The first fragile vote for democracy

For all the rush by the White House to claim it as a triumph before a single result had been declared, for all the trite "festival of freedom" coverage offered by CNN and the like, for all the future difficulties and present carnage, it was impossible not to feel very moved by the experience of election day in Baghdad.

Considered purely as a democratic exercise, it was flawed, verging on the scandalous. At least a quarter of the capital, and most of two entire provinces, was unable or unwilling to take part: imagine a British election without, say, East Anglia.

The head of one polling station I visited was openly partisan for the Shia frontrunners, the Sistani List; yet this is the man who will be in charge of counting that station's votes. Huge numbers in the Shia areas were voting Sistani because they had been instructed to by their mosques, much as they might once have voted Saddam when instructed to by local Ba'ath party functionaries. After the results, there will be weeks of Americanmanipulated horsetrading to choose a government.

Yet somehow all that slightly misses the point. Whether or not this election was really democratic, it still means something if enough people believe in it. Large numbers of Iraqis, on the evidence of yesterday, believe in it. There they were, some of those Iraqis, Shias walking in towards the recentlyrenamed Martyr Mohammed Bakr al-Hakim School polling station (another little Iraqi election touch: the al-Hakim dynasty is closely connected with the Sistani List, making-this the rough equivalent of forcing British electors to vote in somewhere called the Saint Tony New Labour Shrine.)

They wore their best clothes, sometimes a bit shabby after years of hardship. An old woman was supported by her family, who carried a plastic chair which they would set down whenever she needed a rest.

Where British polling stations have party tellers in rosettes and a faint air of boredom, Iraqi ones have concentric rings of barbed wire, concrete blocks, and twitchy soldiers in flak jackets and balaclavas.

Being at the entrance to the first barbed-wire cordon, waiting to be searched, is a form of Russian roulette: will it be our polling station that the suicide bombers choose? The soldiers shouted at men to lift up their jackets before they got close to see if they were wearing belts packed with explosives.

Yet the atmosphere inside the polling stations was matteroffact. Voters ignored the intermittent gunfire and explosions in the distance. These are pretty routine Baghdad sounds, but there were more than usual yesterday morning.

Somewhere out there, not that far away, nine suicide bombs and perhaps about 20 mortars (you lose count) were going off, at least 20 Baghdad voters were dead, but it was not here, so let's get on with it. Perhaps the sheer lack of drama was the most impressive thing.

"The voters understand the situation well, so they come and vote quietly," said Talib Ibraheem, the polling station supervisor. "We noticed some women were scared. Of course it's an effect on their feelings," he says, gesturing towards the gunfire outside, "but we deal with them quickly."

"Scared? Do I look scared?" says Shuruk Mahmood, a voter. "As Iraqis we have seen many scary events. I am very happy. It is a new feeling." And why are you voting? "I want to get rid of the occupation. I want to feel the freedom." As polling day went on, and the expected terrorist "spectacular" did not come, there was a palpable sense of relaxation. Soldiers joked with voters. Police tooted their horns.

The mood among the press lightened. Since the murders of Ken Bigley and Margaret Hassan, life in Baghdad for Western journalists, the only white civilians now living outside the fortified Green Zone, has become nerve-racking.

But the election day traffic ban made us, briefly, less vulnerable to kidnappers, who need transport like anyone else. The press passes we had spent most of Friday queuing for, the ones supposed to get our cars through all the roadblocks, proved predictably useless. Walking between polling stations was too slow. So me and my Iraqi assistant Bashar hired bicycles from a 15-year-old kid and his brother doing wheelies on the street. It turned out to be an inspired means of getting Iraqis into conversation, which usually started with them saying something like: "Look at that foreigner on the bicycle."

By lunchtime, more people were on the streets. Boys were playing street football and others were talking to the American troops for the first time in months.

Groups of men sat outside their shops, showing each other the ink-marked index fingers they got when they voted. It was a Shia area. so no problems about turnout. No doubt about what voters wanted either.

"Now we are democratic, the Americans must do what we ask, finish their mission and then leave," said Alaa Kadlim, as two Apache helicopters flew overhead. And will they? "They must," she says.

The Shia may believe in the election but do enough of the others? In a hopeful sign, a few middle-class Sunni areas of Baghdad voted, some turning out in Zeyuna, known as the "officers' area," according to Ali Adel, a resident reached on the phone. "We know the Sunni parties called for a boycott," said Mr Adel. "But they do not own us, they do not control us." Turnout in the working-class Sunni neighbourhoods of Baghdad, however, ranged from extremely low to nil.

In Mosul, once tipped as the "new Fallujah," and once nearly as far out of control, there was about a 25 per cent turnout: again, rather encouraging and unexpected.

"We thought no one would vote, but some did," said Ahmad Hassan who, as a former Saddam-era general can probably not be accused of bias in favour of the new regime.

We arrived at another Baghdad polling station, on the boundary of Sunni-land. Anyone who feels " uncomfortable" about voting in their own neighbourhood (code for Sunnis) can come here, said the authorities, and a few have. Bashar, himself a Sunni, discreetly votes. Looking around at voters filling in their tablecloth-sized ballot papers, the female election official with her bangles and her uncovered hair, I felt a fierce sense that here was something modern, something valued by the majority, something that needed to be defended against the forces trying to pull Iraq back into the Dark Ages.

One question for the next few months is whether Iraqi belief in these elections can be sustained. Election day felt like a brief interlude of relative security and hope. But things will almost certainly be back to normal today, with both Americans and terrorists throwing their weight around. The collapse of basic services, law, order and the economy is horrifying, possibly insurmountable.

Will these elections be like last June's "handover of sovereignty" - a so-called "turning point," trumpeted by those world-class wishful thinkers of Washington and Downing Street, and turn out to be no turning point at all?

This election is stronger than June's hole-in-the-corner " handover," because it directly involves the Iraqi people. But if they are to maintain their belief in the process, it must move the country towards the things that they want and have voted for. It might, for instance, start with a real handover of sovereignty: a pledge that Washington will not seek permanent bases in Iraq, will stop trying to run the place, and a statement by the US that its troops, utterly despised by the Iraqi people, will stay no longer than necessary to train the Iraqi army.

Britain has made such a statement, but the suspicion remains that the Americans want a permanent presence.

You could sense yesterday, in the fairly impressive, fairly successful, Iraqi-dominated voting and security operation in Baghdad, the fragile beginnings of Iraqi confidence. Confidence, however, is vulnerable, and can easily be destroyed.