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Iraqi kurds vote in droves Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
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Posted on Sun, Jan. 30, 2005
Iraq's Kurds vote in droves
BY COLIN MCMAHON
Chicago Tribune
KIRKUK, Iraq - (KRT) - Somehow, amid all the celebrating, the dressing up and, literally, the dancing in the streets, Iraq's Kurds found time to vote in droves Sunday.
United in their aspiration for independence and their repudiation of the Saddam Hussein regime that brutally oppressed them, Kurd voters lined up across the north even before polls opened at 7 a.m. local time.
At a polling station in Sulaymaniyah, more than a third of all eligible voters had cast ballots by 9 a.m. Hours later in the disputed city of Kirkuk, the registrar at a precinct with Kurd, Turkmen, Arab and Christian voters reported a turnout of 85 percent, with still an hour left on the clock.
Among the Sulaymaniyah voters was a 79-year-old man who could barely walk and yet trudged a mile to cast his ballot. Family members had to half-drag, half-carry him the last 100 yards. The freedom to vote, he said, was worth the effort.
Farida Hassan said she voted for freedom too. And happiness. And independence. And a better tomorrow. And a few other abstractions that showed that, for many Kurds, Sunday's vote was as much about shucking off a debilitating past as it was about shaping a prosperous future.
"All of my life I have been waiting for this day," said Hassan, who voted with her son and a daughter-in-law at a girls' school in the town of Shorish near Kirkuk.
Saddam and his Baath Party used Shorish to relocate Kurd families uprooted from their homes in the 1970s and 1980s during a brutal campaign to oppress the Kurdish minority and settle the area in and around Kirkuk with Arab families from southern Iraq.
"Our home was destroyed by the Baathists," Hassan said. "I had land. I had planted wheat and barley. It was green when the Baathists came and burned it."
Hassan's family was dumped in Shorish with "no tents to live in, no food, no bedding - nothing." Within a year her son would be arrested for selling soft drinks without Baath Party approval, and her anguished husband would drop dead after trying to get the boy out of police custody.
"We suffered a lot," she said. "But now I hope we will never face the same tyranny."
Along the road from Sulaymaniyah to Kirkuk, dozens of Iraqi security troops milled about at makeshift checkpoints. Many of them members or ex-members of the Kurdish militia called the pesh merga, the soldiers stood sentry along roadsides or just beyond in rolling pastures, their silhouettes visible from the hilltops as sheep and shepherds wandered below.
Residents paraded in festive traditional outfits as if celebrating a national feast day. They gathered in parks or over tea or in front of cinder-block homes to congratulate one another and, to the occasional American wandering by, to express gratitude.
"If not for the Americans, we would have remained under the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein," said Aras Jaff, a 55-year-old businessman from Halabja, the town where thousands of Kurd civilians were gassed to death in 1988 in an attack most experts blame on the Saddam regime. "Today is one of our biggest celebrations. Today is one of the happiest times since I was born."
Men linked arms to dance on concrete rooftops and in dusty streets. Children waved at passersby and chased after cars. Women held up ink-stained index fingers to show they had voted. It was only half of the "V" for victory, but to the Kurds this clearly was a full-bore triumph.
"Tomorrow will be the end of our suffering," Ala Talabani, a women's rights and peace activist running for the National Assembly on the unified Kurdistan list, said Saturday. "It will be the end of discrimination. Tomorrow will be a new Iraq. Tomorrow will be a new Kirkuk. There will be no class one, class two and class three citizens anymore."
Talabani is a member of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, which along with the other half of the Kurdish power structure, the Kurdistan Democratic Party, put forth a single ticket for the National Assembly and a single ticket for the separate election of a Kurdish regional parliament. Kurds make up about 20 percent of Iraq's population, and going into the vote experts estimated the Kurdish list could win up to 80 of the 275 seats in the transitional National Assembly.
What a new Kirkuk would look like, and who will control its rich oil deposits and refineries, is the most contentious issue facing the Iraqi north as it emerges from Sunday's voting.
The Kurds want Kirkuk to be made part of their autonomous region. Arab residents, including many who were brought to the city by Saddam under his Arabization program, are determined to keep the city out of Kurd hands.
That has made the city a frequent hot spot in the fight between mostly Sunni Arab guerrillas and the U.S. and Iraqi forces trying to put down the insurgency.
Insurgents had heavily targeted polling stations in and around Kirkuk in the days leading up the vote, but violence was said to be light Sunday. Three mortar or rocket attacks killed one person in the morning, police Col. Sarhad Qader Mohammed said, and gunfire crackled in the city into the night. But Mohammed said a series of raids that led to detentions of 65 suspected insurgents in the last week kept Election Day attacks to a minimum.
In Sulaymaniyah and most other parts of Kurdistan, violence was only a distant concern. Parents took their children to polling places and then strolled through the parks and streets of their towns and villages to enjoy the rest of the day off.
"My children were very interested in the elections," said Mohammed Omer, 41, a tailor in Sulaymaniyah who was relaxing with his children in a city park at the end of a row of sculptures honoring revered Kurdish poets.
"My children woke me up this morning at 6 a.m.," Omer said of his 10-year-old son, Pavil, and his 5-year-old daughter, Shaniar.
"`Daddy, daddy,' they said. `Hurry up, daddy, we have to vote today.'"
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© 2005, Chicago Tribune.
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