Scrivener.net

Iraqis embraced democracy in large numbers Sunday, standing in long lines to vote in defiance of mortar attacks, suicide bombers and boycott calls. Pushed in wheelchairs or carts if they couldn't walk, the elderly, the young and women in veils cast ballots in Iraq's first free election in a half-century.

''We broke a barrier of fear,'' said Mijm Towirish, an election official ... the mere fact the vote went off seemed to ricochet instantly around a world hoping for Arab democracy and fearing Islamic extremism.

''I am doing this because I love my country, and I love the sons of my nation,'' said Shamal Hekeib, 53, who walked with his wife 20 minutes to a polling station near his Baghdad home.

''We are Arabs, we are not scared and we are not cowards,'' Hekeib said...

The feeling was sometimes festive ... Entire families showed up in their finest clothes...

With the tanks of the New Iraqi Army keeping watch on main roads and local paramilitaries stationed around polling centres, tightly knit Shia neighbourhoods in the Iraqi capital produced a higher than expected voter turnout yesterday...

In some districts, the relaxed atmosphere was underscored by impromptu football games on streets, bridges and even four-lane motorways left empty by a near-total ban on traffic...

Most voters in the predominantly Shia suburb of Zafaraniya ... seem to have been unconcerned by the prospect of violence yesterday.

[Ahmed] Mahjim... spoke of the elections as a "historic chance" to build a democratic, tolerant, federal state. Shia Arabs, as Iraq's largest social group, argue that they are naturally entitled to majority representation....

... some Sunni districts also witnessed high turnout. In one school in the west Baghdad neighbourhood of al-Ameriya, election officials reported that nearly 50 per cent of the voters on the list had shown up to cast their ballots by midday.

The district lies just across a highway from the headquarters of the Muslim Scholars' Front, Iraq's most influential Sunni religious authority, which had said elections under foreign occupation were invalid and called for a boycott.

Written on the walls of the polling station were guerrilla graffiti threatening voters: "We will kill anyone who goes to the elections. We will kill you for treason and spying."

Sunni residents claimed they were not swayed by these threats, even though their fingers would be dyed with indelible ink that would mark them as voters for several days to come.

"I am a suicide voter," said unemployed Ameriya resident Saad Ahmed. "We need to have steadfastness as a people, because our country needs a future."

Nobody among the hundreds of voters thronging one Baghdad polling station on Sunday could remember anything remotely like it, not even those old enough to have taken part in Iraq's last partly free elections more than 50 years ago...

The scene was suffused with the sense of civic spirit that has seemed, so often in America's 22 months here, like a missing link in the plan to build democracy in Iraq...

At the Darari primary school, east of the Tigris River in central Baghdad, the courtyard teemed with people of all ages, and of all ethnic and religious groups, doing what American military commanders here have urged for so long: standing up for themselves, and laying down a marker, with their votes, that signaled they could not be intimidated into surrendering their rights by the insurgents who have terrorized the country with guns and bombs and butchers' knives...

On Sunday, everything about the voting resonated with a passion for self-expression, individuals set on their own choices, prepared to walk long distances through streets choked with military checkpoints, and to stand for hours in line to cast their ballots.

"A hundred names on the ballot are better than one, because it means that we are free," said Fadila Saleh, a 37-year-old engineer...

[T]he Iraqi people made a powerful statement Sunday. In cities across the country, voter turnout exceeded even the most optimistic predictions...

Driven by the country's Shiite and Kurdish communities -- accounting for 80 percent of the population -- they flooded the polls with near glee, showing their resilience and optimism after nearly two years of shattering disappointments and decades of oppression and war.

One Shiite voter, holding the hand of his 5-year-old son, told of his desire to show his son a democracy he had never before seen himself. "I want my son to see this," he said proudly...
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link, posted at 1:30 AM

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