Iraqi Refugees in Iran Eager to Cast Votes

The Iraqis say they’ve created a little Baghdad here on the southern outskirts of Tehran. The streets of Dowlatabad buzz with Arabic, not Persian, and falafel stands line the alleys.

For more than three decades, this impoverished neighborhood offered refuge to Iraqis expelled by Saddam Hussein’s Baathist government.

With Iraq’s elections fast approaching, a registration and polling station has opened for Iraqi refugees here.

Bright banners bear slogans such as “The future awaits us!” The walls are plastered with colorful posters bearing images of Iraq’s revered Shiite Muslim leaders: powerful cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, along with Ayatollah Mohammed Bakr Hakim, who lived in exile in Iran before returning to Iraq, where he was killed in 2003 by a car bomb in Najaf.

“Whoever enters through that door does so with the hope to return to Iraq,” said election official Shaker Ahmad, pointing to the entrance of the indoor sports arena that has been converted into a temporary polling station.

Iran has long been home to the world’s largest number of Iraqi exiles, with the United Nations reporting 202,000 registered refugees in 2003. Since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, their fortunes have improved. Baghdad has recognized their citizenship, and some have returned. Those in Iran are preparing to vote in next Sunday’s balloting. With more than 20,000 voters registered, Iran is expecting the highest voter turnout of any of the 14 countries where expatriate Iraqis can vote.

Karbala Falafel’s owner, 63-year-old Mohammed Taghi Karbalai, said he had trekked back to Iraq five times in two years to visit the shrine of Imam Hussein in Karbala.

His family, who had moved to Karbala three generations ago “for the love of Hussein,” was kicked out in 1971. Although he’s not planning on moving back to Iraq soon, he is proud to have the registration ticket that entitles him to vote.

“Iraq has been ruined by the Baathists,” he said, explaining that he planned to vote for the United Iraqi Alliance, apparently supported by Sistani, so that “the Shias get a chance at government and rebuilding the country.”

If the situation in Iraq improves, Karbalai said with a mischievous smile, he would return and “open a bistro in Karbala called Tehrani Falafel.”

Fouad Abbas, 52, still carries his military service card, decades after he was stripped of Iraqi citizenship and forced into exile. The tattered green paper has a photo of a young Abbas, who served 45 months in Saddam Hussein’s army before he was expelled to Iran in 1980.

“We want justice and a government that recognizes all of Iraq’s children as equal,” he said.

Abbas was arrested with his family and sent to the border on a truck, he said, “because we were Kurdish and Shia, a combination that didn’t figure well in Saddam’s racist calculations.”

Though Hussein’s Baathist government was secular, it was dominated by Sunnis who discriminated for decades against Iraq’s majority Shiites and minorities, along with anyone who refused to join the Baath Party.

Iranians, who are also predominantly Shiite, have long been drawn to the Iraqi cities of Najaf and Karbala, home to the sect’s holiest sites. Many have lived there for generations, often regarding themselves as Iraqi and speaking Arabic at home.

Hussein’s government singled out those families, branding them Iranian, and deporting about 74,000 to Iran in 1971, in the first of three major deportations. Ahmad, the election official, was among those expelled.

“We were treated ‘nicely,’ if you will, because we were a very respected family. We were given 24 hours to pack our belongings and leave Iraq,” said Ahmad, 53, who was born in Baghdad. “Most others were simply arrested wherever they were found and taken directly to the border.”

Ahmad’s father, too, was born in Iraq, but his grandfather was born in a village in the Ilam region between Iraq and Iran.

“National borders back then didn’t mean anything to us,” he said. “But once we settled in Baghdad and prospered into a wealthy merchant family, we saw ourselves as Iraqi.”

Ten years after his expulsion, Ahmad drove to the border to pick up his sister-in-law and uncle. The government had gathered more than 800 merchant families, stripped them of their belongings and driven them to a spot about three miles from the Iranian border. They were given a choice: Walk to Iran or be shot.

Ahmad’s fortunes turned last year when the interim Iraqi government adopted a law granting citizenship to everyone born on Iraqi soil. He was an Iraqi again.

“Saddam threw us out because we refused to become members of his Baathist party,” said retired chemistry teacher Sharifeh Abdulmajid, 52, whose physician husband was arrested and detained while she and her 4-year old daughter were driven to the border in 1980.

For 25 years, Abdulmajid didn’t know whether her husband was alive.

Last year, she was able to go back to Iraq and look for him. “An office run by the Americans told me he had been executed shortly after his arrest,” she said.

Still, Abdulmajid plans to return to Baghdad, where she has other relatives, “and help rebuild Iraq.”

Older refugees in Iran have yearned for years to be acknowledged as Iraqis. Many of their children have the opposite dream: born in Iran, they long to be recognized as Iranians.

Zeinab Yaseri, 21, who works as an election official at the polling center in Tehran, said she felt Iranian despite her Iraqi lineage. “I’ve been born and raised here,” she said firmly.

But she does not hold Iranian nationality because Iranian law bestows citizenship based on blood, not birthplace.

Yaseri spent six months in Baghdad after the war -- but decided to return to Tehran for good. “They are at least 15 years behind Iran,” she said. “It would be foolish of anyone to return to Iraq under these conditions, especially for the young.”