BAGHDAD — Only a week after Iraq’s leaders celebrated the passage of an election law that kept the country on course to hold its first national elections in four years, Kurdish lawmakers threatened Tuesday to boycott the election unless their demand for a greater share of parliamentary seats was met.

Their demand came on the heels of a threat by the top Sunni politician in Iraq, Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi, to veto the election law unless Iraqi voters living outside Iraq were also given more seats in Parliament. The majority of Iraqis who fled the country after the American invasion and during the sectarian violence were Sunnis.

Lawmakers and representatives of Iraq’s Independent High Electoral Commission met Tuesday to try to negotiate an agreement that would satisfy all parties. The election law must still be approved by Iraq’s presidency council, and details, like the allocation of seats, can be amended before then.

Any delay of the elections beyond their scheduled date of Jan. 21 would not only be an international embarrassment but could complicate the American military’s plans for withdrawal.

The passage of an election law was delayed 11 times, hung up largely on the question of representation of the ethnically mixed area of Kirkuk, an oil-rich region whose Kurdish population has grown substantially since the American invasion, after shrinking under years of persecution by the government of Saddam Hussein.

When the election law was passed on Nov. 8, it seemed as if those differences had been resolved. But as the details of the law and the allocation of seats in Parliament became clear, familiar divisions have once again surfaced.

“Unless the seat allocation formula is reconsidered in a just manner, the people of the Kurdistan region will be compelled to boycott the election,” the Kurdistan regional president, Massoud Barzani, said in a statement.

Vice President Hashemi was equally forceful in his veto threat. Sunni politicians believe that the Shiite-led parties want to limit the representation of Iraqis living abroad because they are viewed as largely secular and Sunni.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/18/world/middleeast/18iraq.html?ref=todayspaper&pagewanted=print

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