First Poll Returns Favor Musharraf

Pakistanis voted Tuesday on whether to give military ruler Gen. Pervez Musharraf five more years as president, with the main opposition coming from vocal opponents to his crackdown on Islamic militants and backing for the U.S. war on terrorism.

With 9,578 votes counted from 21 polling stations nearly five hours after polls closed at 7 p.m. local time, 9,280 ballots supported extending Musharraf's term. Only 203 were against. The rest were ruled invalid.

Final results were not expected before Wednesday.

In announcing the results from Dera Bugti, Chief Election Commissioner Irshad Hassan Khan said polling in Pakistan had passed peacefully. Although no electoral roll exists, officials say some 62 million people age 18 and over were entitled to vote.

Musharraf is expected to win despite boycott calls from most of the main political parties, but he was hoping for a high turnout that would lend him a stamp of legitimacy. The government-run Electoral Commission relaxed voting rules and set up an unprecedented 87,000 polling stations - some of them in novel places such as gas stations, hospitals and prisons.

But with Pakistan's Information Minister Nisar Memon predicting a 25 percent turnout as polls closed, opposition parties asked Musharraf to step down immediately and predicted the "lowest-ever turnout."

"We are thankful to the people of Pakistan for boycotting Musharraf's sham referendum," Qazi Hussain Ahmad, leader of the country's largest Islamic group Jamaat-e-Islami, said in a statement. "The general has lost all moral, political and legal basis to continue to impose himself on the people,"

"After the low turnout ... General Pervez Musharraf should immediately step down and hand over the government to Supreme Court of Pakistan so that a democratic government can be installed," Pakistan People's Party Secretary General Reza Rabbani said in Karachi.

Musharraf seized power in a bloodless military coup in 1999. The Supreme Court endorsed him but gave him three years to introduce reforms and return the country to democracy.

Musharraf called the referendum to extend his presidency before that deadline comes up in October, when the first parliamentary elections since the coup are scheduled to be held.

Under Pakistan's constitution, parliament chooses the president, but Musharraf is trying to circumvent that rule by winning a mandate for another five years at the helm - time he says he needs to ensure the continuity of economic reforms, battle deeply rooted corruption and boost efforts to fight religious extremism.

That mandate could also boost him in his policy of supporting the U.S.-led campaign in neighboring Afghanistan. Musharraf turned Pakistan away from being the closest ally of the former ruling Taliban to being a key backer of the United States. The switch has outraged Islamic hard-line groups.

In Pakistan's deeply conservative southwestern Baluchistan province, Islamic groups called for a strike and boycott. Religious leaders said their call was heeded.

"The strike in Baluchistan was so successful that most of the polling stations in the province remained deserted throughout the day," Maulana Fazle ur-Rehman, a prominent pro-Taliban cleric, said in a statement.

Wearing a cream-colored T-shirt and slacks, Musharraf cast his vote just after noon with his wife and mother at a women's university in an army compound in Rawalpindi.

"I am very confident," he said after joking that he had voted no. "I am feeling relaxed because of what I've seen on television and the reports I've received."

With the backing of leading business groups, scores of trade unions and some political parties - as well as the powerful military - analysts said Musharraf was almost certain to succeed.

But opponents were banking on a low turnout.

"If people boycott the referendum, it means he has lost," said a statement by exiled former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, who leads the Pakistan People's Party. It was issued from New York and printed in many Pakistani newspapers. Bhutto has been living abroad since she was ousted amid accusations of corruption and misrule in 1997.

Turnout appeared brisk in Islamabad and Lahore, but light in Karachi, the largest city and stronghold of the United National Movement, which joined the boycott call to protest the killing of its two leaders by unidentified gunmen last week.

But evidence emerged that machinery of the state was being used to influence the result, with many public sector workers saying they had been pressured into casting their ballot.

At one polling station at a government college for women in Rawalpindi, the presiding officer stuffed ballot boxes with several "yes" votes in view of a Reuters team.

"I have been told by the principal to complete 500 votes at my booth," she told Reuters, explaining that only 150 people had cast their votes. "What can we do? We are government servants and we have to do our job."

Also in Rawalpindi, around 100 employees of the state's Water and Sanitation Authority arrived at the Islamia High School polling station with their superiors.

"We are being dragged to vote," one employee, who declined to give his name, told Reuters.

The government denied putting pressure on its employees.

"If you force me to go and vote, you cannot force me to say 'yes,"' Information Secretary Anwar Mahmood told Reuters. "If you force me, I will go and vote 'no.'"

Journalists saw a police inspector open several ballot papers at the polling station to see which way people had voted, and he also brushed aside polling agents' objections when one man turned up to vote without an identity card. "While working in government, you can't say 'no'," said one civil servant voting alongside his colleagues in Islamabad.

Other voters said Musharraf had lost their support by the way he had run his referendum campaign, denying political parties a fair chance to put their arguments across and forcing teachers and civil servants to attend his rallies.

"I voted no," said student Hina Mubarak. "He has become a typical politician and is behaving like them."

But elsewhere, many people said they had voted "yes."

"I am supporting Musharraf in the hope those corrupt people will not be allowed to return," said medical student Mansoor Mehmood in Rawalpindi.

The United States has refrained from criticizing the referendum, although the Commonwealth -- a grouping of former British colonies which suspended Pakistan after the coup -- has reacted coolly.