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UK-based Iraqis have
until Tuesday to register to vote in the 30 January
elections. But organisers say a disappointingly low
turnout so far has not been representative of
Britain's Iraqi community.
Student Karwan Hamad is much like any other teenager
in Britain preparing to cast his vote for the first
time.
But for him, the election he will vote in next week
is symbolic for many more reasons than that.
The 19-year-old Iraqi Kurd, from Haringey, London,
has just registered at Wembley Conference Centre to
vote in the Iraq elections.
He left Iraq with his father three years ago "for
our own safety".
"Now that I've registered my vote I feel great," he
says.
"My people are about to be somebody."
Nawzad Guron, 34, of north London, shares Mr Hamad's
enthusiasm.
Dressed in national Kurdish dress, he sees his visit
to Wembley Conference Centre exhibition hall one,
together with wife Snur, 29, and 18-month-old
daughter Lana, as a "great family day out".
"Today is a fantastic day for the Kurdish people, a
historic day.
"Everybody is smiling - it's like a big party."
'Bad situation'
Mr Guron came to the UK in 1998 to escape violence
back home in Iraqi Kurdistan.
"It was a very bad situation in Iraq," he says
wistfully.
That violence wiped out 13 members of his family,
including his sister and nephews, in Halabja, in
1986 when 5,000 people were killed by Saddam
Hussein's regime.
The memory of their deaths is still painful for Mr
Guron but he says he now wants to look forward.
"We hope that the election is the solution to all
the problems."
According to the International Organisation for
Migration (IOM), which is organising voting in the
UK and 13 other countries, Mr Hamad and Mr Guron, as
Iraqi Kurds, are in a majority of those who have
registered at Wembley in the last few days.
'Slow and steady'
Nisar Talabany, assistant to the head of the IOM
field office, said that, overall, there had been a
relatively low turnout at the Wembley centre since
its doors opened for registration last Monday.
"The turnout was slow and steady until Saturday when
it picked up," she said.
A lot of coaches have arrived from places like
Cardiff, Birmingham and Peterborough."
Most of the coaches had been organised by political
parties, particularly Kurdish ones, she added.
The IOM says that, before registration began, it was
expecting a total of up to 150,000 potential voters
to register at its three centres in Wembley,
Manchester and Glasgow.
But Ms Talabany said that she was expecting just
15,000 to have registered by the end of Sunday.
'Low turnout'
The story was the same in Scotland.
The Glasgow operation was set up for 16,000 voters -
but by the end of Sunday only 1,000 had registered.
One organiser Faten Hameed, said she thought that
word of the registration has not reached a lot of
people in the ex-pat community.
Sunday was due to be the last day for registration
but the IOM, which is organising the voting in 14
countries, has extended that until Tuesday.
The low UK turnout has mirrored those in other
countries which has led to the two day extension.
The estimation of 150,000 may have been unrealistic
because, Ms Talabany says, "nobody knows how many
Iraqis live here".
"But I think one of the reasons for the low turnout
has been maybe that some people don't want to
participate," she added.
"Some people don't know who they're voting for
because lots of parties have put themselves forward
and, also, Iraqis are just not used to voting."
But the "vast majority" of the 15,000 who had so far
registered had been Kurds, she said.
"There have been a lot more Kurds than every other
group and I think that's because they know who they
are electing and they're familiar with their
parties."
http://www.bbc.co.uk
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