Daniel González
The Arizona Republic
Jan. 23, 2005

Mona K. Oshana was 8 when her family escaped from Iraq, slipping away at 4 a.m. from their home in Kirkuk and traveling secretly by bus to Baghdad and then to Jordan.

It was 1977 and in his climb to power Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was intensifying his persecution of religious and ethnic minorities through a brutal campaign of fear, intimidation, torture and death. As Assyrians, a Christian minority in Iraq, Oshana's family knew they had to get out.

"It was a time when a lot of fear was starting to spread into the population. You literally had to escape," recalled Oshana, 36, whose journey took her from Iraq to Jordan and then to the United States, where her family settled in Chicago.

Oshana, now a resident of Glendale, planned to embark today on yet another predawn bus journey, motivated this time not by fear but by freedom.

At 5:30 a.m. she and six other members of her family were to leave on a 12-hour round-trip bus ride from Phoenix to Southern California, where a special polling station has been set up to allow Iraqi nationals to register to vote in the historic Jan. 30 election in Iraq.

Iraqis in the United States must register by the end of today and then return to vote on Jan. 28, 29 or 30 at polling stations in Los Angeles and four other cities across the country.

So next week, Oshana, the mother of three, will take time off from her job as a Realtor and travel back to Southern California, where at last she will cast her vote for a slate of candidates to serve in an interim 275-seat parliament. Its main duties will include electing a new president and writing a draft constitution for Iraq.

She is just one of hundreds of Iraqi expatriates living in the Valley who will be making the double journey to Southern California to take part in the election. It is the closest polling place.

Members of the Valley's large Iraqi Chaldo-Assyrian population chartered buses to transport voters both Saturday and today to California, said Fred Rustam, 48, a community leader from Gilbert.

Several hundred Shiite Muslims from Iraq living in the Valley also are expected to take part in the election, said Jabir Algarawi, a community leader from Phoenix. Many have rented vans especially for the occasion and are traveling in caravans of four and five vehicles, he said.

For Iraqi expatriates, the hectic week of traveling back and forth between Phoenix and Southern California signifies only a minor inconvenience compared with the daily onslaught of car bombings and attacks that have killed dozens in Iraq, where insurgents are trying to sabotage the election.

The expatriates see the election as an opportunity to help bring freedom and democracy to Iraq after 38 years of totalitarianism under Saddam Hussein's regime.

"I consider my participation in voting as a bullet in the heart of the terrorists, the people bombing and killing people," said Algarawi, 37, who traveled to Los Angeles on Thursday to register with his wife, Amira, 26. Algarawi, who said he was tortured by Saddam Hussein's security forces, fled Iraq after taking part in the failed 1991 uprising to oust the Iraqi leader after the first Gulf War in 1991.

Expatriates also believe the ballots they cast will play a crucial role because many Iraqis inside the country will be too afraid to go to the polls.

For the election, voters will cast ballots not for individual candidates but for slates of candidates. There are 111 political entities listed on the ballot representing thousands of candidates. To learn about the candidate slates, Iraqi expatriates mostly have relied on the Internet and community leaders.

"Our people back home are still being persecuted. We feel we need to be able to speak for them," said Oshana, who plans to make the trip to Southern California with her mother, three sisters and two brothers.

Even so, many Iraqi expatriates here expressed frustration that a polling station wasn't set up in Phoenix, and believe thousands of Iraqi expatriates will be excluded from voting because there aren't enough polling stations throughout the country.

There are 13,000 to 15,000 Iraqi expatriates living in the Valley, including about 10,000 Chaldo-Assyrians, most of whom have moved here in the past five to 10 years from Detroit and Chicago, where the largest concentrations of Iraqi expatriates in the United States live. There are an additional 4,000 to 5,000 Shiite Muslims living in the Valley, most of whom came to Phoenix as refugees after the first Gulf War.

Community leaders fear most of those eligible won't be able to vote because family obligations and work kept them from making the two trips to Southern California. That could skew the outcome of the election at a time when Shiites and Assyrians in Iraq are trying to gain political power following decades of persecution.

Assyrian community leaders chartered buses to help get as many members of their community to the polls, but many Iraqi families in the Valley find themselves having to choose who will get to vote.

Noel Kando, 53, of Glendale, who left Iraq in 1976 because of religious persecution, planned to travel on one of the chartered buses on Saturday.

But his wife was staying in Phoenix.

"I'm going by myself because my wife has to be here with the kids," Kando said.

Oshana's husband, Wilson, 40, is also disappointed he won't be able to vote. He has an ailing mother to care for in addition to his three children, so he couldn't make the trip to California.

June Chua, an International Organization for Migration official overseeing voting in the United States, said the five polling cities were selected in an effort to reach the greatest number of Iraqi nationals. The cities are Los Angeles, Detroit, Chicago, Nashville and Washington, D.C. As a precaution, election officials have contracted a private security company to watch over polling stations in the United States.

All five cities have large concentrations of Iraqi nationals based on census data, interviews with Iraqi community leaders and the Iraq Embassy in the United States, Chua said.

There are an estimated 240,000 Iraqis in the United States eligible to vote in the election, she said. Through Thursday, 12,079 Iraqis in the United States had registered, she said. To be eligible, voters must have been born in Iraq, or have a father who was born in Iraq and be at least 18.

Chua also said only five cities were selected for polling places to guard against fraud. Officials had only 10 weeks to set up the polling stations after officials in Iraq decided to extend voting to Iraqi nationals living outside the country. Including the United States, a total of 14 countries have set up polling stations for the Iraq election.

"We totally sympathize" with the people who have to travel long distances to register and vote, Chua said.

But considering the short time frame and the information gathered, she said, "We have done what we can to reach the greatest number of Iraqis in this country."