By Terry Friel
Reuters, 18 September 2005.
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (Reuters) - There's a buzz at the Zarghona Ana school for girls on the baking edge of Afghanistan's Registan desert on Sunday.
Playful chatter and laughter bounce off the thick, cooling green-and-white walls as dozens of women, most with burqas and veils pulled back comfortably off their face in the absence of men, wait to vote in the first parliamentary ballot in living memory.
From President Hamid Karzai's mother, Sarajo, to 18-year-old high school students whose mothers had barely been born the last time Afghans chose a parliament, the women in the chaotic southern trading center of Kandahar, Afghanistan's second city and birthplace of the Taliban, flocked to have their say.
"I am so happy, so happy," says Khatereh Mushafiq, 18, her black veil decorated with white flowers pulled back from her beaming face.
"Because, you know, we (women) are also now taking part in the government and in society. People must take part, people must have a say."
As a handful of blue-uniformed policemen with AK-47s guard each polling station -- separate ones for men and for women -- Kandaharis queued quietly in the hot sun to cast their vote for the 249-seat Wolesi Jirga, lower house of parliament, and one of 34 provincial councils.
Sixty-eight seats are reserved for women candidates, but the women voters appear to be voting equally for women as for men.
The holdout elements of the Taliban have denounced the election and there was a string of attacks in the southeast of the country on Sunday.
All voters were frisked on their way in, seated female election workers sticking their heads under burqas to search and check faces.
"I'M SCARED"
But security was relatively light in Kandahar, one of the major remaining centers of the Taliban insurgency. There were no machine guns at polling stations, no sandbagged bunkers, no armored cars and few police or troops.
Too few, says election worker Ahmad Salim, 28, at a center for Kuchi nomads in a half-built building of bricks and mud just outside the city on an eerily quiet Highway 1 to Kabul.
"I'm scared," he says of the Taliban, surrounded by tough-looking nomads in long turbans. "Where are the police? Where is the U.N.? How many police do you see here? Four? It's not enough."
The city itself was largely shut down. All traffic, except candidates' and other official cars, ordered off the streets. In some neighborhoods, only the whirr of bicycles or loud Afghan pop music from a roadside stall could be heard.
Sarajo Karzai, along with the president's three-year-old niece, Shamla, sporting a badge with Karzai's photo, turned up early to vote. Karzai is not standing in this poll, he was elected in a separate presidential ballot a year ago.
"I am happy," Sarajo says after voting, "for peace in Afghanistan, for women who will find their rights, that all the Afghans will now come back to our country."
Did Karzai give her any advice on how to vote in the non-party parliamentary election?
"No, he didn't. I wasn't even able to talk to him yesterday or today," she says.
And how has he done after a year of winning his mandate?
"He is my son. How can I say anything, whether it's good or it's bad?"
The defining image of this election could be Kandahar woman Bemana single-handedly putting together cardboard vote booths at the last-minute and carrying them to their place.
Or it could be the little girl, well below voting age, who turned up at Zarghona school with her sick sister's voting card -- the family determined not to lose their say -- but not quite sure what to do.
"Just pull your veil over your face," someone told her, "they won't realize it's you."
For many here where the Taliban once stifled all criticism and dissent, the chance simply to have a say is enough.
"Before, there was no democracy, now there is democracy," says 36-year-old Mohammed Twahir, who sells cold drinks from a roadside stall, after voting. "Democracy means freedom."
Citation: Terry Friel. "Bullets, Ballots and Burqas as Afghans Eagerly Vote," Reuters, 18 September 2005.
Original URL: http://abcnews.go.com/International/print?id=1136530