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Christian Iraqis in the United States claim they are
being effectively shut out of the planned Jan. 30
election for a new government in Baghdad at a time
when their community faces murderous violence and
discrimination back home.
Jacklin Bejan, a spokeswoman for the Chaldean-Assyrian-American
Advocacy Council, said the decision by election
organizers to set up just one polling station west
of the Mississippi — in Los Angeles — means that
tens of thousands of eligible voters will not be
able to register or vote.
In San Diego alone, there are an estimated 25,000
expatriate Iraqis of Assyrian or Chaldean ancestry
who could vote in the election. Iraq's Chaldean-Assyrian
community is one of the largest remaining Christian
populations in the Middle East, and has been the
target of intimidation, assassinations and bombings
by Islamist terrorists in recent months.
For some Iraqi communities in Northern California,
"you are talking about an 800-mile round trip just
to register next week, and another 800-mile round
trip to vote on January 30," Mrs. Bejan said.
"We offered to do everything they wanted to set up
more polling places — locations, security, staffing
— and we were just told no," she said.
The Geneva-based International Organization for
Migration (IOM), working with Iraqi election
officials, selected five cities where the estimated
240,000 eligible Iraqis can vote: Washington,
Nashville, Chicago, Detroit and Los Angeles.
About 1 million Iraqis in 14 countries will be
eligible to cast ballots in the Jan. 30 election,
considered a critical step in the country's rocky
path to self-rule.
Fifteen U.S.-based Chaldean and Assyrian groups
signed a petition this week protesting the voting
procedures in the United States. They noted that
Nashville, with a community of only about 4,000
Iraqis of Kurdish origin, has a polling site, while
San Diego County, whose Iraqi expatriate community
is the third-largest in the country, does not.
Large Iraqi Christian communities in central and
Northern California, as well as Arizona and Nevada,
are also effectively shut out, the petition said.
"The seemingly arbitrary allocation of polling
stations is seen as an outright act of
discrimination against non-Kurdish Iraqis,
especially the Chaldo-Assyrians who comprise 85
percent to 90 percent of all Iraqi-Americans," the
petition said.
The Sunni Muslim Kurds were a staunch U.S. ally in
the drive to oust Saddam Hussein. But they have also
clashed in northern Iraq with Chaldeans, Assyrians
and other smaller minorities over political control
and economic resources.
The issue has attracted the attention of members of
Congress.
Rep. Frank R. Wolf, Virginia Republican, wrote to
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell earlier this week
questioning the distribution of polling places and
noting the campaign of terror targeting Christians
inside Iraq.
"It is in our nation's own political interest to
help ensure that this group, which is pro-democratic
and pro-Western, can participate in the democratic
process and have its rights protected in the new
government," he wrote.
And 12 California lawmakers wrote this week directly
to election organizers, urging the opening of two
more polling sites in San Diego and Modesto, Calif.
Sarah Tosh, spokeswoman for the IOM's Iraq
Out-of-Country Voting Program, said in an e-mail
that the U.S. sites were picked based on census data
and in close consultation with U.S. Iraqi groups and
the Iraqi Embassy.
"They agreed that if we could only have registration
and polling in five cities, then these were the best
ones," she said.
She said officials recognize that the one California
registration and voting site "will be inconvenient
for Iraqi voters in San Diego," but, she added,
"Iraqis living in other parts of the United States
also face long commutes to vote."
With voter registration set to begin Monday, "it
would be impossible for us to consider opening new
sites at this stage in the process."
State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said
yesterday he had not seen Mr. Wolf's letter to Mr.
Powell and would not comment on it.
Michael Kozak, acting assistant secretary for human
rights, democracy and labor, said in a Wednesday
briefing that the U.S. government was merely
"facilitating" the expatriate vote, which was
organized and financed by the Iraqis.
"We are not making the rules. We're not the ones
selecting the sites," Mr. Kozak said.
Nina Shea, director of the Freedom House's Center
for Religious Freedom, said the passive stance of
the U.S. government reflected "the proverbial tin
ear our bureaucracy has for the importance of
religion in the Muslim world and in the Middle
East."
"We formed an alliance with the Kurds for
understandable reasons, but that does not mean we
should just view the country's persecuted Christian
minority as an inconvenience," she said.
Mrs. Bejan said the voting question wasn't an
academic one. Under Iraq's proposed voting formula,
the expatriate U.S. vote could ensure as many as
five seats for Assyrian-Chaldean candidates in the
new National Assembly.
"Those are seats we badly need just to protect our
property and our lives," she said.
Nicholas Kralev contributed to this article
http://washingtontimes.com
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