CAIRO, Nov 28, (Agencies): Egyptians flocked to the polls on Monday for a first post-revolution election, making a mostly orderly and joyous start to ushering in democracy after a week of violence and political crisis.
Ten months since the end of 30 years of autocratic rule by Hosni Mubarak, ousted by popular protests in one of the seminal events of the Arab Spring, up to 40 million voters are being asked to choose a new parliament.
“It was no use to vote before. Our voices were completely irrelevant,” Mona Abdel Moneim, one of several women who said they were voting for the first time, told AFP as she cast her ballot in the Shubra district of Cairo.
Voting for the lower house of parliament takes place in three stages beginning on Monday in the main cities of Cairo, Alexandria and other areas. The highly complex procedure to elect a full assembly ends in March.
The backdrop was ominous after a week of protests calling for the resignation of the interim military rulers who stepped in after Mubarak’s fall. Forty-two people have been killed and more than 3,000 injured.
By late afternoon, proceedings appeared to be passing off peacefully and in an orderly manner as the army and police discreetly deployed around polling stations where queues had formed early in the morning.
“We were surprised that people turned out to vote in large numbers, thank God,” Abdel Moez Ibrahim, who heads the High Judicial Elections Commission (HJEC), told reporters, adding that there had been no security problems.
Administrative glitches such as the late arrival of observers delayed the start of proceedings at a number of voting centres and there were other minor violations of electoral law, AFP correspondents witnessed.
“I’m voting for the future of Egypt,” declared Yussuf, a 25-year-old software engineer in the Al-Raml district of Alexandria, Egypt’s second-biggest city and a major port on the Mediterranean.
“This is the first free election in our country. I hope it will be the first fair election,” he told AFP.
The poll was endangered last week as unrest gripped the country, but military ruler Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi has stuck to the schedule and called for a large turnout.
Much remains unclear about how the new parliament will function and whether it will be able to resolve a standoff with the armed forces over how much power they will retain under a new constitution to be written next year.
The formerly banned Muslim Brotherhood, a moderate Islamist group, is widely expected to emerge as the largest power when results are published on Jan 13.
Hardline Islamists, secular parties and groups representing the interests of the former Mubarak regime are all expected to win seats, raising the prospect of a highly fragmented and ideologically split new parliament.
The stakes could not be higher for Egypt, the cultural leader of the Arab world, but the conduct and results of the election will also have repercussions for the entire Middle East at a time of wrenching change.
“For most Arabs, the primary examples of democratic processes in the Arab world are in Iraq and Lebanon,” said Bruce Rutherford, a Middle East specialist and author on Egypt at the US-based Colgate University.
“In both cases, elections produced weak, fragmented, and largely ineffectual governments.
“If Egypt produces the same result, then the appeal of democracy in the region may be weakened. However, if the Egyptian experience is positive... the effect could be very powerful.”
Egypt, with a fast-growing population of more than 80 million, is a former British protectorate ruled by military leaders for most of its history since independence in 1922.

Syria
Russia is sending a flotilla of warships to its naval base in Syria in a show of force which suggests Moscow is willing to defend its interests in the strife-torn country as international pressure mounts on President Bashar al-Assad’s government.
Arab League sanctions and French calls for the establishment of humanitarian zones in Syria have increased international pressure on Assad to end bloodshed that the United Nations says has killed 3,500 people during nine months of protests against his rule.
Russia, which has a naval maintenance base in Syria and whose weapons trade with Damascus is worth millions of dollars annually, joined China last month to veto a Western-backed UN Security Council resolution condemning Assad’s government.
Izvestia newspaper reported on Monday, citing retired Russian Admiral Viktor Kravchenko, that Russia plans to send its flagship aircraft carrier the “Admiral Kuznetsov” along with a patrol ship, an anti-submarine craft and other vessels.
Syria on Monday hit out at the Arab League for the treatment it has meted out to Damascus, accusing it of ignoring the presence of “terrorists” in the country and prematurely imposing economic sanctions.
Foreign Minister Walid Muallem made the accusation at a news conference at which gruesome video footage was shown of what was described as a “mass grave of security force martyrs” that the authorities had discovered.
“I apologise for these horrific images, but at the same time I offer them to the Arab League ministerial committee members who still continue to refuse the presence of these armed groups,” said Muallem.
“The Arabs don’t want to admit the presence in Syria of groups of armed terrorists who are committing these crimes, abductions and attacks on public places.”
He told reporters that his government had opened all avenues in talks with the Arab League to end bloodshed in his country, but said that “they have closed all these windows” of opportunity which could have helped solve the crisis.
“Shame on them that they have reached this point,” he said of the foreign ministers who on Sunday voted the sanctions against Damascus.
Muallem insisted that Syria can weather the sanctions and “will emerge stronger from this situation.”
The European Union will tighten sanctions against Syria’s oil and financial sectors this week to deprive President Bashar al-Assad’s regime of more sources of funding, diplomats said Monday.
EU foreign ministers meeting Thursday will adopt a raft of sanctions including bans on exporting gas and oil industry equipment to Syria, trading Syrian government bonds and selling software that could be used to monitor Internet and telephone communications, a European diplomat said.
European governments will also be barred from providing concessional loans to Syria — credit at lower rates and longer grace periods than what is offered by the markets.
Syria’s military and security forces have committed crimes against humanity in their brutal crackdown on anti-regime protesters, UN-appointed investigators said on Monday.
State forces have murdered, raped and tortured demonstrators since the beginning of protests in March this year, according to evidence gathered by the Independent Commission of Inquiry on Syria.
The panel interviewed 223 victims and witnesses, among them security force defectors, who told of shoot to kill orders to crush demonstrators and cases of children being tortured to death.
“The commission is gravely concerned that crimes against humanity have been committed in different locations in the Syrian Arab Republic during the period under review,” it said in its report, while concluding that military and security forces were behind the acts.
“The sheer scale and consistent pattern of attacks by military and security forces on civilians and civilian neighbourhoods and the widespread destruction of property could only be possible with the approval or complicity of the State,” the panel said.