After a slow start, voters turned out in large numbers in Baghdad today, packing polling places and creating a party atmosphere in the streets, in the country’s first free elections in 50 years. This despite reports of scattered violence that claimed at least 36 lives. Preliminary estimates of a 72 per cent turnout by a member of the Independent Electorial Commission, Adel Lami, were later revised to ‘‘about 60 per cent’’ by another commission official. The initial estimate excluded the mainly Sunni Muslim provinces of Anbar and Nineveh. In Washington, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the elections were ‘‘going better than expected’’. In an interview on ABC TV, she said, ‘‘What we are seeing here is the voice of freedom.’’ The streets of Baghdad were closed to traffic, but full of children playing soccer, and men and women walking, some carrying babies. Everyone, it seemed, was going to vote. They dropped their ballots into boxes even as continuous mortar shells started exploding at about noon. Thirty civilians and six police officers died in mortar attacks and suicide bombings around the country, the Interior Minister reported. Twenty-two of the deaths occurred in Baghdad, where at least 29 were wounded. But if the insurgents wanted to stop people in Baghdad from voting, they failed. If they wanted to cause chaos, they failed. The voters were completely defiant, and there was a feeling that the people of Baghdad, showing a new, positive attitude, had turned a corner. No one was claiming that the insurgency was over or that the deadly attacks would end. But the atmosphere in this usually grim capital, a city at war and an ethnic microcosm of the country, had changed, with people dressed in their finest clothes to go to the polls. ‘‘You can feel the enthusiasm,’’ said Col Mike Murray of the First Cavalry Regiment, outside a polling station in Karada. In Khadamiya, a mixed area in northwest Baghdad, the turnout was also large, with some political parties saying the turnout could approach 80 per cent. Even in the so-called Sunni Triangle, a hotbed of resistance to the American occupation, people voted. In Mosul, the restive city to the north, large turnouts were reported, even in the Sunni Muslim areas. But even before 8:30 am, officials were getting reports about roadside bomb attacks, mortars and small-arms fire. There were no reports of violence in Najaf, the holiest city to Shiites, where turnout appeared to be good. The city is home to Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. In Ramadi, only six people had voted after seven hours at a polling station on the south side of the Euphrates River across from the town. Many people were apparently intimidated at crossing the bridge over the river, because potential voters would make themselves highly visible. Today’s election will create the basis for the rise to power of a Shiite-dominated government for the first time in the country’s 85-year history. But the chaotic situation on the ground seemed to render most predictions about the future composition of the government tenuous at best. — NYT
