In Northern Iraq, a Vote Seems Likely to Split

There was a hope, not long ago, that democracy would mean peace and stability for Nineveh, a place where cultures and armies have clashed since biblical times. Instead, democracy is hardening divisions — of people, of resources, of land — in ways that threaten the future of Iraq itself.

Last year’s election of a new provincial governor and council spawned political deadlock, inflamed by ethnic tensions. A boycott by a third of the council’s new members since last summer has crippled the government’s work at a time when Iraqis were promised that the elections would improve it.

Basic services remain meager, the economy feeble. The violence, though diminishing, is relentless, ravaging a crossroads of peoples and faiths in the plains where Arab Iraq meets the Kurdish mountains.

“This is the democracy the Americans brought,” said Hussein Mahmoud Ahmed, a Shabak, a member of a small minority group that occupies the plains.

It is a sentiment increasingly heard across Iraq as the country prepares to elect a new Parliament on March 7. The vote — only the country’s third since the American invasion in 2003 — is considered crucial to forging a unified, functioning democratic state. Here in Nineveh Province, though, as elsewhere, it is highlighting Iraq’s alarming fragmentation.

Lebanon is a model Iraqis often cite, a democracy that produces gridlock among ethnic and sectarian parties as divided before elections as after them, resulting in an ever tense political paralysis. Bosnia is another. When it comes to land and borders, disputed between the Arabs and the Kurdish regional government, the divisions are as intractable as those of Israelis and Palestinians.

When the federal government started to build a textile factory in Mr. Ahmed’s village, Bartallah, in a part of Nineveh controlled by the Kurds, the Kurdish regional government halted the project lest it create jobs for workers loyal to Mosul, the largely Arab provincial capital.

In Qaraqosh, the ownership of land is so fraught politically that the community council created a “black book” to register the name of any Christian who sold property to “an outsider.”

“We are living as doves among wolves,” said Staifo Jamil, a leader of a community council that represents Qaraqosh, a Christian town that lives in such fear that it mustered its own irregular militia to stand watch.

Iraq’s democracy is still young, and compared with those of other countries in the region, it remains the most competitive, if not exactly robust. Voter apathy and disillusionment, however, are already taking root. The election, delayed for months by bickering in Baghdad, has become a contest not of ideas as much as for advantage in the way the vote itself will be conducted and the parliamentary seats distributed.

The murky process to disqualify candidates with ties to Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party knocked out at least 10 candidates allied with the governor, Atheel al-Nujaifi, a Sunni who sought to restore Arab dominance in a still divided province. Among them was the mayor of Mosul, Zuhar al-Araji, who once worked closely with the American military.

Nineveh remains split, as it has since 2003, between Arab- and Kurdish-controlled regions. The tensions are so high that the American military this month joined troops from both sides to police the line of control along a series of new checkpoints.

Politicians on both sides on the line complain of restrictions when they campaign on the opposite side: harassment of candidates, pressure on parties, violence. When Mr. Nujaifi recently crossed the unofficial boundary on his way to Tall Kayf, his convoy was pelted with stones and tomatoes and briefly held up by Kurdish troops, the pesh merga. On Sunday evening a woman running with a secular coalition that includes Mr. Nujaifi and a former prime minister, Ayad al-Allawi, was shot to death outside her home in Mosul.

Mr. Nujaifi’s election last year raised hopes that the post-2003 disenfranchisement of Sunnis in Nineveh, which once fueled the insurgency, was coming to an end, and some measure of reconciliation would result.

That it has not is one reason that few interviewed here expressed hope that the coming election would result in anything better.

“Nothing is going to happen,” said Saleh Hassan Ali al-Jubouri, the mayor of Ash Shura, a town on the Arab side of the Tigris River not far from the ancient ruins of Kalhu, or Nimrud.

“We know which part belongs to the Kurds and which part to Nineveh,” he said, when asked how the results in March might affect the territorial dispute that has cleaved the province. He repeated, with evident disdain, “Nothing is going to happen.”

What is striking is how faithfully Iraqis expect to vote by identity, despite campaign appeals to national unity.

Issues — basic services, economic development, security — all seem to stem from identity as much as politics. “First ethnicity, second political party,” was how the leading Kurdish official here, Khasro Goran, put it.

The new Parliament will include 31 members from Nineveh, and Mr. Goran expects the main national Kurdish coalition to win 10 seats — based not on polls, but on the estimated percentage of Kurds in the province. Nineveh’s small minority communities — Yazidis, Shabaks and Christians — have dedicated parliamentary seats reserved for their representatives.

Mr. Goran, who has led the boycott of the provincial council, blames the governor and his party for the increasing bitterness, saying stability in Nineveh will come only with respect for minority parties, like his.

He also acknowledged that Nineveh’s border with the three officially recognized Kurdish provinces to the north is enmeshed in the impasse between the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki and that of the Kurdish regional president, Massoud Barzani, over the extent of Iraq’s federalism. That, as much as the local disputes, has perpetuated Mr. Goran’s boycott. Becoming the loyal opposition in Nineveh might imply recognition of Mosul’s political authority over the whole region.

“Some of the problems are local, but others are Iraqi,” Mr. Goran said in the Kurdish regional capital, Erbil, referring to the disputes that plague Nineveh. “And we have to pay the price.”

Khalis Isho, a candidate from Qaraqosh vying to win one of the Christian seats in Parliament, said that the country’s political leaders had failed — failed to embrace democratic values of rights and representative government, failed to learn that elections are only one part of democracy.

“I don’t believe we will reduce the activities of the terrorists until the thinking in Iraq generally and in Mosul in particular improves,” he said, “until they understand that peace in Mosul means peaceful coexistence.”