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Iraqis Defy Threats As Millions Vote

Night StalkerNight Stalker Member Posts: 11,967
edited January 2005 in General Discussion
[black]Washington Post
January 31, 2005
Pg. 1

Iraqis Defy Threats As Millions Vote

Mood Is Festive; Turnout Appears Strong Despite Deadly Attacks

By Anthony Shadid, Washington Post Foreign Service

BAGHDAD, Jan. 30 -- Millions of Iraqis turned out Sunday to cast ballots in the country's first free elections in a half-century, the ranks of voters surging as attacks by insurgents proved less ferocious than feared and enthusiasm spilled over into largely Sunni Arab regions where hardly a campaign poster had appeared.

At least 44 people were reported killed in suicide bombings, shootings and mortar and rocket attacks. But for the first time since the fall of Saddam Hussein in April 2003, the haggard capital and other parts of Iraq took on the veneer of a festival, as crowds danced, chanted and played soccer in streets secured by thousands of Iraqi and American forces. From the Kurdish north to the largely Shiite south, at thousands of polling stations, voters delivered a similar message: The elections represented their moment not only to seize the future, but also to reject a legacy of dictatorship and the bloodshed and hardship that have followed the U.S. invasion.

Lines that began small at polling stations grew during the 10 hours of voting, sometimes dramatically. After casting ballots, many Iraqis triumphantly pointed their index fingers, stained with the purple ink that indicated they had voted, and hardly flinched at gunfire and explosions that interrupted the day. At one station, a woman showered election workers with handfuls of candy. At another, a veiled, elderly woman kept repeating, "God's blessings on you" to election workers. Across town, three Iraqi soldiers carried an elderly man in a wheelchair two blocks to a voting booth.

"It's like a wedding. I swear to God, it's a wedding for all of Iraq," said Mohammed Nuhair Rubaie, the director of a polling station in Baghdad's Sunni neighborhood of Tunis where, after a slow start, hundreds of voters gathered as the cloudless day progressed. "No one has ever witnessed this before. For a half-century, no one has seen anything like it.

"And we did it ourselves."

Officials loosely estimated voter turnout at 60 percent nationwide -- a figure that, if accurate, would make Sunday's vote perhaps the freest, most competitive election in an authoritarian Arab world and a rare victory for the Bush administration in Iraq. U.S. and allied Iraqi leaders had looked to the vote as a turning point in a troubled two-year occupation beset by almost daily carnage, rampant crime and deep disenchantment with the United States. Those officials had expressed hope that a strong turnout would deliver elusive legitimacy to the new government, enabling it to defeat the insurgency in Sunni regions and begin a long-awaited economic revival.

In the weeks before the vote, insurgents had vowed to disrupt the elections, and on Sunday they carried out the attacks that have become their trademark: suicide bombings, car bombings and mortar shellings spaced, at one point in the morning, a few seconds apart. Police reported nine suicide bombings, the majority of them carried out by assailants on foot because most cars were banned from streets.

In one of the deadliest attacks, a bomber on a minibus carrying voters to polls in Hilla, south of Baghdad, killed himself and at least four others. In Baghdad, mortar shells struck the neighborhood of Sadr City, and a suicide bomber detonated explosives at a polling station in the Zayuna neighborhood. Other attacks were reported in Balad and Kirkuk in the north and in Mahawil, south of the capital.

Late in the day, a British C-130 military transport plane crashed near Balad, 35 miles north of Baghdad, scattering wreckage over a wide area. Britain's Press Association reported Sunday night that at least 10 troops were killed.

Al Qaeda in Iraq, a group led by Jordanian guerrilla Abu Musab Zarqawi, asserted responsibility for many of the suicide attacks Sunday in a statement posted on the Internet. The statement could not be immediately verified.

In Sunni-populated regions of central and northern Iraq, where the insurgency has been most fierce, turnout was far lower than elsewhere, a sign of the guerrillas' strength in those areas and their ability to intimidate.

Despite rumors that food rations would be taken away if residents failed to vote, few defied threats by insurgents to, in the words of one leaflet, "wash the streets" with the blood of voters.

In Ramadi, a western city of roughly 200,000 people along the Euphrates River, residents said only six people voted at one polling station: the provincial governor, three of his deputies, the representative of the Communist Party and the police chief. In Dhuluyah, a town north of Baghdad along the Tigris, the eight polling stations never opened, residents said, and in other towns in the region, voters usually numbered in the dozens as others ignored appeals broadcast by patrolling U.S. soldiers to vote.

