The Guardian: 'Iraqi polls bring secular success'

Dal Guardian:

Herded into lines by inexperienced police officers, hundreds of would-be Iraqi voters pushed into a sparsely equipped school at the weekend to cast their ballots for the local council of Tar.



Deep in the marshlands of the Euphrates, the town of 15,000 people was the first to rise against Saddam Hussein in the abortive intifada of 1991. Now it was holding the first genuine election in its history.



The poll was the latest in a series which this overwhelmingly Shia province has held in the past six weeks, and the results have been surprising. Seventeen towns have voted, and in almost every case secular independents and representatives of non-religious parties did better than the Islamists.



This week sees the biggest event in the Shia calendar, the annual pilgrimage to the holy cities of Kerbala and Najaf, and thousands of people were making the 10-day walk along the main road west through Nassiriya and its surrounding province of Dhi Qar. But in the march to the polling booths the secular democrats were showing the greater strength.

In Italia di questo fatto, curiosamente, nessuno ha parlato: meglio concentrarsi sulla tesi degli iracheni strutturalmente incompatibili con la democrazia e capaci solo di appoggiare i leader religiosi estremisti, evidentemente - questa sembra ormai diventata la Regola Numero Uno di gran parte dei media occidentali: mai dare buone notizie sull'Irak, e se necessario negare anche l'evidenza.



Fonte: Guardian Unlimited.