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PAKISTANIS HAVE BEEN queuing to vote in landmark elections today, defying Taliban attacks to cast their ballots in polls marking a historic democratic transition for the nuclear-armed state.
Turnout appeared enthusiastic in the capital, in Karachi, Lahore and Peshawar, but was thinner in the southwestern province of Baluchistan, gripped by separatist and sectarian violence, AFP reporters said.
More than 86 million people are eligible to vote for the 342-member national assembly and four provincial assemblies in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Punjab, Sindh and Baluchistan. Polls close at 5pm.
In Karachi, Pakistan’s financial hub, a Taliban bomb killed 11 people and wounded 36 others, targeting a candidate for the provincial assembly for the Awami National Party, one of the secular parties in the outgoing government.
An AFP photographer said a child aged three to four was among the dead laid out in the morgue and police said one of the candidate’s guards was also killed.
The target, Amanullah Mehsud, escaped unhurt, senior police official Mazhar Nawaz said. The Taliban, who consider democracy un-Islamic and have vowed to disrupt the vote with suicide attacks, quickly claimed responsibility.
“We proudly claim responsibility for this attack, we carried it out and will carry out more of the same,” spokesman Ehsanullah Ehsan told AFP by telephone from an undisclosed location.
A Pakistani supporter of former cricket star-turned-politician Imran Khan, talks with another from his car decorated with pictures bearing the image of Khan, in Islamabad. (AP Photo/Muhammed Muheisen)
Another bomb wounded eight people outside a women’s polling station in Peshawar and temporarily suspended voting, police said.
Pre-election violence killed at least 127 people, according to an AFP tally, and the campaign has been called the bloodiest in the country’s history.
Queues gathered outside polling stations in Pakistan’s main cities where some people said they were nervous about security, but others spoke enthusiastically about exercising their democratic right and voting for change.
“We have already spent a lot of time being scared of terror threats. Today, we have to take a decision and bury this state of fear once and for all,” said Suhail Ahmad, a shopkeeper in Peshawar.
The vote marks the first time that an elected civilian administration has completed a full term and handed power to another through the ballot box in a country where there have been three military coups and four military rulers.
The front-runner is ex-prime minister Nawaz Sharif, head of the centre-right Pakistan Muslim League-N (PML-N) but much of the campaign has been electrified by cricket star Imran Khan with promises of reform and an end to corruption.
The charismatic 60-year-old leader of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) tapped into a last-minute surge of support after fracturing his spine when he fell from a stage at a campaign rally on Tuesday.
Pakistani boy cries next to the site of a bomb blast outside a polling station in Peshawar, Pakistan. (AP Photo/Mohammad Sajjad)
Although he is expected to make a full recovery, he is flat on his back in hospital and aides say he will not be able to vote.
The outgoing centre-left Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) has run a lacklustre and rudderless campaign, with its chairman, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, too young to run and largely hidden from public view due to Taliban threats.
In Karachi, there were queues outside polling stations in some areas, but voting was more sluggish in other parts of the city where people spoke of security fears.
“This time I am more enthusiastic about voting than in the last elections. The media played a good role in motivating people… that they should not let their vote go waste,” said Mehar Rehman, 29, who works for a private company.
An AFP reporter said voting was delayed at 12 polling stations he visited, as officials awaited the delivery of ballot boxes and papers. Election commission official Najeeb Ahmed said that any delays at polling booths would be compensated by extending voting hours.
Commentators are divided on whether a wealth of enthusiastic first-time voters and Taliban threats will make turnout higher or lower than the 44 percent at the last elections in 2008.
The main issues are the tanking economy, an appalling energy crisis that causes power cuts of up to 20 hours a day, the alliance in the US-led war on Islamist militants, chronic corruption and the dire need for development.
A Pakistani girl runs past a car decorated with an election banner showing Mohammed Abdullah, a candidate of a pro-Taliban religious group Jamiat-e-Ulema Islam (JUI-F) in a poor neighborhood on the outskirts of Islamabad. (AP Photo/Muhammed Muheisen)
More than 600,000 security personnel have deployed nationwide and around half the estimated 70,000 polling stations have been declared at risk of attack, many of them in insurgency-torn parts of Baluchistan and the northwest.
