Election Day
News: By many accounts, the vote was a success. But don't celebrate too soon.
January 30, 2005
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I opted for a lie-in this morning, figuring that, it being a holiday (hmmm… everybody gets the day off so they can go vote… what a novel idea…), people wouldn't be getting to the polls just as they opened. Oh, and the very real threat of violence made people a touch reluctant as well.
At 8:30 we hit the nearly traffic-free Baghdad streets after convincing the guards at the hotel compound that we did, indeed, want to leave. In the traffic circle closest to my hotel, Iraqi armor has finally hit the streets. The T-72s and T-55s look like set pieces. Though the streets were devoid of anything but military and police vehicles (and my car), the slow trickle of voters, on foot, that was to grow to something of a torrent had begun. On the way across town, I was forced to disrupt dozens of soccer games as well, shouting "GOOOOAL!" each time I drove the car between a pair of goalposts, generally denoted by a pair of shoes, rocks or a pile of coats, as children took advantage of the holiday.
My real goal was to go to Sadr City (I've been told by the sheikh I know there that only about 10 percent of the Sadr supporters voted), but therein lay the problem. During the credentialing process we were assured by the Ministry of Interior and the election commission that journalists did not need special credentials to drive around. Once we got on the road, we found there was a different game being played. We were stopped a half-dozen times in the span of a mile or so, everyone asking why our car didn't have official stickers on it. At each point we patiently explained the problem, called various officials and were subjected to a number of nervous, somewhat ridiculous searches. At one point, a police officer actually inspected all of my pens and then threw them against the ground, lest they be explosive devices. The fact that he threw them at our feet left me a bit dubious of his mental state.
Sadr City is a good ways from my hotel. After a bit of talking, we negotiated an escort onto the blocked and deserted highway from a pair of humvees. We made it probably another kilometer before being stopped by another group of (incredulous) U.S. troops.
"They gave you an escort onto the highway and then left you? Man, they really screwed you. I can't believe no one's lit you up. You know you're nuts, right?"
Anyway, this group of troops were a little more helpful, and managed to actually get us some stickers for our car, and we were on our way. But by the time we got to Thawra (the larger district of which Sadr City is a part), it was pretty evident that not everyone had gotten the memo about the stickers either. As we passed one of the polling stations, an Iraqi soldier fired into the air and then leveled his rifle at me.
"Shall we just interview people at this one instead?" I asked Hiba. She nodded her weary and slightly relieved assent, and after an even more frantic search than at the last few (we arrived shortly after one of the nearby stations had been struck by a mortar round) we were on our way.
Thawra is mostly Shiite, and we joined the Iraqis walking toward the polling station. The stations there claimed better than 50 percent turnout by two in the afternoon, and despite the gunfire and explosions, it looked to me as though that were quite likely.
While at one of the polling stations, we bumped into a representative of Abdul Aziz Al-Hakim -- the head of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), a major Shiite political party -- who said informal exit polls indicated the descendent of the prophet (that would be Hakim) was netting somewhere around 80 percent of the vote. As he spoke, an Iraqi machine-gunner on the roof of the polling station opened up in response to a group of men who were trying to launch mortars from a car. The voting continued.
In true Iraqi fashion, once Hiba and I managed to get inside the polling station, we were invited for lunch. We sat down with Assem Abdul Zahra, the head of the station, who had walked three m iles to get to work this morning. Though he has a degree in psychology, he worked as a baker because of trouble finding a job in the old government. "I was discriminated against because I was Shiite," he said. "I felt so happy yesterday when all of the election materials arrived he said. They are attacking us with mortars — we are fighting them with this ink," he said, holding up his index finger, stained with blue dye, to show he had voted. Then he talked about what most of the voting today really seemed to be about.
"For 35 years we lived under that dictator," he said. "Why shouldn't we be in power?"
The insurgents failed to disrupt the vote in Baghdad on any large scale, but not for lack of effort. Continuously on our trip across town we could hear explosions from mortar rounds and the chatter of small arms fire. I'm not particularly reassured by the fact that the only way to quell the violence (and even then, not entirely) seems to be to shut the city down entirely. What's more, I'm beginning to figure out how people get shot at checkpoints. I noticed that on more than one occasion an Iraqi soldier motioned for me to stop while one of his colleagues motioned for me to pull forward.
So, by many accounts, the vote was a success. But don't celebrate too soon — they all celebrated in Sadr City when the Americans invaded; three months later, Moqtada Al-Sadr was raising his militia. And then there is the more chilling implication — the disenfranchisement of a sizeable and geographically distinct part of the population, the Sunnis. Though voter turnout was high in the south and in parts of Baghdad, it was almost non-existent elsewhere. Though some did not vote out of a very real fear of retribution, others refused, not so much out of fear of losing power (Saddam was never a friend to Sunni Islamic militants), but out of opposition to the occupation. Nor were many members of the former military (in my estimation, the other sizeable component to the resistance) great fans of the former dictator..
Hiba went to vote when we had knocked off for the day, but took the increasingly narrow route of unarmed resistance — she cast a blank ballot.
David Enders is a 24-year-old freelance journalist who has spent more than a year reporting from Iraq since the end of the invasion. His first book, Baghdad Bulletin: The Real Story of the War in Iraq--Reporting from Beyond the Green Zone, will be released by the University of Michigan Press in April.
