Saddam re-elected in one-candidate election

Saddam Hussein was today re-elected for another seven-year term as President of Iraq.

Iraq announced that there had had been a 100% yes vote.

Saddam repeated his performance at the polls of the last referendum in 1995 when he won more than 99.9% of the vote, as his people turned out in their thousands to return him to office.

The British Foreign Office joined the White House in rejecting the show of democracy, after Iraqis cast their ballots with missiles firing into the sky above the dictator’s home town of Tikrit, 95 miles north of Baghdad.

A British Foreign Office spokesman said a truly democratic poll was impossible, calling the referendum “a travesty of democracy”.

“You can’t have free elections when the electorate goes to the polls in the knowledge that they have only one candidate for president, when that candidate has a history of using weapons of mass destruction against his own people, that candidate routinely murders and tortures opponents of the regime, and the penalty for slandering that sole candidate is to have one’s tongue cut out.”

In Washington, US President George W Bush’s press secretary Ari Fleischer dismissed yesterday’s one-man race: “Obviously, it’s not a very serious day, not a very serious vote and nobody places any credibility on it.”

But many of Saddam’s supporters took a different view, expressing strong anti-American feeling after several months during which President Bush has raised the pitch of war talk against Iraq.

As one voter displayed his ballot paper stamped with his own blood in support of the dictator, he declared: “All Iraq is for Saddam. He is our leader and our father.”