Khalil is an IWPR trainee journalist in Sulaimaniyah.