BAGHDAD, Nov 1 (AFP) - Iraq began on Monday registering voters and potential candidates for legislative elections planned for January amid confusion among the electorate and fears that the relentless violence could derail the process.
"Today voter registration is starting all over the country," said Farid Ayar, the spokesman for Iraq's Independent Electoral Commission. "It is going well up until now."
Some 550 registration centres throughout Iraq have been set up in the same location or near where Iraqis are accustomed to receiving their food rations -- a leftover from the UN oil-for-food programme when the country was under sanctions.
"We are not worried about security, everything is going very well," Ayar said.
But as the process got going on Monday there were clear signs of the security concerns and challenge of bringing many voters with no experience of democracy to the ballot box in January.
Voters are to choose a national assembly, a parliament for the semi-autonomous region of Iraqi Kurdistan and 18 provincial councils.
Ayar said that a group linked to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian Islamist who tops Iraq's most wanted list, had sent menacing letters to election organisers warning them to stop work or die.
Meanwhile six US military Humvees and more than a dozen soldiers standing outside the sprawling Dabash food ration depots in the capital's Hurriya (Freedom) City in the northern Khadimiyah district, a predominantly Shiite Muslim area of about two million people.
Food agents like Iyad Salman, 51, at Dabash must distribute registration notices to would-be voters instructing them to go to their nearest voter registration centre to verify that their names appear on a national register.
There are an estimated 45,000 agents like Salman across Iraq charged with distributing monthly food rations to Iraqi families.
"I am just going to make people sign off a piece of paper saying they received the notice and it is up them then to go to the centre," he said.
About 25 food agents showed up at Dabash on Monday to pick up rations of flour, rice, sugar and tea and the voter registration notices, but a lot of Iraqis appear uncertain about what to do next.
With the exception of a smattering of posters on walls coupled with advertisements on television and in local newspapers, there has been little in the way of awareness-raising campaigns.
Bushra Abdul Jawad, 43, hosing away the dirt in front of her brick home in this working class neighbourhood, said she is not even aware that the elections are taking place.
"What elections?" she exclaimed when asked about the start of voter registration.
Her cousin Abbas Mohammed, 43, an official from the ministry of education, says he and his wife will make sure they are registered to vote at a centre set up at a nearby clinic.
"The problem is that I do not know who I am voting for and have seen no candidates come down here and introduce themselves," he said, dressed in a white dishdash (male robe).
"If that remains the case in January I will not bother to vote."
His mother, Radhia Hassan, 62, is enthusiastic about the elections but it is unlikely that her preferred candidate will even stand. "I will vote for our religious leader Sistani, may God bless him" she declared. "He will bring us peace and security."
Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the spiritual leader for Iraq's majority Shiites, has told his people that voting was a religious duty, but he himself has no political aspirations.
"I am going to vote for a strong president," said Aysar Abdulzahra, a friend of the family.
Most Iraqis still receive monthly rations after the government took over the cost of the oil-for-food initiative -- implemented as a humanitarian tool while international sanctions were slapped on the former regime in the 1990s.
11/01/2004 15:41 GMT - AFP