Baghdad, Oct 16: Saddam Hussein won another seven-year term as Iraq's president in a referendum in which he was the sole candidate, taking 100 per cent of the vote, the Iraqi leader's right-hand man announced today.
All 11,445,638 of the eligible voters cast ballots, Izzat Ibrahim, vice chairman of the revolutionary command council that is Iraq's key decision-making body.
"This is a unique manifestation of democracy which is superior to all other forms of democracies even in these countries which are besieging Iraq and trying to suffocate it," Ibrahim said at a news conference in Baghdad, apparently referring to the United States.
The White House had dismissed the one-man race in advance, and the results seemed to bear out the criticism. To get a vote total at all -- let alone a 100 per cent "yes" vote -- Iraqi officials would have had to gather and count millions of paper ballots, some from remote areas far from Baghdad. Bureau Report