Attacks fail to stop voting

2005-01-30 13:59

Baghdad - Iraqis turned out to vote on Sunday in their country's first free election in a half-century, defying insurgents who launched deadly suicide bombings and mortar strikes at polling stations.

By midday, at least 29 people were dead but the violence had slowed and voting picked up.

Casting his vote, interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi called it "the first time the Iraqis will determine their destiny".

The head of the main Shiite cleric-endorsed ticket, Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, said: "God willing, the elections will be good ... Today's voting is very important."

Despite the heavy attacks that began two hours after polls opened, turnout was brisk in many Shiite Muslim and mixed Shiite-Sunni neighbourhoods, both in Baghdad and in southern cities like Basra.

Even in the small town of Askan in the so-called "triangle of death" south of Baghdad - a mixed Sunni-Shiite area - 20 people waited in line at each of several polling centres. More walked toward the polls.

"This is democracy," said an elderly woman in a black abaya, Karfia Abbasi, holding up a thumb stained with purple ink to prove she had voted.

In one sign of potential trouble, polls at first were deserted in mostly Sunni cities like Fallujah, Ramadi and Samarra around Baghdad, and in the restive, heavily Sunni northern city of Mosul.

By midday, however, hundreds of people were voting in Samarra and several hundred people were voting on Mosul's eastern side, which includes both Kurdish and Arab neighbourhoods, witnesses said.

There were still big pockets with little turnout. In Baghdad's mainly Sunni area of Azamiyah, the neighbourhood's four polling centres did not open Sunday, residents said. In Beiji, a Sunni insurgent stronghold in northern Iraq, polling centers were all but deserted.

The chief UN adviser to the Iraqi election commission, Carlos Valenzuela, said turnout seemed to be good in most places, although he cautioned it was too early to know for sure.

He said there were some voters in Fallujah and Ramadi.

"There have been a number of attacks of course, as expected," Valenzuela said. But, he said: "These attacks have not stopped the operations."

Asked if reports of better-than-expected turnout in areas where Sunni and Shiite Muslims live together indicated that a Sunni cleric boycott effort had failed, one of the main groups pushing the boycott seemed subdued.

"The association's call for a boycott of the election was not a fatwa (religious edict), but only a statement," said Association of Muslim Scholars spokesman Omar Ragheb. "It was never a question of something religiously prohibited or permitted. We never sought to force anyone to boycott."

Across Iraq, joy broke out in places as the day went on. At one polling place in Baghdad, Iraqi soldiers and voters joined hands in a dance.

One polling site in Baghdad ran out of ballots and was trying to get more, US officials said.

At another in eastern Baghdad, an Iraqi policeman in a black ski mask tucked his AK-47 assualt rifle under one arm and held the hand of an elderly blind woman to guide her to the polls.

A driving ban seemed to discourage car bombs. But the insurgents improvised: Several used belts of explosives rather than cars rigged with bombs to launch their suicide missions.

- SAPA