There are approximately 150.000 Iraqis living in the UK who were eligible to vote in January's elections, around 30,000 of whom travelled to the three polling stations in the country on two consecutive weekends to first register and then vote. Manchester received the most voters with 13,000 arriving from the North of England and Midlands.

The relatively low turnout was in part due to the difficulty for many in making the necessary journeys - with the enormous complexity of the current party system in Iraq undoubtedly not helping matters (the ballot paper was perhaps the largest ever produced). However, as I saw, the turnout was hugely influenced by the disparity in participation amongst sections of the expatriate community: firstly there were almost no women present, I saw no more than a dozen amongst a crowd of thousands, and none at all in the queue to vote. Secondly, the Kurdish community were by far the most effective and organised at bringing out their vote.

The atmosphere around the polling station was generally that of a street party, with people wearing traditional dress, dancing, and wearing and waving hundreds of flags - I didn't see a single Iraqi national flag though, they were all the Kurdish symbol with the yellow sun at the centre. I spoke to some Kurdish men from Bolton who were clearly proud of their involvement in the election but were either uninterested or dismissive when I asked about Sunni or Shia voters, the largest two groupings in Iraq. Later I saw a small number of non-Kurdish Iraqis booed and jeered as they joined the queue to vote, and on the second day of voting there was some violence on the fringes of the crowd.

It's an interesting thing to consider, then, for Iraqi democracy that the majority of participants - at least in the UK - were doing so in order to disassociate themselves from the new state. The Kurds I spoke to were very clear that the reason for their enthusiasm to vote was to gain as much autonomy for the Kurdish North of Iraq as possible (to this end the main Kurdish parties, the KDP and PUK, formed a united coalition for these elections) with an eventual view to independence. Since the creation of Kurdistan would have to remove territory from not only Iraq, but also Turkey, Syria, and Iran the prospects seem distant, and it remains to be seen how the new Iraq will deal with the Kurdish voice.

-Manchester, January 2005