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Iranians in Iraq and Kurdistan-Iraq vote for first
time
18.6.2005
Headline "Iranians in Iraq vote for first time" |
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BAGHDAD, June 17:
Polling stations were open in four locations across
Iraq on Friday to allow Iranian expatriates to vote
here for the first time in their own country’s
presidential election.
Several hundred people cast ballots in Baghdad and
the central holy city of Karbala. But turnout was
weak at other locations with only a few dozen
showing up in the southern port city of Basra and in
Suliemaniyah, in the northern Kurdistan region,
officials said.
The voting in Iraq is of major significance given
the deep-seated animosity that existed between the
former regime of Saddam Hussein and the Islamic
republic to the east.
Iraq fought a 1980-1988 war against Iran in which an
estimated one million people died. Saddam at the
time expelled thousands of Iraqis of Iranian origin,
most of them Shiites from the south.
“This is of special importance to us because it is
another proof of the new chapter in relations
between Iraq and Iran,” said Hasan Kazimi Qomi, the
Iranian ambassador in Baghdad.
“A very dark cloud has already passed over.”
Iran’s Foreign Minister Kamal Kharazi came to Iraq
in May, shortly after the Shia-dominated government
of Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari was sworn in, the
highest-ranking Iranian official to visit since the
fall of military dictator Saddam’s regime two years
ago.
Several ministers in Jaafari’s government and
leading allies including Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, who
heads the Shia bloc in parliament, spent many years
in exile in Tehran and have close ties with Iran.
Iranian officials in Baghdad estimate the number of
Iranians in Iraq at about 12,000. However, it is
unclear if this figure includes Iranian Kurds living
in Kurdistan who have called for a boycott of the
Iran vote.
In the south alone there are about 3,000 Iranian
women who had come to Iraq after Saddam’s fall with
their Iraqi husbands, members of the paramilitary
Badr Brigade trained and supported by Iran to fight
the former regime, according to embassy official
Sayed Sadati.
The spiritual leader of Iraq’s majority Shias, Grand
Ayatollah Ali Sistani, is Iranian. But his aides
said it would be complicated for Sistani to leave
his base in Najaf and travel to nearby Karbala to
cast his ballot.
Sistani was the driving force in rallying millions
of Shias to vote for the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA)
list headed by Hakim.
“Long live the Islamic republic!” declared Malika
Ali Amin, 55, as she entered the polling station at
the Iranian embassy in Baghdad.
She deposited her ballot in a box on a table with
the Iranian flag on the side and a portrait of
revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini
staring from above.
Amin said she voted for frontrunner Akbar Hashemi
Rafsanjani. She was expelled from the central city
of Kufa with her family in the early 1980s and
except for occasional visits back she has no desire
to return.
Another group of voters born in the southern Iraqi
city of Amara and now living in predominantly Arab
Ahwaz province in Iran voiced similar sentiments.
“What’s there to come back to, they took away
everything from us,” says Badriya Haidari, 53,
adding that her 18-year-old son Zuhair was executed
by Saddam’s henchmen in 1983.
AFP
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