By Antonio D. French
Filed Saturday, January 28 at 8:44 AM
With governments all over the globe trying to come to grips with the Hamas victory in this week's historic elections, one St. Louisan has been in the middle of it all, observing with her own eyes the wonder that is democracy.
Sister Mary Ann McGivern, who ran for a seat on the St. Louis school board in 2003, is in the region as an elections observer with the United Nations. She gave PUB DEF permission to publish the letters she wrote last week to friends here.
Jan. 23, 2006 -- I am sitting in an internet cafe in the center of the Old City, Jerusalem. We had two excellent days' training by the United Nations. The speakers from the Central Election Commission were candid. There are new election laws, requiring, for instance, full financial disclosure. One candidate wrote: I received one million dollars (US) from Fatah. I spent it.
These three days the security forces are voting so they can work during the election. The first morning a policeman called the Central Election commission to say his commanding officer ordered him to claim he is illiterate so that someone can watch how he votes. So the Election Commission announced that all the Security Forces had to pass a written test and so no one would be allowed to claim illitaracy.
We got lots of details on the issues, the voting process, and negotiations with Israel. Crossing the check points is tough. Our international passports get us through quickly once we get there, but there are such long lines. You take a taxi and then walk a couple of blocks and then pass through concrete rooms and two or three turnstyles and a metal detector and your packages get x-rayed. Some people are turned away or told to go to the end of the line.
Today we got a briefing that is a risk assessment. The bottom line is that the risk is low. That's the least dangerous rating possible. All the political parties are fielding candidates and they all expct to win in some districts. They also hope to come close in others. They want to see the results. So they have nothing to gain and everything to lose from disrupting the elections. And they have everything to gain from us saying the elections were transparent and credible.
I've been asking people if they plan to vote. In the city of Jerusalem, several men in the shops have told me no. One man who owns a little coffee shop talked to me at length about his analysis. Very interesting. Then he introduced me to other men and told them to tell me if they plan to vote.
One man said he plans to vote for Fatah -- unless I would be willing to pay him not to vote.
But the woman next to me on the bus is planning to vote and so are the taxi drivers. Very interesting.
This is my short first report. I have taken a ton of notes and I will write more about the whole process.
Now I have to go read all the UN pages of materials, study the maps, figure out where we will be, etc.
Love, Mary Ann
PS -- I got the invitation to be an observer in early December from the Nonviolent Peaceforce. I've been a member from the beginning, an old friend of founder and director Mel Duncan.
PPS -- There are many similiarities to Northern Ireland. But it is shocking that things here are so bad and it only started after WWII. Things are very bad.
Jan. 25, 2006 -- Being here for elections is terrific. I keep thinking how much you would see. There is a campaign silence the day before and the day of elecitons. The Palestinians have only had two elections, one in '96 and one last year for president. This was like a birthday party and the hats and cake were campaign leaflet. They totally ignored campaign silence. Veiled women were out wearing campaign hats and staffing tables at the door of the school-polling stations, tallying who showed up to vote.
Mary Ann
Jan. 28, 2006 -- I am back at the internet cafe in the center of the Old City, Jerusalem. Finally, the vote seems to have gotten the world's attention.
I was up at 4 am, at the checkpoint at Bethlehem at 5 am. The checkpoints are a whole story in themselves. Tough places. At the one to Ramallah someone had written the words the Germans put at one of the concentration camps: work makes you free. I have a photo and a photo the next day of it blacked out.
Anyway, I was in Hebron at a public school at 6:45 AM to witness the opening of the polls there. I was in about 11 polling stations during the day. The vote was counted at each station beginning at 7 pm. The count took about four hours. The classroom where I was had four broken windows.
Coat, vest, scarf and hat were not enough to keep me warm.
These were fair elections, born of deep frustration and anger. But other Palestinians are afraid and despairing of peace.
Yesterday 7 of us who were still here participated in a nonviolent demonstration at a little village where the wall is taking their olive trees for a settlement.
Love,
Mary Ann
UPDATE 1:
Jan 31, 2006 -- The fact of the occupation & How the voting took place
The occupation is the first thing to be observed and reported on. When Dr. Hanna Nasir, chair of the Palestinian Central Election Commission, opened the United Nations Development Pragramme orientation for observers, that's what he told us, that the elections could not be viewed apart from the occupation and that he hoped on our return to our homes we would tell people how we experienced the occupation.
