ON MONDAY in Baghdad gunmen shot dead eight members of one family. To drive home their message of hate they cut the heads off some of the bodies. Against this bloody background, seven years after the US toppled Saddam Hussein, voters go to the polls to choose a government on March 7th in a vote most Iraqis hoped would continue their country’s uneasy progress towards democracy and political stability. But oil has been poured on simmering sectarian tensions by electoral bans on Sunni and secular nationalist politicians, raising fears the elections could reignite widespread insurgency and even civil war.
In the January 2009 provincial elections, a dry run for this year’s more important vote, secular and nationalist parties delivered a major blow to the Shia religious parties, especially the Iranian-backed Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (SIIC). But since then, largely at the instigation of Iran, a powerful new alliance of sectarian Shia politicians has come together as the Iraqi National Alliance (INA), combining the SIIC, and groups associated with Moqtada al-Sadr, former prime minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, and Ahmed Chalabi, once the darling of US neo-conservatives.
In January a body controlled by Mr Chalabi banned 500 candidates from the elections, ostensibly to prevent former supporters of the deposed Baath Party coming to power. The ban has been upheld by the government of prime minister Nouri al Maliki despite international protests. Among those proscribed, the vast majority with only the most distant connections to the Baathists, were current MPs and politicians, including Sunni Saleh al-Mutlaq, head of the National Dialogue Front (NDF), who had joined forces with former Shia prime minister Ayad Allawi in a secular coalition. The latter has been working with Saudi backing to reach out across the sectarian divide and private polls have suggested that the Allawi-Mutlaq bloc might have done well enough at the polls to make Mr Allawi prime minister.
The NDF has now withdrawn from the election in protest at the bans and there is a likelihood that low turnout among Sunnis and secular-minded Shias could hand the election to the SIIC, Mr Chalabi and their cronies, or return Mr Maliki. What should have been a stabilising election now promises to be precisely the opposite with the top US commander in Iraq warning that the planned withdrawal of all US combat forces by the end of August could yet be delayed if conditions worsen. Iraq remains bitterly divided internally, a pawn in a regional game.