Liberians optimistic about election, Chafee says

War-torn though Liberia may be, you'd never know it from watching the country's residents. So says Sen. Lincoln D. Chafee, who just returned from four days there.

Chafee, who visited the West African country to observe its first presidential election since the end of a 14-year civil war, said the tone there was markedly optimistic.

"The people are upbeat," he said. "There's positive energy. They've seen the bottom, and there's a feeling that things are going to get better."

There's been no fighting since a 2003 peace agreement that closely followed warlord-turned-president Charles Taylor's departure from the country. United Nations election workers have been in the country for a year, registering voters, handling candidate registration and ballot printing, setting up polling places.

The election workers "have done this in Haiti, East Timor, Sierra Leone," Chafee said yesterday. "They know what they're doing."

Even with polling places throughout the country, some people had to walk three days to reach one, Chafee said.

They did. And they started lining up at midnight, even though the polls didn't open until 8 a.m.

The proportion of Liberia's residents who registered to vote was just more than half. However, Liberians are a young population -- 44 percent are 14 or younger, and the median age is 18. That means nearly everyone who could register to vote in this country of 3.5 million did.

The United Nations reported 70-percent turnout. Election monitors swabbed voters' left thumbs with purple ink, à la the January elections in Iraq.

"On Wednesday, everywhere we went," Chafee said, "everybody had voted."

Chafee said people seemed to have faith in the system. "There was nobody disparaging the process, saying 'I'm not going to vote. We know who's going to win. It's all rigged.' None of that," he said by phone from Washington, as he drove to the airport to return to Rhode Island. (He will hold a news briefing today at 2 p.m. at the Liberian Association of Rhode Island's office, 807 Broad St., Providence, to talk more about his visit.)

Chafee traveled with Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Jendayi Frazer, an official from the U.S. Agency for International Development and U.S. Rep. Donald Payne, D-N.J. Chafee said he was chosen for the delegation because of his status as a senator from Rhode Island, home to the largest per-capita population of Liberians in the country, and as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

The delegation left Washington Sunday, flew ahead four time zones, and landed in Monrovia Monday morning after an all-night flight with a refueling stop in Cape Verde, another country that's the birthplace or ancestral home of many Rhode Islanders. Chafee said he got out of the plane to look around, and was disappointed to find everything obscured by darkness.

They met Monday with U.N. election workers, and visited polling places in Monrovia and the countryside Tuesday, traveling in armored vehicles the embassy provided.

Wednesday, the election workers counted ballots. Chafee's delegation got a post-election debriefing, and visited a training center for Liberian police officers and a shelled-out military barracks being rebuilt to house border patrol agents. About these, Chafee said: "Once again, the United Nations doing good work and the United States helping with the funding."

This was Chafee's first trip to sub-Saharan Africa. (He had previously been to Egypt.)

Yesterday, he was back in the United States, monitoring news reports just like everyone else as observers predicted a runoff election next month.

Whoever becomes the president faces a daunting job. Even in the capital, Chafee said, many residents have no running water, no wastewater treatment, no trash pickup.

"You drive through Monrovia at night and see buildings that are crumbling down, and it makes you realize the insanity of war," Chafee said. "What has it done?"