I did experience the occupation. I passed through checkpoints, was intimidated by men with guns, was threatened with confiscation of my camera for taking a picture of the observation tower at a check point. Entering the country I faced fewer questions than when I've gone to Northern Ireland, but the exit scrutiny of my passport, rejection of Palestinian credentials and a demand for non-existent Israeli ones, triple x-ray of my luggage and purse, page-by-page scrutiny of the book of West Bank maps of election sites that was part of our briefing, and the flippant question of what I saw when I observed the elections, followed by a bullying scowl at my answer -- this examination made me nervous of failure. What if the Israelis refused to allow me to leave the country?
But my nervousness is not the same as the fear of a man on the housekeeping staff at my hotel in Jerusalem. He is afraid to visit his home village because the last time, when he tried to cross back from the West Bank he was thrown into prison for three months, beaten, jailed with violent men., despite being told at his arrest that his record was clean.
My nervousness is not the same as poverty. The schools where the elections were held had blackboard and chalk, but no maps on the walls or papers of best work, much less shelves of books or cabinets of paper, scissors, glue, crayons. The last classroom I was in, where I watched the ballot counting for four hours, had four broken windows. My coat, vest, hat, scarf and gloves were not enough to keep me warm.
A taxi driver in Hebron, taking us to the next school on our polling list, said he wasn't voting. He lives in H1, the militarized section of Hebron City where the army protects Jewish settlers who have illegally evicted Arabs and established a militant commune. Three of us observers got lost there, looking for a school, and were followed ominously by two of the male settlers, even through soldiers' checkpoints. The cabbie said it is foolishness to pretend that either Fatah or Hamas has any power to resist the occupation and he was unwilling to participate in the charade.
The Israelis only allowed voting in Jerusalem at the Post Offices, and only allowed 6300 of about 120,000 eligible voters to vote, to make the point that in their view the Israelis were not occupying East Jerusalem but had annexed it and now Arabs were foreigners. The postal clerks were Israelis. Some made provision for secret ballots, others didn't. Some explained the complex ballot, others didn't. Some kept campaigners out of the post offices, others didn't. The Jaffa Gate post office is so small a portable voting booth was set up outside around the corner, but the postal clerks weren't telling voters where it was. And Palestinians with blue cards, giving them permission to live in Jerusalem, were afraid that voting would put their residence cards at risk.
The occupation was the background of the voting, but the voting was splendid. The election workers were faculty, men and women, and the polling stations were three to six or so classrooms, each with a register of 500 to 700 registered voters. The lists were posted outside the school and to enter the school voters had to hide campaign paraphernalia like caps and flags and fliers. An ID checker sat outside each classroom and inside a worker crossed the voter's name off the registration list, another inked the left index finger, and a third handed each voter two ballots.
The ballots were complex. The first one contained 11 lists, slates of national party candidates. The second was lists of individuals running to represent the district. Hebron voters could select nine from about 25 candidates. From seven o'clock in the morning through to seven at night I did not see one instance of an election worker losing patience or cutting an explanation short. I don't speak Arabic, but these transactions were transparent.
Even more remarkable, the election worker who was in charge of the ballot boxes never once in places where I was took a ballot out of a voter's hands to fold it or place it in the box. Women sometimes tried to hand off their ballots but the workers never took them. Illiterate voters brought trusted assistants with them and there too the election workers made sure it was the voter who put the ballot in the box. The voters guarded their ballot secrecy and the election workers guarded the voters. It was inspiring. It was a fair and transparent and credible election.
Meanwhile, outside the schools, on the playgrounds, the parties were campaigning. Cars and taxis were draped in Hamas green and Fatah yellow. Boys and men lined the gateways handing out campaign material. At one school a veiled woman working for Hamas sat at a table next to the school entrance, checking off voters from a copy of the registration list. It’s what party operatives do all the time, track whether their committed members vote.
Yes, this may have been intimidating to voters. It was illegal. All campaign activity was supposed to have ended two days earlier. But it was such a vigorous commitment to the electoral process that it did my heart good. Not an inch of this campaigning spilled over into any school I was in, and I didn't hear of accounts elsewhere of in-school party regalia – except in the Jerusalem post offices.
I had one big cultural shock. At about six o'clock in one polling station a man unrolled a prayer rug and quietly prayed for about three minutes. Then a second man used the rug, then four more. Then two men prayed together, singing a portion of the Koran loudly. The voting process continued, no one batting an eye. And less than half the men in the room prayed, though judging by the vote most of them voted for Hamas.
