Iraq: In a country that has never been famed for its political subtleties, yesterday the message was clear enough. As US administrator Mr Paul Bremer addressed the United Nations to back the coalition's vision of Iraqi self-rule thousands of Iraqi Shia, marched through the streets of Baghdad.
"Yes, yes to elections. No, no to an appointed government!" they shouted.
It was the second large demonstration in a week - and came a day after a gruesome suicide bomb in Baghdad killed 25 people.
Mr Bremer - the subject of much chanting by the demonstrators - believes there is no time for elections before a transfer of power to the Iraqis in June.
Current US proposals call for indirect elections from US sponsored committees. It is a prospect few Iraqis welcome, not least the 5,000 demonstrating yesterday.
"Bremer should know we will never accept a government that hasn't been chosen by the people," said Majid Khatab (44), an oil-ministry employee.
"We've dreamt for many years about democracy. We're not prepared to have it denied us now." One man, Abu Abid, a taxi driver, had travelled five miles from a Baghdad suburb to attend the rally.
"I won't stop marching until there's a change in plan," he declared. His car had been stolen the day before.
Mr Bremer marked one focus of the rally. Another was clearly Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the head of Iraq's Shia population, whose Hawsa religious party had organised yesterday's rally.
Demonstrators yesterday held aloft pictures of the stern and dour looking ayatollah, who has rapidly become the only effective opposition to the US administration.
Mr Bremer flew to New York in part to address specific concerns made by the ayatollah in a statement released last month. Mr Bremer had already made a similar trip to the US in November after the ayatollah issued a fatwa calling for elections to Iraq's constitution-writing body.
Such opposition to the US administration has made Sistani a rallying point for political dissent, and cut across ethnic and religious lines.
"He is a man we can trust because we know he's not interested in worldly power," said one Sunni protester.
Karim Mohammed, a 27-year-old engineering student, said: "Sistani is just an ordinary man with a spiritual frame of mind. That is why we like him."
The ayatollah wasn't at yesterday's rally. He rarely leaves his modest suit of rooms on one of Najaf's winding streets.
An aid said the ayatollah, far from revelling in his new-found status, had simply had a morning of prayers, and had now retired.
That left the demonstrators to round off their protest at a university campus on the outskirts of the city. Sheikh Mohammed Hassan al-Jaferi, a member of the Hawsa, said: "This has been a peaceful march for democracy. The Americans had better listen to us whilst we continue to talk respectfully to them."