The PML-N and PPP have dominated politics for decades, led by two of the richest families in the country, the Sharifs and the Bhuttos.
But Khan has sought to galvanise a young, urban middle class with promises of sweeping change.
With no reliable polling data, Sharif has been earmarked the most probable winner but if PTI do well enough to become a formidable opposition, there are concerns that the emergent coalition will be weak and possibly short-lived.
Sharif served as prime minister from 1990-93, when he was sacked for corruption, and from 1997-99, when he was deposed by the military, although his family say he is a changed man who will this time govern more successfully.
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Louth County Council really on their toes as usual, nothing gets by them. Only 1600 tonnes got passed them and they are on the top of the pile.
I wonder how long locals were complaining before Louth Council got their finger out.
Did the Council just wake up to find 1000 tonnes of rubbish in a field? That’s weeks of trucks coming and going, and we’re supposed to believe nobody noticed?
@Brent Weaver: Did no local have a phone with a camera to go down an take pictures … i hope they did or they are part of the problem.
This is an organised operation taking place in a border region, would you be running down there to snap some pictures of these people? How far do ya reckon you’d get?!
@bazhealy: if it was in my area, bloody oath I’d be down. I was raised by an Irish mother who stood up for herself so I can 100% say i would be intervening. Dont be giving these gurriers more power than they deserve.
@bazhealy: Actually send the women down – they seem to have more balls than the men in Ireland anyway.
Louth coco are a joke. Dub originally but living in Drogheda and the place is a kip. Dog sh** everywhere. Litter. Dirty looking buildings. They are a disgrace.
@bazhealy: baz are you saying the gardai are involved in organized crime and if you passed information to them in confidence, that they are their associates would be making a midnight call.
It might interest you to know the only person I know caught by the council involved in illegal dumping and instead of a hefty fine and the cost of removing the contaminated waste the whole lot was covered up (literally) thanks to the local f.g senator or drunken clown as he is better known.
Wtf are you talking about? Who mentioned the Gardaí? If you people think it’s a good idea to go down at night and confront lads in trucks and excavators and try taking pictures fire away. But I wudn’t fancy your chances of you getting those pictures to anyone who matters because you’d be the bottom of the heap at that stage. I thought the inference was fairly obvious but some people seem to need it spelt out to them. People involved in large scale organised criminal activity aren’t generally very friendly when people interfere or try to expose them.
Not to mention the sludge from fuel laundering poisoning the local water supply. Some people really don’t give a shite who they endanger.
@Charlie Wrex: On that scale it was more then likely a contractor of one of our private sector waste disposal companies.
Privatizing how we handle our waste has been unmitigated disaster and should be a lesson in why not to !
Any evidence, Brian. Or just your personal prejudice?
Well it’s hardly just some lad throwing a bit of rubbish out the car window now is it? It’s clear to anybody with eyes that somebody collected and then dumped all this rubbish on a large scale. That doesn’t leave a very long list of suspects.
@Charlie Wrex:
If there had been a will to clean up the fuel laundering business, it would have happened years ago.
The bureaucrats are afraid of these mafias.
The government bring in overwhelming force when it suits them- but only to crush the water tax protesters.!
@David Murphey: The article above and my own personal experience of fly tipping in wick low since privitasation
Also the cost regularity of service to my property
Well, Brian, you are certainly entitled to your anti-privatisation agenda.
But I think this particular case, given the location, is much more likely to be the responsibility of a certain “army”.
But that’s just my prejudice.
Private contractors are required by law to have a licence. Whatever groups was responsible dumped this crap knowing they were breaking the law, as well as not giving a toss about the country the Easter rising forefathers died for.
@Charlie Wrex: wasn’t that proven to be yet another lie by f.g/uvf.
Er..shouldn’t the council have turned up when the excavators were operating?
@Kieran OKeeffe: No need Kieran, sure “excavators operating late at night” ….. perfectly normal – nothing to see here. WTF – Is everyone sitting on their hands waiting for someone else to sort it?
Council workers on flexie time “entitled” … sick days .. “entitled” ..sure who works Friday anyway… and I don’t like Mondays …civil servants the opt out brigade.
@Kieran OKeeffe:
Lol. only in Ireland.!
