Iraq has a new constitution. Iraqis approved the national charter by a narrow margin, prompting allegations of fraud by dissenters. While the outcome produced a document that is more democratic and representative than any other in Iraq's history, the referendum results highlighted the country's sharp ethnic divisions. Some of those divisions will persist no matter what happens in Iraq. The new government in Baghdad must minimize the rejectionists and marginalize them so that they are revealed for what they are: enemies of a genuinely democratic state.
The official tally for the Oct. 15 referendum showed 79 percent of Iraqi voters approved the new constitution; 21 percent rejected it. More than 95 percent of Iraq's Kurds and Shiites, two of the country's three ethnic and religious groups, voted yes. Turnout was a respectable 63 percent. As many as 10 million Iraqis voted, an estimated 1 million more than the ballots cast in the January parliamentary election, and most of the new voters were Sunni Muslims.
A healthy margin of victory was not enough to guarantee the charter's adoption. The referendum law stipulated that rejection of the document by two-thirds of voters in three of Iraq's 18 provinces would have been sufficient to defeat the constitution. In fact, overwhelming majorities in two provinces voted no. In a third province, Ninevah, "only" 55 percent of voters voted no. In other words, 11 percent of voters in one province -- some 80,000 people in a country of 23 million -- determined the fate of the constitution. Predictably, there were complaints of fraud, but they have not been substantiated.