LEBANESE /AUSTRALIANS VOTE IN LEBANON

AN estimated 12,000 Australians turned out to vote in Lebanon's fiercely contested election recently - Fadi and Noha Zreika from Sydney were among them.

Mr Zreika, who owns a brick-cleaning company in St Ives on Sydney's north shore, has been working for the past two months for the campaign of Saad Hariri's Future Movement, which is competing against the coalition run by the militant Hezbollah.

In the battle between Saad Hariri and Hassan Nasrallah, the Australian couple are firmly in the Hariri camp.

They fear for the future of Lebanon if Hezbollah wins with its March 8 alliance.

"Too many guns with Hezbollah," Mr Zreika told The Australian yesterday at his family's ancestral home in the village of El Minieh, about an hour's drive north of Beirut.

"We need democracy, we need freedom, we needs kids to be safe, we need good roads, we need traffic lights," he said.

"We need everything we have in Sydney. We don't need a war with any country - with any Arab country or with Israel."

Mr Zreika estimates about 2000 Australians with dual Lebanese citizenship have arrived to vote in El Minieh alone. He and his friends have been co-ordinating the use of their cars to transport Australians, particularly elderly people, to polling booths.

He has also been assisting some of the Australians, particularly those whose Arabic is not good, to produce the required identity cards and register to vote.

Mrs Zreika, holding her six-month-old baby as she was about to go to a polling booth, said: "Hariri is all about a democratic country - no wars, he wants a modern country, giving people a fair go, living in peace.

"This is our country as well, this is our family, and we want a country here that our children can come to if they want to in the future."

They have brought their four children with them through the election period.

The Zreikas say they paid their own fares to Lebanon but Noha says she knows the Future Movement has paid the fares for "a lot" of Australians.

It's a sign of how close the election is expected to be, and how much money has been spent, that both major alliances have been paying for people to return to Lebanon to vote.

Under Lebanon's system postal votes from overseas are not allowed.

The parties are also able to protect themselves against the wasted investment of paying $3000 of airfares to buy one vote if that person then votes for someone else or not at all.

Lebanon does not have a secret ballot the same way Australia does and party officials, through colour and number coding, are able to fill in the ticket they want the person to place in the ballot box and can then tell whether that person turned up to vote.

Apart from airfares, locals in Lebanon are often rewarded with fridges in return for a vote - it has been known that party officials, unhappy if a person did not turn up, have gone to the person's home following the election and demanded the fridge back.

The March 14 alliance is identified with the US and Saudi Arabia and is known to have received large amounts of money from Saudi Arabia while the March 8 alliance is allied to Iran and Syria and is believed to have been heavily funded by Iran.

AAP