Pakistani voters went to the polls on Thursday for local elections that are being seen as a test of President Pervez Musharraf’s fight against Islamic hard-liners and his commitment to women’s rights.
Security was high with tens of thousands of troops and police guarding polling stations, while five people died and scores were injured in clashes between rival supporters in the first elections in Pakistan in almost three years.
Polls later closed for the first phase of the elections, in which about half of Pakistan’s 63-million-strong electorate was eligible to vote. The second phase is on August 25.
Islamists, who traditionally have won only a small share of the vote, are trying to seize seats at the expense of the pro-Musharraf ruling party, the Pakistan Muslim League-Quaid, and the two main secular opposition parties.
Officially, the elections for district councillors and mayors are being held on a non-party basis to avoid the political violence that has blighted Pakistan in the past, but in practice groups have been openly backing candidates.
Hard-liners have been enraged by military ruler Musharraf’s crackdown on Islamic extremism and madrassas, or religious schools, in the wake of the July 7 London bombings.
Musharraf, a key United States ally, appealed to Pakistanis to reject ”retrogressive elements politically and socially” in a speech to mark Independence Day on Sunday.
The polls are part of a reform plan devised by Musharraf to give more power to the grassroots after he took office in a bloodless coup in 1999.
Female candidates and voters defied efforts by an alliance of Islamic parties that rules ultra-conservative North West Frontier province to ban them from taking part in the elections.
Women make up nearly a fifth of the 114 000 candidates across the country.
Few incidents of intimidation or violence against women were reported. But staff at a women’s polling station in Sheikh Mohammadi, near the provincial capital, Peshawar, said ”not a single woman” had come to cast her vote.
A home-made bomb damaged a women’s polling station in Khuzdar, a district in the poverty-stricken south-western province of Baluchistan, but there were no casualties.
Private women’s rights group the Aurat Foundation said it had received complaints that in some districts women were not allowed to cast votes, while in some polling stations the female voters’ lists were missing.
”The situation is overall very bad,” director Rakhshanda Naz said.
After an outcry by rights groups, Pakistan’s electoral commission has said it will annul any results in districts where women were barred.
In Karachi, Pakistan’s violence-plagued largest city, about 55 000 army troops, paramilitary rangers and police were deployed, police said on Thursday.
”We are on high alert and we have set up emergency centres and a control room to monitor the law and order situation,” said city police chief Tariq Jamil.
Two men were killed in a clash between rival groups in and around the central city of Multan, police said, while three people were killed in the north-western town of Bannu. Fifty-seven were injured across the country.
However, private television station GEO put the toll at 10 dead.
These are the first elections in Pakistan since parliamentary polls in October 2002. Presidential elections are likely to be held in 2007 and Musharraf is expected to stand. — Sapa-AFP