But both the violence and the Sunni turnout proved to be the wild cards. After a slow start, growing numbers voted in heavily Sunni districts of the capital, including Khadra, Tunis and parts of Adhamiyah, residents said. Crowds in Baqubah, a mixed Sunni-Shiite town northeast of Baghdad, gathered with their children before polls opened and waited for tardy election workers as mortar shells detonated in the distance.

In the northern city of Mosul, scene of some of the fiercest fighting in recent months, turnout grew among both Sunni Arabs and ethnic Kurds as intense attacks failed to materialize. In the two weeks before the elections, the United States had increased its troop strength in Mosul by 50 percent, from 8,000 to 12,000, and brought in an additional 4,500 Iraqi security forces.

"God willing, this election will be the nail in the coffin of the terrorists," Abbas Salem, a real estate agent in Mosul, said after voting.

A Commitment to Vote

Across Baghdad, residents -- who had often placed more credibility in the threats of insurgents than in reassurances by the U.S. military and Iraqi security forces -- rejoiced at a casualty count that, while dire, was far lower than on some of the capital's bloodiest days.

"Enough fear," said Najia Abbas, a 46-year-old woman whose family was displaced by fighting in Fallujah.

Along a street in western Baghdad, a man thrust forward his ink-stained finger.

"Whatever they would do, I would still vote," said Hamid Azawi, 57. "Even if I was dead, I would still participate." He hit his chest. "The vote comes from the bottom of my heart."

The election of a 275-member parliament, 18 provincial councils and a legislature in Iraq's Kurdish region involved more than 6,000 organizers who oversaw 140,000 workers and more than 5,000 polling stations. About 14 million people were eligible to vote in Iraq, as well as 1.2 million overseas voters who were allowed to cast ballots in 14 countries. The U.S. government invested heavily in the project but sought to play down its efforts for fear the elections would be seen as an American-engineered process.

Throughout the day, U.S. forces stayed in the background as tens of thousands of Iraqi police officers and soldiers fanned out across towns and cities. For the first time since the fall of Hussein, residents of Baghdad saw Iraqi armor in the streets. The personnel carriers and Soviet-built T-55 tanks were leftovers from the dissolved Iraqi army, now overhauled for service with the reconstituted military. Across the capital, roads, squares and bridges were barricaded and manned by U.S. and Iraqi troops. Police pickups, their sirens blaring, plied streets where children set up soccer goals with piles of shoes.

Independent observers noted some irregularities in the vote. Scattered polling stations opened late, and 61 stayed closed. At some, materials were missing or not delivered and many voters were unsure where polling stations were. Some poll workers did not show up.

"Nonetheless," the Iraqi Election Information Network, a nongovernmental group monitoring the vote, said in a statement, "the election appears to have been conducted without systematic flaws and in accordance with basic international standards."

In all, 111 parties participated in the elections, ranging from organizations composed along Iraq's ethnic and sectarian lines to groups with deep historical roots, such as the Communist Party and constitutional monarchists. Opinion polls showed three parties to have the best prospects: a list that joined the two main Kurdish parties in northern Iraq, the party of interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi and a largely Shiite coalition that had the tacit endorsement of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the country's most influential religious leader.

"This is the starting point in the path of democracy, rule of law, prosperity and security to Iraq and the entire region," Allawi said after voting in the fortified Green Zone, which serves as the headquarters of the U.S. and Iraqi administrations.

Abdul Aziz Hakim, whose name led the list of the Sistani-backed United Iraqi Alliance, called the vote the start of "a new era."

"The Iraqis will vote, and the dream we have fought and sacrificed for will be fulfilled," he said.

Despite the flush of optimism Sunday, hardly anyone in Iraq predicted a quick end to an insurgency that has roiled vast regions of the country and deeply undermined the credibility of the U.S. military here. An American official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity so he could speak candidly, predicted that attacks might intensify after the elections, posing what may be the greatest challenge to the new government and making it difficult to withdraw the 150,000 U.S. troops in Iraq.

"I think the insurgency is going to continue. I do not think it is going to stop. In some places, it's going to get worse," the official said last week. "This is a long-term process. There's no quick fix."

