Sunnis and secular parties are uniting in calling out the blatant fraud carried out by the Election Commission.

BAGHDAD, Dec 21 (Reuters) – Iraq’s Sunni Arab and secular parties threatened on Wednesday to boycott the new parliament after alleging massive fraud in last week’s election, ramping up pressure on the triumphant Shi’ite Islamists to share power.

Sunni rebels, whose informal truce helped push turnout to 70 percent as insurgents pitched for a voice in the new, full-term legislature, warned they would intensify attacks if the Shi’ite Alliance held on to the lion’s share of power.

The Electoral Commission, which opposition groups demanded be dissolved accusing it of bias, rejected calls for a rerun of the vote, saying complaints were numerous but unlikely to affect the overall result — a view held by U.S. and U.N. officials.

With demands for a rerun or a substantial revision of the vote looking unlikely for now, lobbying by those disappointed with their shares of the vote seemed intended to back up calls for posts in a grand coalition government — something the ruling Shi’ites have offered and Washington is encouraging.

Representatives of secular Shi’ite former prime minister Iyad Allawi and two major Sunni Arab groups, the Islamist-led Iraqi Accordance Front and the secular Iraqi Unified Front, along with other groupings, met on Wednesday to coordinate.

“We all agreed to contest and reject the results of the election,” said Allawi aide Thaer al-Naqib. “We want the Electoral Commission dissolved and the election rerun.”

“We will take to the streets if necessary,” he told Reuters. “We might even not take up our seats in the new parliament and so any new government would be illegitimate.”

Unified Front leader Saleh al-Mutlak said they would take their complaints not only to the Electoral Commission but also the Arab League, European Union and United Nations.

This is perhaps the most polarized we have seen Iraqi politics to date. The population is going to become more defiant, the insurgency more dangerous, and the country less stable if the Commission doesn’t find it within itself to correct its errors. It would be impossible for it to actually succeed in the face of so much military force, but it is possible that the Iraqi opposition will attempt a colored revolution in the face of this electoral fraud? The whole situation is making me sick to my stomach.

But it definitely gets worse. Omar reports that the Kurds won Kirkuk, meaning that the city is most likely to be incorporated into the Kurdish autonomous region despite the wishes of the center of the country. In sum, the Kurds got what they want, while the religious Shia UIA got what they wanted out of the rest of the country. The only reason the Kurds were able to win Kirkuk in the first place, however, was because of what I can only consider a hugely corrupt addition of 200,000 new voters to the database just a few days before the election. Tell me something isn’t wrong here.

It makes me highly suspicious of the intentions of both groups. We know that the Kurds want to be at the least highly autonomous, and at most independent. We also know that the Shia-dominated south of Iraq was heavily oppressed under Saddam and wants nothing to do with a highly centralized government, preferring to form its own highly autonomous super-region.

Do you see where I’m going with this? The difference between “democratic politics” in Iraq right now and politics in real liberal democracies is that, in the latter, the groups in government are working toward the betterment of the whole country. In Iraq, however, it is becoming more and more apparent that those in government are only working to satisfy the demands of their tribes or regions.

I think they’re thinking, “Baghdad be damned, let’s use our position of power to cut and run.” And by cut, I mean the possible partitioning of the country, if not officially than by de facto control. They both already have their own militias that have more control than the Iraqi army itself and have their own regional parliaments. What’s left? Iraq is moving in a very dangerous direction if this isn’t solved. The violence could get much, much worse under these circumstances, as I don’t think either side can restrain itself and honestly work for a resolution in the interest of a unified Iraq.

UPDATE: Addressing the concerns that I’m being premature, I understand what I’m being criticized about, so let me clarify. It still remains to see be seen if the Iraqis will be able to work this out peacefully through compromise instead of bullets. The problem is not that the Kurds and Shia could perpetually rule Iraq and that Sunnis will never be in power. They know they won’t be.

The problem is that voter fraud is blatantly apparent and skewed toward the ruling parties. What is happening now is not anger at losing the elections, its anger at participating in a political process they thought would be transparent and fair but isn’t. They are losing faith in the country’s democratic institutions that are being built. What good is an Election Commission that doesn’t do its job right? If they lose faith in the institutions, there will be no way to bring them peacefully into the political process, and everything will be for naught.