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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.
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 Shia 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:
What documents are required to register to vote? (A
photo ID card and proof of their or their father's
birth in Iraq.) How many workers are needed to open
a voting station? (Four)
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."
http://www.latimes.com
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