By Christine Hauser
New York Times
03 February 2005
MOSUL, Iraq, Feb. 2 - With its thriving tribal structure, its serious insurgent violence and its mixed society of Kurds, Arabs and other ethnicities, this city might seem a good benchmark to assess the success or failure of national elections intended to forge a government reflecting Iraq's diversity.
Here, where wartime privations continue to take their toll, where "Death to Traitors" and "Long Live the Mujahedeen" were spray-painted on polling centers, where insurgents issued threatening fliers and publicly killed Iraqis they called collaborators with the Americans, many observers questioned whether anyone would vote.
They did, in numbers that are emerging as relatively tiny but higher than expected. With 60 percent of the count completed by Wednesday, the city's overall turnout seems slightly more than 10 percent, somewhat more than 50,000 of Mosul's 500,000 estimated eligible voters.
But there is little but anecdotal evidence to answer some of the most significant questions. Did Sunni Arabs here follow the declared resistance to the vote by their leaders and clerics? What was the turnout on the west bank of the Tigris River here, where activity by insurgents has been strong? How did the city's Kurds vote relative to its Arabs and other ethnicities trying to achieve political balance satisfactory to all?
The vote has not been broken down along these lines, and American military officials who oversaw backup security and worked with Iraqi election officials, keen to project a new image of national unity in Iraq, decline to discuss distinctions between Arabs and Kurds in Mosul, especially when they talk about the vote.
But in interviews, many of the city's residents and some military officials said that their impressions were that voter turnout was better on the east bank of the river, which has mostly Kurdish communities but some Arab ones.
Hind Fadhil, a young woman, called an American-run talk show, "Your Voice," from the Arab neighborhood of Islah Zirai, which residents of Mosul refer to as an insurgent stronghold, to explain why some on the west bank went to the polls despite the danger.
"We didn't care," she said. "We just wanted to vote."
The city's Kurdish areas seemed to have a higher turnout. They are relatively safer than the Arab neighborhoods where insurgents are believed to either operate, live, or find safe havens. But the expected levels of violence did not occur, and, in Sunni Arab neighborhoods, some Iraqis said a diminished level of fear outweighed their interest in cooperating with the boycott Sunnis had called.
"In the beginning a lot of Sunni people here boycotted the idea of voting," said Mohsen Abdel-hamid, 56. "Then some agreed to vote. It was an individual decision. When we saw that things were going smoothly, a lot of people came and then called others to come."
But in the Arab Zuhur neighborhood, one man said that only two people on his street had voted. The rest had been intimidated, he said.
"It has become a scandal that they voted, because of the threat," the man said, without giving his name. "After I came out of the mosque everybody was talking about it. Because so few people voted everyone knows who they are."
Tribal factors also came into play among Sunni Arabs here. Some Sunnis said they voted for Ghazi al-Yawar, the interim president, because of his membership in a large Arab tribe.
In the garbage-strewn, swampy Rashidia neighborhood in Mosul's northwest, a Sunni Arab area where American military officials say there is no insurgent activity because of strong tribal ties and directives from sheiks, voter turnout was reportedly strong.
Mahmoud Ibrahim, a 36-year-old education official, paused as he led a blind relative down the street. "We voted here in Rashidia because we followed the lead of our tribal sheiks," Mr. Ibrahim said. "We are Sunni Arabs, but we voted because we want a country, a government and security."
Some Sunni Arabs said they voted after leaving their neighborhoods for areas where they would not be recognized.
"I didn't vote at the polling station near my home," said Muhammad Hussein, 30, an electrical engineer. "I made sure to vote in a crowd. I found out I am not the only one who did that."
One Sunni Arab man, Zakaria al-Ahmar, a 33-year-old shop owner, said he voted in his own neighborhood.
"If all we have to do is mark a ballot paper to survive grenades, explosives, kidnapping and killing by terrorists, then so be it," he said.
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Citation: Christine Hauser, "In Diverse Mosul, Slightly More Than 10% Voted, but That's More Than Expected," New York Times, 3 February 2005.
Original URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/03/international/middleeast/03mosul.html?oref=login&pagewanted=print&position=
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