Wouldn’t take a genius to sort this one – that rubbish has to contain information that points to its origin and hence who picked it up and dumped it. We are talking about the equivalent of 800 4WD’s being dumped – surely not even in our corrupt country can someone get away with that? Sadly they probably can.
@Pablo: The local councils don’t want to know, they talk a good game about litter wardens going through illegally dumped waste but the reality is quite the opposite.
On numerous occassions I’ve called my local council to complain regarding illegally dumped black bags near my house, when they get around to it they just throw them into the back of a lorry. I’ve asked them about going through the bags for information to see who’s responsible and was told they do it at their yard, yet when dogs have ripped them I could see clearly who was responsible, a neighbour. And they’re still doing it.
Myself, and everyone else, pay for our bin collection service but people like this just dump their rubbish illegally with impunity and councills collect it there’s no punnishment.
@Rusty Balls: For that amount of waste someone had to be regularly collecting it and dumping it there. As to litter wardens, I once picked up a book from the post office and discarded the cardboard sleeve it was in in the bin by the bus stop. While waiting for the bus I saw the guys empty the bin and take the sleeve out and store it separately to everything else. I got a fine for dumping domestic waste.
@Darren Byrne:
You have to pay the fine Darren.
Respectability.etc.
The big dumpers would laugh..
The fine for 50 tons is probably not much more-but highly profitable.
@John Joseph McDermott: i got out of paying the fine. Took a couple of photos and emails but they were reluctant to see if a Judge would agree that it was domestic waste. I think a judge would have thrown it out straight away and would have been annoyed at them for wasting the courts time. But i’m just making the point they are quick enough to send out the fines if they think it’s an easy way to swell their coffers.
Hopefully the DCC will check the rubbish for name’s, addresses and track them down.
@Michael McGuinness: Why would DCC be looking for people 80km away from their citizens?
@Michael McGuinness:
If my name and address was on a piece of litter found in an illegal dump that cannot be used to convict me of a criminal offence in a court of law.
Oh Sorry about that, I’m other end of Ireland. Must brush up on my geography
I’m sure you dump your rubbish in an proper manner.
Blaming the council for illegal dumping is nonsense. The illegal dumpers are to blame – nobody else. The council have a very difficult job dealing with this sort of dumping in conjunction with the hazardous effects of sludge from illegal republican fuel laundering.
@Paddy Lions: typical politician reply, blame the republicans! When reported to Dundalk council about fly tipping on common ground close to the estate where I live they did nothing, Litter warden drove in to the estate saw the illegal dumping of household waste on the banks of the Castletown river and said there was nothing he could do.
It’s right to blame the councils all the way up to government. The government don’t give the Gardaí the resources and powers to stop this as it begins, the councils don’t have the powers and resources to enforce orders and seize property and the council don’t use what powers they have. Politicians like to talk a good game about the environment and protection and building regs and enforcement but they do feck all with the powers they have which are feck all to begin with!
On a national level the issue is not taken seriously enough. Punishments are not tough enough. Councils have to spend thousands each year to bring people to court following up cases which are thrown out for the most minor of reasons.
There should be mandatory prison sentences for the scanks that illegally dump. Forget fines. Forget warnings. The whole process should be streamlined in order to facilitate this.
Like everything in this country, the money to be made in pursuing the culprits by solicitors/cctv companies etc far outweighs the importance of nailing the problem. Get the finger out Denis Naughton.
Might be a cultural gathering
You’d be surprised how many “respectable” people are usual behind large scale dumping like this. Wasn’t there legitimate businesses operating illegal quarries for years during the boom times, even though the councils knew about them.
“One source in the waste industry, who did not wish to be named, said the Huntstown site had been “used extensively over a long number of years” for the deposition of various categories of waste, including municipal waste.
Wicklow County Council is currently investigating a large Roadstone quarry near Blessington, where it has already found evidence of illegal dumping.”
http://www.irishtimes.com/news/charge-of-illegal-waste-at-quarry-to-be-explored-1.348727
Probably dumped by the same patriotic “business people” who launder the diesel——That’s their stomping ground!!
I live in Dundalk and for months now I’ve been buying water as the tap water smells and tastes bad, now I know why. When were the council first told about this and where were the litter wardens they employ? Its an absolute disgrace that this area was allowed to get so bad as from the picture it is clear this dumping has been on going for a longtime.
