Iraqis Are Far From Home but Voices Will be Heard

Alaa Alasady joined the armed uprising against Saddam Hussein. Shak Hanish endured torture for opposing Hussein’s Baath Party. And Alan Zangana saw his community gassed, deported and massacred by Hussein’s forces.

The three Iraqi immigrants to Southern California have dissimilar backgrounds, with Alasady an Arab Muslim, Hanish a ChaldoAssyrian Christian and Zangana a Kurd. But they are bound in suffering under a brutal dictator -- and now united in new hopes for their beleaguered homeland as they prepare to participate in Iraq’s first democratic elections in six decades.

“We have dreamed all of our lives of putting that piece of paper in the ballot box,” said Hanish, an international relations professor who fled Iraq in 1980 after being forced to sign his own execution papers. “If the election was anywhere in the world, I would go to participate.”

Under voting rules, Iraqi expatriates who were born in Iraq or whose father was born there are eligible to vote even if they are American citizens now. Overseas voting is planned to take place in 14 countries from Jan. 28 to 30; U.S. balloting sites are in Los Angeles and four other cities.

Registration for Iraq’s National Assembly elections begins Monday, and the training of hundreds of poll workers is well underway to handle the estimated 67,000 potential voters who could travel to Los Angeles from around the Western states.

On Thursday, election officials gave the public its first peek at the Los Angeles training sessions.

Voting officials said that security for the election was a high priority, although a U.S. Homeland Security spokeswoman said no specific or credible threats had been received.

The California voting is not without problems. The Iraqi community in San Diego, the largest on the West Coast at an estimated 25,000, is protesting the failure to open a polling station in that area. On Thursday, 12 members of California’s congressional delegation appealed to the Jordan-based organization that is running the overseas voting to open up more polling places in San Diego, San Francisco and the Central Valley.

Jeremy Copeland, spokesman for the International Organization for Migration’s Iraq Out-of-Country Voting program, said it initially was intended to be limited in scope, with plans to conduct voting only in Washington, D.C. But under community pressure, it was expanded to Los Angeles, Detroit, Chicago and Nashville. He said there are no plans to add other cities.

Still, excitement over the election is palpable in places such as the Ahlul-Beyt mosque in Pomona, a sanctuary of Koranic tapestries and glass chandeliers largely frequented by Shiite Muslims from Iraq. Last week, Basim Ridha Alhussaini, who is a voting trainer in Los Angeles, gave a primer at the mosque, complete with a draft ballot.

The crowded ballot includes many coalitions or individuals from which voters may select only one as their choice for the 275 parliamentary seats. Seats will be awarded proportionally.

But this crowd’s leading candidate was clear. “Which is the coalition supported by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani?” one mosquegoer asked, referring to Iraq’s most influential religious leader.

“Number 169,” Alhussaini replied. “The United Iraqi Alliance.”

For Walnut psychologist Ilham Al-Sarraf, the electoral stakes are highly personal. Her son, Sermid, is in Iraq helping rebuild the country’s shattered legal institutions. Her brother is the nation’s Supreme Court chief justice. Her sister, she said, is suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome produced by years of war and terror.

That sister, Widad Hussein, was visiting the mosque from Baghdad last week and poured out anguished stories of a life destroyed. Amid continued lawlessness, she said, one daughter shuttered her dental practice after receiving anonymous death threats. Another, an engineer, has survived three bomb attacks on her office.

“We are living in pure misery,” Hussein said. “The elections are a glimpse of hope to allow the Iraqi people to become human again.”

Among Iraqi expatriates in El Cajon outside San Diego, the religion was different but the sentiments similar. At the St. Peter Chaldean Catholic Cathedral, the Eastern-rite Catholics still celebrate their liturgy in Aramaic, the ancient language of Christ, and have modeled their cathedral’s tile towers after the architecture of Babylon, which is claimed as roots by the ChaldoAssyrians of Iraq.

But excitement over the elections was mixed with deep disappointment that San Diegans would have to travel to Los Angeles twice, to register and to vote. Noori Barka, president of the Chaldean American Foundation, said the community had offered volunteers and the free use of its churches as a voting site, to no avail.

“We have nothing here, nothing! Why?” asked the visibly agitated Bishop Sarhad Y. Jammo, who oversees 19 Western states. “How can you promote democracy through a process that is not democratic in the United States itself?”

Still, over a lunch of Mideastern salads and marinated meats, several community members marveled at the democratic choices finally facing them.

Hanish, the professor who fled Iraq in fear that his secret membership in a left-leaning student group would be his death warrant, planned to vote for the People’s Unity Party. The liberal secular party, he said, represented “the unity of Iraq” and the values of pluralism, tolerance and feminism.

His friend, Said Sipo, said he would vote for the Christian Two Rivers Party to ensure that the rights of Christians would be respected.

In California’s 30,000-member Kurdish community, meanwhile, many see the election as “the end of genocide against Kurds,” Zangana said.

Zangana, program director of the San Diego-based Kurdish Human Rights Watch, came to the United States under political asylum in 1982. He had survived torture during a monthlong prison term under Hussein’s regime. He experienced the mass deportation of his family and 300,000 others from Kurdish cities in 1975. He lost friends in Hussein’s 1988 nerve gas attacks on Kurdish cities.

Like many other Iraqi Americans, he supported the U.S. invasion and does not want the upcoming voting to be postponed even amid continued violence by insurgents in Iraq.

Zangana plans to vote for the Kurdistan Democratic Party in the hope that Iraq will adopt a U.S.-style federalist system.

To secure his and others’ voting rights, more than 300 poll workers are being trained in Los Angeles to staff the voting stations, whose locations have not yet been announced.

At the Radisson Hotel near Los Angeles International Airport early Thursday, poll trainer Alhussaini quizzed 150 poll workers on their upcoming duties.

The poll workers included Suad Jawad, 46, and her 18-year-old daughter, Essra. Like so many Iraqi expatriates, the elder Jawad can reel off the names of many relatives who were tortured or killed by Hussein’s forces. Now, suddenly, her homeland was poised for democratic progress, and she and her family were eager to lend a hand.

“I never imagined this day would happen,” said Jawad, her face crinkling into a smile.

Her Los Angeles-born daughter, weaned on the terrible tales of her family’s suffering, added: “I want to do something for the country, even though I’ve never been there.”