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30-01-2005 Scotland on Sunday Hopes and fears on the eve of polling day as the average voter craves clean water, electricity and jobs By GETHIN CHAMBERLAIN IN BASRA THE streets of old Basra are silent, as they have been for hours since the pre-election curfew began. The shopkeepers keeping guard on their roofs against thieves taking advantage of the empty streets have abandoned their watch; the night vision equipment on the helicopter traversing the sky above the city shows fewer and fewer human forms. In the back streets around one of the old town's polling stations, British soldiers wait. It is 12.25am on the eve of the Iraqi elections. The soldiers are looking for bombers preparing to launch attacks on today's elections. Those inside the houses are unaware of the danger. Outside, in the shadows at the edges of the bright moonlit streets, words are spoken into radios. A green flare soars into the night sky. It is the signal for the Scots Guards to swing into action. They begin to move forwards towards the doors of the four target houses. Five hundred and forty nine kilometres south of the chaos that is Baghdad, there is none of the sense of a society sliding into disarray. Fighting breaks out from time to time, and roadside bombs remain a menace but the Sunni insurgents and the foreign fighters have no natural power base here and it is harder for them to mount attacks. Most of Basra's problems come from disgruntled Shia frustrated by the lack of progress on reconstruction. But there are plenty of people who would be happier if Basra, too, could become a battleground. They were the ones targeted by yesterday's raid. Today's elections may well decide whether Basra can escape the fate of Baghdad. The portents have been mixed. In truth, it is not possible to know how today, and the coming weeks, will pan out. The polls show that 80 per cent of Iraqis say they would like to vote, though those opposed to the elections make the most noise. A poster appeared in one town playing on the nerves of those who have embraced the elections. "You vote, you die", it read. The words were superimposed on a picture of a headless body, one thumb covered in ink. Voters who do turn up to the polling stations today will have their thumb marked with indelible ink to prevent them voting more than once. The message will not have been lost on them. And yet the message coming back from the voters, certainly in the Shia strongholds of the south, is that they are not afraid to go to the polls. They are aware of the threats, but there appears to be a genuine enthusiasm for the electoral process. "The elections must succeed," said Osama Abdul Karim, a 30-year-old from Basra, waiting at the only official crossing point into Iran this week. "The Iraqi people love their freedom." The vote is a keen topic of debate among those registered to take part. There are posters up, people have been actively canvassing. They have little cards printed up, which they hand out to whoever they meet, with the number of the party printed prominently next to a picture of its candidate or leader. Around Basra, there is good support for Ayad Allawi, the current prime minister, among those people who appreciate a strong leader, and there are many of those in Iraq. But everyone who has made up their mind knows the number of the party or individual who will get their vote, and will rattle it out whenever the subject comes up. Grand Ayatolla al Sistani's Unified Iraq is number 169 on the list. It is a number that comes up time and time again around Basra. Sistani is the most revered of the Shia clerics; his coalition will inevitably mount a serious bid for power. So too will the Islamic Da'awah Movement and SCIRI, the Iranian-backed supreme council for the Islamic revolution in Iraq, which make up the other main Shia groupings. In a polling station in a school near the centre of Umm Qasr, a small port town on the Al Faw peninsula south of Basra, policemen arrived on Thursday to take up position on the roof, though there was minimal security on the ground. Of the polling staff, there was no sign; they are keeping quiet until the last minute, for fear of reprisals. Intimidation, it is acknowledged, is a serious problem at these elections. It works in many ways. Candidates have been warned off, election staff threatened. Sometimes it is more insidious. There were election posters up at the school. But the picture that stood out was a framed picture inside of Muqtadr al Sadr, wagging his finger. The picture bears the slogan: "I disagree with the infidel." Sadr is not standing for election. He does, however, have people on a number of candidate lists and word will have got around who they are. The picture will perhaps help remind those entering the polling station that those candidates might be worth a vote. It does not pay to get on the wrong side of Sadr and his Mahdi Army. Policemen put his poster up in their cars, not, they explain, because they hold him in any esteem, but more because if they do not, their families receive a visit from serious people who explain the error of their ways. Sadr may not be standing in the elections, but the military believe he is the most likely candidate to cause trouble in Basra today. In the streets of old Basra, less than a minute has passed since the flare signalled the start of the raids. A platoon of Guardsmen moves cautiously towards the front door. There is the sound of rifles being cocked, but it is not coming from the soldiers. Suddenly there is an explosion, a blast bomb hurled into the street just 20 yards in front of them. From the shadows up ahead, in the direction of the nearby polling station, a man emerges and raises his AK47. He fires and a sergeant and a corporal fire back. There is more firing from the guardsmen on top of the lead Land Rover. Neither side in the exchange finds its target. Back at the door of the house, the soldiers knock. No-one answers. They wait a few moments, then take the door down with a sledgehammer. Inside there is a man and his family, a wife and two children. The man looks stunned. The wife is angry, with her husband and with the interruption. The soldiers swarm in. In the back of the house they find what they are looking for: explosives. The streets of this part of town are mud, the ground unable to soak up the recent heavy rain. It sticks to the boots of the soldiers of another of the platoon standing outside another of the target houses round a couple of corners. They knock; hello, they say, British forces, please open the door. There is no answer. They kick open the door and rush in; there are 15 people inside, some children. Three of the men are detained. Another platoon has gone to what appeared to be the right house, only to find the wrong person inside. They try next door; the man they want is there, and so are circuit boards and other bomb making materials. The raid is a success, senior officers say. They have taken out a group of people who are no longer in a position to disrupt the elections. But there are other perils with which the security forces must contend. Military sources say Sunni extremists are now capable of travelling down from Baghdad and the surrounding areas to mount suicide operations against targets in the south. Other fighters have slipped across the Kuwaiti and Saudi borders. More may have come in from Syria and everyone assumes that the Iranians, the perpetual bogeyman, have been sneaking people across that vast border to cause all manner of mischief, though evidence to support the theory is harder to find.There have already been attempts to get to the new Iraqi security forces, to intimidate them. The Iraqi police have borne the brunt of the attention from Sunni militants, who hope to render them ineffective. Letters have been sent to police officers warning them that if they go to work the next day, they and their families will be killed. The problems are worse in the Sunni areas further north, but the south has its own fair share of violence. A car bomb two weeks ago injured nine British soldiers. The attack was claimed by Abu Musab Zarqawi. Roadside bombs still go off from time to time. It is on basic issues as this that the success or failure of this election rests; sometimes they get lost among the bigger political arguments. Security, electricity, petrol, jobs, homes, water. Those are what Iraqis want. In the market at Umm Qasr stallholder Mustafa al Hassadi spelled it out. "The most important thing is water and electricity. Here there is no clean water at all," he said. Unemployment, too, was at the forefront of the minds of the people of the town. "You can easily recognise that all these people have no work to do," he said. "We believe that the level of unemployment here in Umm Qasr is too high." These were the issues that mattered; the threats did not worry him. "You can easily recognise that the security situation around Basra is good compared with the rest of Iraq," he said. "I'm not afraid at all. I will participate in the election. I am very optimistic and enthusiastic about the election." It seems inevitable that the insurgents will strike at some polling stations. There are too many bombers, and too many polling stations, for them to fail completely. The television screens will again be filled with pictures of carnage. But that will not change the outcome of the elections, and it will not necessarily mean they have failed.
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................................................................................................................. Copyright ©2004 Gethin Chamberlain. All rights reserved. |
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