Election brings Liberians eager to start over
VOTERS WAIT IN LINES ALL DAY Millionaire soccer star, World Bank veteran among favourites
MONROVIA, LIBERIA •
Liberians voted in huge numbers yesterday in their country’s first elections since a brutal civil war, and officials kept polls open for extra time to allow enthusiastic electors to cast their ballots.
Crowds of voters, including elderly people and mothers with babies strapped to their backs, waited patiently all day in lines outside polling stations set up in churches, schools, public buildings, and even huts and tents in rural areas.
Many had slept outside the centres overnight. Others trekked over mudchoked country roads to cast their ballots in presidential and parliamentary polls aimed at restoring political normality to a nation devastated by a 14year war that ended two years ago.
Some shielded themselves from the hot sun with brightly-coloured umbrellas as they waited amid the derelict buildings and bullet-scarred walls which bore testimony to the bloody recent past Liberians were voting to put behind them.
“Even if I have to stand here until midnight, I am happy. I will stay and make my vote. This election will change our life in Liberia,” said trader Joseph Kamara.
Out of 22 presidential hopefuls that include former warlords and wealthy lawyers, George Weah, a former AC Milan striker and millionaire soccer star, and Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, who has worked for the World Bank and the United Nations, are seen as the frontrunners.
The National Elections Commission was expected to announce the first partial results today.
“The election is taking place in a generally peaceful and calm atmosphere with a huge turnout,” Frances JohnsonMorris, the commission head, told reporters.
She said polling stations originally due to close at 6 p.m. were being instructed to stay open until every last person waiting in the lines had cast their ballot.
Many Liberians saw the polls as a historic opportunity to lay to rest a cycle of violence in Africa’s oldest independent republic, founded by freed slaves from the United States in 1847.
“I want for us to get a good leader that will help our children with free education. No more war,” said Abbie Bomimah as she voted in Tubmanburg, north of Monrovia.
Mr. Weah, 39, and Ms. Johnson-Sirleaf, a 66-year-old grandmother, had both campaigned on promises to rebuild Liberia’s shattered infrastructure and restore such basic services as running water and electricity.
If Ms. Johnson-Sirleaf wins, she could become Africa’s first elected female president.
Some question whether Mr. Weah, who was brought up in a Monrovia shantytown, has the qualifications and political experience to be president. His supporters retort that Harvard-trained professionals like Ms. Johnson-Sirleaf have done little to help ordinary Liberians.
Ms. Johnson-Sirleaf must also explain why she supported the despotic former president Charles Taylor when his rebels bombarded Monrovia in 1990.
“He expressed all the right things about change in the country, about democracy, about reform,” she said. “Sure, he fooled me. The majority of Liberians were fooled. Taylor is a charismatic criminal.”
Mr. Taylor, now the subject of an Interpol arrest warrant on 17 charges of war crimes, lives in exile in Nigeria.
International observers, including former U. S. president Jimmy Carter, praised the peaceful voting, although some expressed concern about delays.
“It’s a bit slow ... that worries me a bit,” said Alan Doss, head of the 15,000strong UN peacekeeping mission in Liberia.
Until a 2003 peace deal, Liberia was torn apart by 14 years of on-off fighting in which child soldiers high on drugs wielded grenade launchers and Kalashnikovs.
A quarter of a million people were killed and almost a third of the population were forced to flee their homes.
Mr. Doss said Liberia’s new rulers would face big challenges. “Reforming the security sector, the judicial system, restoring the rule of law, strengthening public service — there’s a fairly hefty agenda,” he said.
Jendayi Frazer, U. S. assistant secretary of state for African affairs, was also in Liberia to observe the polls.
“Liberia is one of the two most important countries [in Africa] for the United States in terms of post-conflict reconstruction,” she said.