@Brianán Ní Giolla Bhríde: Thats a file photo and has nothing to do with the dumping in Louth. Ireland is a small country – the equivalent of 800 4WD cars can not get dumped without someone noticing – maybe its time the locals helped themselves instead of looking for someone else to sort it. Maybe its no wonder we have the politicians we have.
I’ll give out to someone for dropping a crisp packet on the street yet your fellow county men let 1600000 Kg or the equivalent of 20,0000 average size men be dumped in your county – how?
@Pablo: I have reported illegal dumping to the council and I know people who have also reported and nothing was done. The article also states this dumping was reported to the council by local residents; it would be interesting to know how long it took for the council to act on the complaints obviously it took them a while.
@Brianán Ní Giolla Bhríde: Fair enough – they are obviously useless – vote the councillors out the next election ….. but surely this is a crime and the Guards sound be investigating, not some fool with a clipboard.
I went to guards too last year, asked guard at desk if fly tipping was illegal, he said yes, I told him where I witnessed fly tipping he told me it was an environmental issue and report to the council which I done, council told me report it to the guards!
@Brianán Mc Bride: Unfortunately I can well believe you. Some people only do their job when they see their name in the media being ridiculed – many a company only acts when it hits social media and is there for all to see – that’s where i’d be going with that one.
@Brianán Mc Bride: I think the guards would only be obligated to do anything if they were to stumble on someone in the act or were order by the courts to carry out warrants in the case. Would you report tax evaders to the guards or the revenue. You should inform the EPA, they have officers who can investigate it and the council will be quick to act if they get involved as then the council can be in trouble as well as those doing the dumping.
@Brianán Ní Giolla Bhríde:
I have seen dead zones while driving near the border area.
Swans swimming in small ponds beside the poisoned stumps/remains of trees.
@Darren Byrne:
Illegal dumping has made new multi millionaires in Ireland:
Watch this video before the criminal tries to have it removed.
https://youtu.be/I19UdQE0hNI
It’s part of their culture. Please be sensitive.
@Seth Cheffetz: Didn’t want to say it, but yeah.
Probably dumped by the same patriotic “business people who launder the diesel——It’s their stomping ground!!!
Not illegal dumping, merely a valuable expression of culture…
There was program on Tv where our waste goes and it shocking that county council know where it ends up been dump in other countries or striped by cheap labourers with no H&S or real rights. Companies making huge money from our waste and even charge us to get their hands on it. The pricing structure charging by the vehicle type is only going to lead to illegal dumping. When bin charges came out our tax never when down now we pay twice for a service that is less and cause most now recycle we have to pay for that now, and if go to a recycling center we have to pay again.
These places should be either free for certain items and more reasonable for items as these companies are making from taking our waste. There profit making should not incl taking form our pockets just our waste.
@JustMade Ireland: Honest question, what recycling centre is charging you. The one’s I use in Ballyogan and Bray are free. Admittedly there is a charge in Ballyogan for greenwaste and stuff like wood/rubble but everything else is taken for free.
@Darren Byrne: I meant other items not the ones you mention .
@JustMade Ireland: I’m not trying to be smart here but here is a link that gives everything that is accepted. http://www.wicklow.ie/recycling-centres Also if you buy an electrical item the shop you’re buying from is required to take a similar item for recycling free of charge. I do have a gripe about the current situation regarding the recycling of mattresses as it appears that the government is paying for schemes to do the actual recycling but that others are making money charging a collection fee and not allowing you to drop off the mattress at the centre yourself.
@Darren Byrne: no probs, I meant things like that. Have a good weekend.
Illegal large scale dumps are a problem throughout Europe. The notion that border areas are somehow unique in this regard is pretty ignorant. As long as it costs x to dispose of a ton of waste officially, someone will do it for y on the quiet. Happens everywhere unfortunately
I smell a suspended sentence and a fine of a few hundred euro coming down the river.
There must have been a convoy of hiaces traveling to the dump.
Every fridge,tv,iron etc has a serial number and can be traced to the shop that sold them and the customers that bought them. It would be easy enough to trace the offenders by following a simple trail.
When Louth county council sort this, then maybe they can stop pumping raw sewage into Dundalk bay.
Hopefully those involved get hit by a bus!
have your say