MICHAEL JANSENreports from Sulaimaniya where police presence was light and traffic flowed normally on a day of high security elsewhere
THE SUN shone brightly on voting day, giving Suli’s citizens a respite from the chill winds and rain of the brief but bitter election campaign. Families in holiday finery rode or strolled to the polls from seven in the morning till five in the afternoon.
Kurdish men wore traditional black and white turbans and one-piece suits, bound round the waist by wide cumberbunds; their wives donned bright red, orange and green semi-transparent caftans over spangled, gold and silver lame tops and bloomers. Children clad in their best trailed behind their parents.
Voting is a family affair in this relatively peaceful three-province Kurdish region.
Here the police presence was light, traffic flowed normally, and large numbers of people turned out to cast their ballots in an intense contest. The ruling Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) alliance faced a serious challenge from “Change”, a movement that emerged last year to win 25 seats in the 111-member Kurdish regional parliament. “Change” – Goran – campaigned on an anti-corruption platform.
Four hours after polls closed, the PUK declared victory and supporters began firing automatic weapons into the air and driving through the streets hooting horns from cars flying faction flags.
Earlier in the day, at the Angel girl’s school near the main bazaar of Sulaimaniya city, Kurdish men and women lined up separately to enter the polling station but voted together in rooms designated by the letters of the Arabic alphabet. They showed their identity documents and voting cards, collected their ballots, entered cardboard booths, and checked a single candidate or list on the ballot papers. Voters sealed their papers in envelopes and dipped their right index fingers into a pot of purple ink before dropping the envelope into a plastic bin.
The process here was smooth and efficient. Among the voters were elderly men and women kept on their feet by relatives and youngsters who were voting for the first time.
Displaced Iraqis from all over the country voted at the Rezbar school on the city’s outskirts. Long, slow-moving lines of men and women from all communities voted for candidates standing in the 15 Arab-majority provinces. In each booth there was a book more than 100 pages long with the names and affiliations of all 6,200 candidates, arranged by provinces.
Voters received ballot papers from their home provinces and their votes will be counted there.
Christians could either vote for provincial lists or for six Christian candidates on an all-Iraq ballot. Faleh Francis Yousef, a Christian from Baghdad, had to wait in the sun for more than an hour and a half. But he was delighted to take part. “We must all vote if we are going to have democracy in this country,” he said. He voted for a secular candidate who “does not care about religion”.
He was fortunate. Voters who had not registered or did not have all required documents had to wait until the last hour to cast their ballots. Ali, a Baghdadi resident of Suli, managed to vote after he called his mother in the capital to obtain the number of his ration card. But an engineer “retired” from Iraqi Airways was turned away. “If I don’t vote, I lose my pension,” he stated. “I used to fix planes, now I drive a taxi.”