The ballot paper asks for a simple Yes or No, but for many voters the issues involved are a lot more complex
IT IS a clear, sunny day – a good day for voting. Journalists from a dozen countries gather in front of the offices of the Syrian information ministry. They receive press badges and board minibuses to tour polling stations where Syrians are delivering their verdict on the new constitution.
We alight at the Zaki al-Arsousi girls’ secondary school in the middle-class Damascus neighbourhood of Ruk’n Deen and mob the two polling stations with cameras, microphones and notepads.
Three officials behind the table bearing the ballot box show us the small square of paper where voters check a green circle if they approve, a grey circle if not.
After registering their name and identity card number, voters are given a ballot and an envelope into which they can put their vote before slipping it through a slit in the top of an opaque plastic bin.
Some voters slip into a curtained corner where there is a table and pen; others make their mark and drop the paper into the bin in seconds.
By 10am, only 10 have voted at one station, at the other 25.
At the Abdel Raouf Said boys’ secondary school in Mazaken Barzeh, turnout is better. Randa Abboud (24), a painter, says he voted in favour of the constitution “but I say no to article three”, which states that the religion of the president must be Islam.
Mounira Amoush, a cleaning lady at the school, says she will also vote in favour of it: “I like the provisions for social welfare and free education and healthcare.”
A volunteer hands round cups of Turkish coffee to celebrate a constitution providing for multiparty elections in 90 days.
The ministry bus leaves us behind at a pro-government jamboree at Seven Fountains Square in central Damascus. Half-a-dozen boys, arms linked, leap to blaring music in a traditional dabkeh (folk dance). Children wave national flags. Vendors sell sugar-coated buns stuffed with dates. A girl perched on her father’s shoulders brandishes the Russian tricolour.
History teacher Halima Omran, a Yes voter, is scathing about governments seeking Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s removal. “These countries are exercising pressure on us to make us capitulate without a fight.”
A German colleague and I meet a brother and sister we encountered earlier leaving the second school we visited. The brother (20) says they live in Balad Barzeh, a restive town outside Damascus, “but we could not vote there because gunmen called for a strike and threaten anyone who wants to vote”.
“They have attacked military checkpoints four times . . . and killed two shopkeepers who did not strike,” he says.
His sister (21), who wears a headscarf, says: “We can’t give you names. Our father is a helicopter pilot in the military . . . We voted for the constitution . . . We don’t know what will happen to our country.”
At the polling station in the tourist information centre near Youssef al-Azmeh Square, 600 people have voted by noon.
We end up at the Hijaz Railway Station, a century-old Ottoman monument at the heart of Damascus that is now a museum.
Badi’a Saadi (18), a student from the port city of Tartous, announces proudly that he voted Yes, “although I object to article 88”, which limits the president to two seven-year terms.
The office serving as the polling booth has walls of carved wood and windows draped with golden curtains. Above the ornate desk where a steady stream of voters deposit their papers in a half-filled ballot box is a painting of the ancient railway engine that stands on the pavement outside.
Saer Misquaf (33), from the town of Jisr al-Shughour in the violent Idlib province, pricks his finger and presses it to the centre of the green circle on the ballot. “I am not voting with my blood for the president, or the constitution, I vote for Syria.”