'Someone to Serve Us'

Intertwined with the issue of the insurgency is the degree of participation by Sunni Arabs, the longtime rulers in Iraq who in all likelihood will lack substantial representation in a parliament dominated by religious Shiites and the Kurds, who are predominantly Sunni but ethnically distinct from Arabs. Over the past month, conservative Sunni groups have insisted on a role in writing the constitution, one of parliament's main tasks, and senior Shiite leaders have spoken of bolstering Sunni participation in the government. The message was reiterated Sunday by both Allawi and Hakim.

"We don't accept any kind of marginalization of any group," Hakim said.

Initial ballot returns are expected as early as Monday, said Hussein Hindawi, the head of Iraq's Independent Electoral Commission. But the results will be followed by weeks of uncertainty as parties -- none is expected to have a crucial two-thirds majority -- jockey for influence in appointing a president and two deputy presidents, who will in turn name a prime minister and cabinet.

Time and again since the fall of Hussein -- at the start of the occupation, with the naming of the Governing Council in 2003 and with the appointment of Allawi in 2004 -- Iraqis have met change with optimism, only to be disappointed, and the pressure on the new government to address rampant joblessness and crime, persistent power blackouts and a two-month-long fuel crisis will likely be immense. For many, those issues take precedence over the more political questions of Sunni participation and the fate of the insurgency.

"We want someone to serve us," said Hussein Alwan, 44, a professor of business administration, who was standing with friends in the neighborhood of Karrada, where U.S. soldiers threw candy from Humvees to festive crowds.

He named his priority: "The economy. The economy will assure security."

His friend, Abdullah Taher, added his: "Try the officials of the previous regime."

Madhlum Husseini, a 32-year-old day laborer, approached. "Return sovereignty to the country," he volunteered.

For the moment, though, those challenges receded in a celebration of what many viewed as a moment when Iraqis saw the elections less as a contest to choose a particular party or platform and more as an exercise of rights long denied. To many, the vote itself was what mattered, that their very participation would set in motion a mechanism that could improve their lives. In some ways, the joy seemed even more palpable than after Hussein's fall, because Iraqis, not foreigners, were the agents of change.

Making Their Point

In the Sunni neighborhood of Tunis, where surprised election officials estimated that at one station 1,500 of 2,500 residents voted, 60-year-old Dhia Ali shuffled into the Aisha Elementary School. He had no idea who he was voting for; he said he only wanted to vote. Inside, the polling station director held Ali's shaking hand as he randomly marked the party of minority Turkmens.

"We have to show the difference between what we had in the past and what we can have in the future," he said.

The past provided a powerful discourse across Iraq, which has been ruled by a succession of generals and strongmen since the monarchy was overthrown in 1958. In Najaf, the spiritual capital of Shiites, voters answered a call by Sistani, who declared voting a religious duty. Voting surged at midday, with some polls reporting long lines.

"For the Shiites, it is the first time we could do what we wanted to do without pressure," said Yusef Abed Noor, 54, as he emerged with his finger stained. "This on my finger is a symbol of my rights."

In the Kurdish region of northern Iraq, where sentiments for independence run strong, voters jammed polling centers, some waiting three or four hours to vote. Rural voters walked miles in the winter cold.

Rabiaa Mawood said she and her daughters woke up before dawn in the village of Jootiar to get ready to vote. They left their mattresses on the floor and rushed out the door to catch a bus to take them to the polling center in Bahiraka.

In the courtyard of the family home, where about 30 neighborhood children, the village's only donkey and a herd of goats chased each other under laundry hung out to dry, Mawood, who estimated her age to be 50, wrapped herself tight in the black cloak that covered her from head to toe. When asked what she thought about the election, Mawood eagerly extended her hand to show her stained finger. It was her own testament to the past and the future.

"We want to choose a new government for the new Iraq," she said. "We lived for this day."

Contributing to this report were staff writers Jackie Spinner in Irbil and Cameron W. Barr in Baghdad, correspondents Steve Fainaru in Mosul, Doug Struck in Najaf, Karl Vick in Baghdad and Scott Wilson in Amman, Jordan, special correspondents Omar Fekeiki, Bassam Sebti, Naseer Nouri, Khalid Saffar and Sahar Nageeb in Baghdad, Salih Saif Aldin in Tikrit, Dlovan Brwari in Mosul, Hasan Shammeri in Baqubah, Emad Zeinal in Basra, Marwan Anie in Kirkuk and Sarok Abdulla Ahmed and Shereen Jerjes in Irbil.[/black]

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