A parody of an election

The logistical mayhem involved in all aspects of the election process and the utter lack of security are among the many obstacles and grounds for questions that will haunt the results for decades to come. And this is to ignore the congenital defect of a sloppy election conceived by, and under, military occupation and lacking even the façade of any international body that might guarantee its legitimacy. [...] That the international monitors who are supposed to ensure the fairness of these elections will carry out their task in Amman, Jordan, hundreds of miles away from the Iraqi border, underlines just what a parody is going on.

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The irony of ironies is that distance seems to endow the electorate with added weight. Iraqis living in, for example, London or Detroit, most of whom are unlikely to return to Iraq anytime soon, if at all, can have a say in these elections. But many of those living (and dying) in Falluja, Mosul and other towns and cities in the provinces lumped under the so-called Sunni triangle, and who are much more likely to be immediately affected by the results of these elections than those of us living abroad, will not be able to vote even if they want to do so.

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It is not only Fallujans, Mosulites or even predominantly Sunnis who will boycott the elections or be unable to vote. There is a very diverse and representative block of voters, numbering almost 100,000, none of whom will cast a single ballot. The dead, unless they live in Florida, cannot vote.

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The United States is "not interested" -- those were Colin Powell's words -- in the numbers of civilian deaths.

"We don't do body counts," said General Tommy Franks, the war hero.

Not only that, the Iraqi Health Ministry was ordered to stop its own count. What else would one expect from a government that works very hard to shield the citizenry from the sight of its own soldiers' coffins returning home.

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I [...] sometimes silently address the 100,000 dead Iraqi civilians: Had you been birds, your disappearance might have caused much more outrage. You could have flown en masse over a metropolis and clouded its skies for a few hours in protest. Meteorologists and bird- watchers surely would have noticed. Had you been trees, you would have made a beautiful forest the destruction of which would have been deemed a crime against the planet. Had you been words, you would have formed a precious book or manuscript the loss of which would be mourned across the world. But you are none of these. And you had to pass quietly and uneventfully. No one will campaign for you in these elections. No one cares to represent you. No absentee ballots have been issued or sent. You will have to wait decades for a monument, or a tiny museum. If you are lucky in provoking retroactive guilt your names will be inscribed on a wall somewhere. But until then, you may welcome more to your midst and form a vast silent chorus of ghosts, condemning the spectators and the actors.
  Sinan Antoon at Al-Ahram