Divided Loyalties Tear at Ex-Iraqis in San Diego

For many of the 8,000 Christian Iraqis who have settled in San Diego over the years, these are excruciating times: Their adopted country and their homeland may be poised to do battle.

Over newspapers and television news in their living rooms, over the backgammon boards at the social hall, over the cash registers at their markets and gas stations, and in the pews of their church in El Cajon, these Chaldeans are frightened and anxious, trying to balance their civic loyalty to the United States with their ingrained love for their homeland.

“We are feeling hurt for both sides,” says the Rev. Michael Bazzi, pastor of St. Peter Chaldean Catholic Church, which with 3,500 families is the focal point for the largest Chaldean community in the United States except for Detroit. They are most heavily concentrated in El Cajon, La Mesa, Spring Valley and East San Diego. (Chaldeans are Eastern rite Christians, and Chaldea is a region of the valley between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Iraq. Most Iraqis are Muslims.)

Like Bazzi, the Chaldeans talk tactfully and cautiously, weighing their words for fairness and wary that their thoughts might be misconstrued and turned against them, as they assess, both intellectually and emotionally, the events unfolding in the Persian Gulf.

“We are Americans, but my relatives are there, in Iraq,” Bazzi said. “Anything I say, I will be hurting one side or the other.

“We are praying. What else can we do?” he asked. “We have people in our community going to Saudi Arabia (as American troops), fighting their cousins across the border.

“So what is there to say? Our cousins, our friends, our people are now in trouble, yet the Americans are also our people. We are troubled.”

San Diego’s Chaldean community is relatively tightly knit. Although they dominate no one corner of San Diego’s community, and although the names of their businesses and retail stores give no hint of the owners’ heritage, they are proud of their cultural identity.

Many say they spend such long hours to make a success of their businesses, working 16 hours a day, seven days a week, that they don’t have time to socialize with one another.

Others do, meeting at their private El Cajon club, where on Friday nights they wear their own Western clothing but enjoy the strains of Middle Eastern music and delight in the authentically dressed belly dancer.

“We tell our members they can wear Arab clothing, but they wear regular Western clothes,” said Sam Hirmez, who owns a San Diego convenience market and is president of the 350-member Chaldean American Assn., a social club.

But they are reluctant to abandon their heritage. Middle Eastern dinners are served at the club, and backgammon is enjoyed among the regulars. At nearby Cuyamaca Community College, a course is taught in Chaldean culture and language.

Detroit was the first and most popular settling area for Chaldeans emigrating from Iraq, given its employment base and the opportunity for non-English speaking Chaldeans to find work on the assembly lines. But some looked directly to California and settled in the quiet town of San Diego in the early 1950s, and as Detroit’s economy and crime problem worsened, many have relocated to San Diego.

As a whole, the local Chaldean community shrugs off what prejudice they say they feel here against them. There’s the infrequent crank phone call, the offhanded remark in a store, even the occasional caller to a radio talk show--like the one on Friday who suggested that local Iraqis be sent to their homeland and be allowed to return as long as they brought captive Americans with them.

Many of them worry that Americans do not understand that they are not Arabs, but are Aramaic-speaking Christians who were natives of Iraq but who fled to America, especially in the 1950s, in search of political freedom and economic prosperity. They are, Chaldeans realize, caught in the middle of pitched emotions.

On Thursday, for instance, California state Sen. Wadie P. Deddeh (D-Bonita)--a native of Iraq who emigrated to the United States in 1947--told his legislative colleagues in Sacramento that he backs President Bush’s military actions in the Middle East. But he urged the President not to create “further enmity toward the United States in that part of the world.”

Other Chaldeans are less supportive of the White House.

“For the last two years, the world was going toward peace. Then all of a sudden, here’s a big mess which could have been avoided by diplomatic channels, by politics, by peaceful means,” said one Chaldean businessman who refused to identify himself. “Yeah, the Iraqi president started it, but the reaction by the United States was abnormal. They magnified the problem. They make it sound like Iraq is some huge, great country, but they only have a few airplanes to be defeated.”

Whatever their leanings, it is clear that the Middle Eastern crisis has permeated Chaldean daily life, dominating conversations.

“Everybody is sad,” said Hirmez, the social club president. “I’ve been here since 1969. This, the U.S.A., is my country. But my second country is Iraq. I lived there all my life until I came here.

“I want to see peace. I don’t want to see any life in jeopardy, to see anybody dead, because of this invasion (of Kuwait). I pray for peace.”