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No-Win Predicament of Iraqi-Immigrant Merchants in Detroit

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

Basil Boji’s cousins fought on opposite sides of the Gulf War.

Sometimes he thinks about what would have happened if one of them had been killed by the other. Or if indeed one of them was. His American cousin is alive and well, but he has not heard from his relatives in Iraq since the U.S. bombing began.

The personal conflict that the suburban grocer has faced since his adoptive and native countries squared off in the Gulf last summer has caused some of his customers to question where his loyalty really lies, Boji says.

And, like many of the 60,000 Chaldeans--Christian Iraqis--in the Detroit area, Boji confesses to “a lot of mixed feelings,” though he insists his allegiance is clear.

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“I am an American. I chose to come here,” says Boji, 45, who emigrated to the United States in 1961 to work in a grocery and liquor shop owned by his relatives. “I have worked hard here to build up my business. This is my country, and I am loyal to my country.”

Boji and the other Chaldeans in the largest population of Christian Iraqis outside Iraq, whose family businesses play a central role in Detroit retailing, have walked a fine line throughout the Persian Gulf crisis. They identify proudly as Iraqi-Americans--but they do not want to alienate their customers.

For them, in business terms, the crisis spawned by Iraq’s Aug. 2 invasion of Kuwait has been a public relations nightmare.

Many Chaldeans responded by retreating into anonymity as the war worsened pre-existing tensions between the merchants and inner-city Detroit residents. The tensions date to the 1970s, when Iraqi merchants stepped in as grocery chains forsook Detroit for its less tempestuous suburbs.

There was reason for the Chaldeans to feel intimidated. Since August, their stores have received hundreds of threatening phone calls. During the first week of the air war, two men dressed in Army fatigues shot at a Chaldean store owner, yelling, “Bang, bang, you’re dead, Arab.” The owner was unhurt.

So lying low, or hiding their true feelings, seemed the wisest course to many of the Chaldeans who own close to 600 food stores in metropolitan Detroit--almost half the area’s total--along with numerous dairies and party-goods stores.

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Faisal Arabo, a Chaldean who produces a weekly Arabic-language public television show, says he knows Chaldeans--anxious to appear patriotic--who dressed up their stores with yellow ribbons and “Welcome home” signs.

“Many people in business have put up American flags out of fear they will not be seen as a good American,” Arabo adds. “Inside their hearts they love this country. They are against the war, but they feel if they don’t say they are for the war, they are going to be attacked in their own business.”

Arabo continued: “I went to a guy I know, and I see his American flag, and I look at him, and I know what he believes, and he looks at me, and says, ‘Well, Faisal, what can I do? If I don’t put the American flag, I’m afraid they might burn my store.’ ”

But not all of Detroit’s Chaldeans were silenced.

Boji and other prominent Chaldean businessmen and community leaders--concerned about the toll that negative stereotypes might take on their businesses, their families and their community--hired a public relations firm and set out to educate Detroiters about who Chaldeans really are.

“People saw us as monsters,” says Tom George, who owns two grocery stores in downtown Detroit. “We were worried about our children in the schools. We were worried about our community as a whole--about people being able to be proud they are Chaldean. And we were worried about the stores.”

George says he spent hundreds of hours in an effort to dispel the myth that Chaldeans were Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s agents in the United States.

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“We worked very hard to get the message out to people that we are not Saddam supporters,” he says. “The fact is we chose to leave the Middle East, we chose to come here, and now we’re in this country, and we are hard working. We are Americans.”

Thrust involuntarily into the limelight after the Iraqi attack on Kuwait, the once insular, still tightknit Chaldean community had not given much thought to the image it had with the rest of the city, Boji says.

“Everybody was too busy working, too busy putting their kids through school, so we never even thought about it,” he says. “In the last 10 months, people have learned more about Chaldeans than they have in the last 50 years.”

But erasing deep-rooted prejudices is no easy task, says George. He estimates that it cost the community $20,000 and thousands of hours of individuals’ time “just to get through the war.”

In addition to holding press conferences, giving interviews and printing a brochure about Chaldean history in Detroit--a history that dates to a large-scale immigration in the 1920s and ‘30s--store owners publicized the community programs and charities they have long sponsored in their neighborhoods.

“Whether it is helping the poor, giving to the soup kitchen, the homeless, the Special Olympics, whatever . . . ,” Boji says. “These are things we’ve always done, but now we just tried to let people know about it.”

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But the overall emphasis was to let the public know that “we are American like anyone else,” says George. “Like the Irish, the Germans, the Poles, the Italians, who came here and worked hard and assimilated.”

Richard Bulaka, an American-born Chaldean who works as a commercial real estate agent in Detroit, says the community’s public relations efforts prevented anti-Arab violence in Detroit from being worse.

“I think the perception of what a Chaldean is has really changed,” Bulaka says. “People realize, ‘Hey, he’s a real guy; he’s just like us.’ They see Chaldeans are not backward-type Arabs riding on camels like the ones they see on TV.”

Bulaka says he feels the friction between his two national identities most keenly when he sees his mother crying.

“She has a sister in Baghdad, and she hasn’t heard from her since the war. I supported our troops, and I’m an American first. But when you go home and your mom is crying every day. . . .”

Many Chaldeans say they are encouraged by the supportive reception Americans have given to Victims of War, a newly formed group aimed at raising money to aid Iraqi civilians. VOW has raised more than $160,000 since it was founded less than a month ago by Detroit-area Chaldean physicians, attorneys and businessmen.

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Today, a delegation of VOW members will leave for Baghdad, bringing money and medical supplies to their devastated native land. The supplies will be distributed by UNICEF and the Red Crescent Society, the Arab arm of the International Red Cross.

The four-member delegation will try to contact hundreds of relatives whom Detroit Chaldeans have not heard from since the war began.

Dalloo says it is crucial that Chaldeans be able to ease the suffering of the people of Iraq without being labeled unpatriotic.

“I’ve felt extremely helpless,” Dalloo says. “This is one way we can make a difference, to focus our efforts on the unfortunate people of Iraq. We are Americans first. We chose to be here. That doesn’t mean we can divorce ourselves from the 5,600 years of our heritage left behind in Iraq.”

WHO ARE THE CHALDEANS?

BACKGROUND: Chaldean Christians (pronounced kal-DEE-an) are a minority in predominantly Muslim Iraq. Many immigrated to the United States in search of religious freedom and a more prosperous life.

POPULATION: About 60,000 in metropolitan Detroit; an estimated 15,000 elsewhere in the United States, including a community of several thousand in San Diego.

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RELIGION: Chaldeans are members of the Eastern rite of the Catholic Church. There are four parishes in Detroit and four in California.

BUSINESS: Chaldeans operate more than 600 independent grocery and food-and-liquor shops in the Detroit area. In their native Iraq, they often operated similar outlets because their religion allows them to sell alcohol, while Muslims cannot. In this country, the Chaldeans tend to be entrepreneurs and small-business owners. But second- and third-generation Chaldeans have entered other professions, including law, accounting and medicine.

FAMILY: As farmers in northern Iraq--an area that in ancient times was called Chaldea--Chaldeans lived in extended families who worked together to produce food. Some Chaldeans today credit the role of the extended family as a key to their entrepreneurial success.

HISTORY: Most of Detroit’s Chaldeans came from a village in Iraq called Tel Kaif. Many still have families there.

OTHER ARABS: About 250,000 Arab-Americans live in the Detroit area.

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