The vote count was exciting. At 7 PM the door was locked and the ballots in each box were unfolded and counted, along with invalidated ballots, and the counts were reconciled. Meanwhile, one of the men wrote the names of all the lists or slates on the blackboard. He kept the public tally while other workers and observers also kept count. Each party and local candidate as well as domestic organizations had the right to send observers. An English-speaking representative of the Association of Community Organizations (as best he and an English teacher could translate it) provided me with a running commentary.
In this polling station, 336 ballots were cast. It didn't take more than 20 ballots to see that in our little room one of the slates was headed for a landslide. I asked who it was and my kindly interpreter whispered Hamas. The excitement was palpable.
The Hamas list received 247 votes, Fatah 63, the next lists 11, 6, 2 and one votes. Five slates received no votes. The individual votes went the same way, a landslide for all 9 Hamas candidates.
Mary Ann
UPDATE 2:
Feb. 1, 2006 -- The elections were Wednesday, January 25. On Thursday the UN Development Programme and Grassroots International for the Protection of Palestinians (GIPP) held debriefings and analyses that I have yet to summarize in writing.
But on Friday seven of us observers from the Nonviolent Peaceforce crossed the checkpoint again at Ramallah and took a minibus to the very small Arab town of Bil'in. Just a year ago, on February 20, 2005, bulldozers turned toward Bil'in and began to uproot olive trees and clear a path for the wall. The 3000 citizens of Bil'in had feared that the Jewish settlers in Modi'in Illit were going to confiscate their land and that day calls went out from Bil'in. The man who gave us an orientation, Mohammed Katib, said he came back from work in Ramallah and a huge number from the village went to the construction site protest. Then, he said, they had a village meeting and began to develop an organization. They are committed to nonviolence, using their minds, not their hands or weapons. They welcome international partners and Israelis. They don't talk about political parties but about the Palestinian people.
"Our struggle is against the occupation, not the people. They take the land and say 'security.' They kill people and say 'security.' We pull this reason from them. Our hands are tied. We tie our bodies to the trees. We tie ourselves to each other with no way to protect ourselves. We are not a security threat. Our message is to stop the war in our lands and the uprooting of our trees.
"The media describes the Palestinians as terrorists and there is a misunderstanding about who is the occupier and who is the victim. If there is an Israeli tank and a Palestinian with a gun, the story is about two armies facing off. The real story is about an occupying army and an occupied people.
"At first the villagers protested every day, then three times a week, now every Friday. If the soldiers do not use violence, then we can stop the wall and the uprooting of the trees. We cancel their weapons and we show Palestinians that we can use our minds to be stronger than those who are following orders. But so far the soldiers have used violence against us. Four hundred have been injured, ten seriously" [including an Israeli and a Portuguese woman six weeks ago who had both her arms broken].
The villagers have stood toe-to-toe with the soldiers. They have liked arms and tried to cross the police lines. They have stood on the land. The soldiers have used tear gas almost every week and frequently assault the villagers and their supporters. An Israeli woman in her fifties, Kerstin Sodergran, said two weeks she saw agent provocateurs who the villagers unmasked, after which village leaders were arrested by the soldiers.
Kerstin said the women come sometimes (the only women when I was there were Israelis and internationals), mostly when one or several of the men are being held by the soldiers, because detention and imprisonment are such heavy burdens for the captives and their families. Kerstin said the women become emotional, crying and shrieking and demanding the release of their husbands and sons. And the women are often effective in gaining the men's release.
A few weeks ago, the villagers secretly made their way across the wall and build a house, a shack really, an illegal structure, just the way the settlers do. When the soldiers demolished it, the villagers demanded the Israeli Supreme Court also order the settlers' illegal houses demolished and reroute the wall. They have a temporary stay and the case is to be heard today, February 1, 2006, as I am writing this.
Our group waited at noon until prayers at the Mosque were finished. About 150 men and boys came out from prayer and led 75 internationals who were waiting at a house down the road. We walked through the olive orchard to the wall construction site. The men chanted "No to the fence" and "Upsidedown to the wall." I took a lot of pictures, trying to catch the olive orchard with wild flowers blooming underfoot, the scoured land where the wall is to go, the barbed wire, and in the distance the settlers' village and giant construction equipment I would guess is made by Caterpillar and given to Israel by the U.S. Department of Defense as part of the Camp David agreement.
