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Egypt shuts down unauthorized Iraqi polling center
CAIRO, Egypt - Egypt has shut down an unauthorized polling station that Iraqi residents had set up in an attempt to take part in their country's first free elections in nearly 50 years, Iraqi activists said on Friday.

The activists said Egyptian security officials told them to leave the office in downtown Cairo from which they were running an unofficial registration campaign for Iraq's elections on Jan. 30. "They told us the office is illegal: either you close it or we will beat the snot out of you shut it down," an activist told The Associated Press, speaking on condition of anonymity. He said the officials did not give a reason, but they said the decision had been taken by "higher authority."
Setting a bad example, were they?
Egyptian government officials could not be reached for comment Friday, an Islamic holiday.

Egypt has an estimated 6,000 Iraqis, many of whom went into exile under the former dictator Saddam Hussein. But the Geneva-based body that is arranging polling for Iraqis abroad, the International Organization of Migration, has not included Egypt in the 14 countries where it is setting up voting facilities. Carried away with enthusiasm for the polls, a group of Iraqis in Egypt took over the office of the defunct Iraqi News Agency in Cairo and invited compatriots to register for the elections. They planned to turn the office, which fronts on to a main street, into a polling station complete with foreign monitors on Jan. 30 and send the results and ballots to the IOM polling center in Amman, Jordan.

"We want to prove the point that we want to vote," one of the Iraqis, Talib Murad, said earlier this week. "We want to tell everyone we just want the chance to vote." Dozens of Iraqis did register to vote, an activist said Friday.

Now that the government has told them to leave the office, the activists said they were thinking of distributing their unofficial ballots by hand or e-mail, and sending them to the IOM in Amman. However, the IOM has said it will not recognize any results coming from undesignated countries. But the activists are determined to go ahead whether their ballots are counted or not.
But the progressive Democrats have told us that the Middle East isn't ready for democracy!

Posted by: Steve White 2005-01-22
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=54362