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Iraqi PM criticizes UN inaction on ballot rigging

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki criticizes the UN envoy’s rejection of his election fraud allegations and said that he must take strident steps and not make lame excuses.

In a pointed attack on the UN envoy to Iraq Ad Melkert, Maliki harshly criticized him and said: “If I were in Melkert’s position and in front of this wave of problems, I would have said, ‘You should go all the way through (to detect fraud)’.”

“But Melkert has just said, ‘Well, it is difficult because of time’,” Maliki said in a television interview on Sunday.

Maliki’s criticism came as his rival candidate, Iyad Allawi of the Iraqiya bloc, which won the election with two more seats than Maliki’s own State of Law Alliance bloc, opened talks with political rivals to form a coalition government.

The final results were announced on March 26 and declared Allawi’s bloc victorious in the March 7 general election, with 89 out of the 325 seats of the country’s Council of Representatives.

It could take up to two weeks for Iraq’s Supreme Court to ratify the results, as parties can still submit complaints to the election commission.

Maliki has made repeated demands for a nationwide manual recount, claiming irregularities in the counting procedure, but the UN envoy downplayed allegations of fraud calling the results “credible” and has appealed for the acceptance of the results.

Maliki added that he had asked the country’s Independent High Electoral Commission (IHEC) to manually recount the ballots, but his request was refused, “and the United Nations was more vehemently against my request than the IHEC.”

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