Some teenagers threw stones from the relative safety of the olive orchard and the soldiers fired tear gas back. Kerstin advised me to stand close to the soldiers to avoid the tear gas. She said the risk is that if the soldiers decide the demonstration is over and order us gone, they may hit nearby demonstrators, but she thinks that's better than the tear gas.
The village supported Fatah, not Hamas. A couple of village demonstrators engaged one of the soldiers in a discussion, saying: this vote for Hamas is your fault, because of the way you treat us.
I've read about Hamas. I know they are militant and disciplined; their guns and bombs have been silent this past year except for one killing in Gaza. I know they provide food and social services to everyone (while other Palestinian and Arab groups serve only their members).
What I saw and was told while I was there is first that Hamas wanted to be a part of the government. A United Nations staffer gave us a risk assessment as part of our orientation. He said that because all the political parties had fielded candidates and because there were no rumored threats of violence, the risk assessment was low to observers – which is the bottom gradation.
Second, although I was there briefly and my contacts were limited to Palestinians who could speak English, when people realized I was there to observe the elections, they wanted to talk to me, to ask me what I expected to see and when I said I had no preconceptions, to tell me what to look for. No one advocated violence or hinted at a willingness to support it. One of the things I've learned in Northern Ireland is that the IRA depended on community support. By the time I got to NI, that support was mostly gone, and similarly I didn't see or hear any support for violence among the people I spoke with in Jerusalem and Palestine.
Let me put a note in here about who I talked to during the 8 days I was there. My taxi driver from the airport described the Arab Christian diaspora and his experience of not being represented in government. I arrived at my hotel at 5 AM and slept till noon. Then I went walking. The proprietors of the Internet Café and a little coffee and juice operation, when I told them why I was there and asked if they planned to vote, told me at length that they did not intend to vote because the elections were a game. The juice vendor brought over several other men who told me they would not vote either – except one who said he planned to vote for Fatah unless I would pay him not to vote. The other men agreed there was a lot of money circulating for non-vote commitments. Then the vendor went on to challenge me: what benefit was I bringing to people who were miserable. What good is it to watch a ballot box? The only point is to listen to people who are miserable, to meet people who have lost everything. These frank comments emboldened me to ask more people if they intended to vote. At the Muslim Women's Center a woman said, "May you touch the living stone as well as the dead stone."
The next day our tour guide in Jerusalem said that Hamas had given some signals they would be willing to talk with the Israelis and that he planned to vote for Hamas. Two Muslim women sitting next to me on the bus told me they planned to vote, but the language barrier blocked discussion. When I came back across the checkpoint from Ramallah a bus driver congratulated me for crossing and when I asked said yes, he planned to vote. But in Hebron two cabbies and two vendors said no, they would not vote.
After the vote, in the Christian quarter of Jerusalem several Arab Christians told me their fear of Hamas, that Christians would be marginalized, Sharia law would be enacted, and Hamas would fight the Israelis, causing greater misery not only for Arab Christians but for everybody.
But next to all this I have to put the thousands of people I saw outside the 5 schools turned polling centers where I observed. They were confident, enthusiastic, eager, energetic – and at least 60 per cent of them voted by secret ballot for Hamas. My friend Antonio French says people in a voting booth have all sorts of reasons. That's what it looked like to me. They were good people, hoping for the best for their families, not folks with a death wish. They voted for Hamas for the same mix of reasons people in the US voted for Kerry or Bush -- believing their choices would benefit them.
Still more coming
Orientation and debriefing
Touring and food
Conclusions
What I'm sending are drafts, accurate but unpolished writing. This bit about Hamas and who I spoke to in particular may be clunky and too long. Feel free to forward just the part of Bil'in if you wish. But do share this with anyone you think might be interested.
Mary Ann McGivern
2 Comments:
Fantastic Post. It appears that Sr. McGivern did not see the Hammas landslide coming. Wow incredible report.
12:57 PM, January 28, 2006
Mary Ann is amazing. As she hints at in one of her letters, she has also monitored elections in Northern Ireland several times. She has seen voting turn violent before so she can surely appreciate the peace of last week's vote.
Now, whether peace will be the longterm effect of the election -- only time will tell.
6:48 AM, January 29, 2006
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