99.8% Vote Yes, 98% Voter Turnout
A 60-year-old man walks all night from his
remote mountain village, then stands ten hours in a blazing desert sun to cast the first
secret ballot of his life. An old woman kisses the ballot box after delivering her vote;
tears of joy stream down her face. "Now I can sleep in peace," she says. A woman
in labor insists on being taken to the polls; she delivers her newborn in the field
outside the polling station.
A new nation was born this year in Africa.
After a U.N.-sponsored referendum, the Provisional Government of Eritrea announced
Eritrea's formal independence from Ethiopia on April 27. Throughout Eritrea, Eritreans
greeted the announcement with the same passion they took to the ballot box, celebrating
the final chapter in a 50-year struggle for sovereignty.
According to the official returns, 99.8%
of Eritrean voters responded "yes" to the question: "Do you want Eritrea to
be a free, independent country?" Or, as one seven-year-old was quick to point out
when I cited that figure, "No, not 99.8%; it was 99.805%." Clearly, everyone's
ballot counted in this most lopsided vote.
If I hadn't seen the process with my own
eyes, such a result would have been hard to believe. But traveling the countryside as an
official non-governmental observer from Grassroots International, I observed the voting at
several different polling stations. Everywhere, the story was the same. Despite having
three days to vote, virtually every able-bodied voter in the country's 1.1 million
electorate braved long lines and a searing desert sun to vote on the first day of
balloting. Overall turnout was estimated to be about 98%, including over 90% on the first
day.
An Elaborate Process for Foregone Conclusion
It may have been the most elaborate
process in history every carried out to achieve a foregone conclusion. The independent
Referendum Commission of Eritrea could easily have gone through the motions of democratic
process. In a country arguably born as the poorest on earth, few could have faulted them.
Instead, they made the referendum a national rite of passage, a sacred right for each
Eritrean voter to tell the world -- peacefully and democratically -- their answer to the
question no one asked for forty years.
By 6:00 am Friday morning, the first day
of polling, the village of Senafe, where I observed the voting, was a buzz of activity.
Men and women lined the streets surrounding the polling station. Over the course of the
day, voters patiently withstood the withering desert sun to cast their ballots. After
voting, many could contain their elation no longer. Women cried and embraced the ballot
box. Some ululated in the traditional celebratory manner. All smiled widely.
As poll workers meticulously and
repeatedly counted the ballots three evenings later, the final tally showed a result even
more decisive than the national landslide: 2,928-1 in favor of independence. One U.S.
observer from the U.N. told me afterward, he never would have believed such a result if he
hadn't witnessed the process himself. Another U.N. observer told me she had never seen
such a meticulous process.
A Lesson in Democracy for the Future
Election workers had a great deal to be
proud of. Mostly recent high school graduates born and raised in Ethiopian-occupied
Asmara, many of these election workers were seeing rural Eritrea for the first time. It
was an eye-opening experience for man who had never seen close-up the harsh conditions of
rural life or the uncommon courage of their peasant compatriots.
These young election workers served their
country admirably. In the process, they gained valuable experiences in the democratic
process itself. So did Eritrean voters, a fact that, after independence itself, may be the
longest lasting and most important effect of the referendum. As the U.S. consul to
Eritrea, Joseph O'Neill, told U.S. observers afterward, the Referendum Commission schooled
everyone so well in the democratic process that it would be difficult for anyone to hold
fraudulent elections in the future.
Tim Wise is director of Grassroots
International (48 Grove St., #103, Somerville, MA 02144). This article is reprinted with
permission from Frontier, the magazine of Share Our Strength in Washington,
D.C.