For expatriates, distance no obstacle

NEW CARROLLTON, Md. -- Mudafer al-Ziyadi, an Iraqi-American from Weymouth, endured a 10-hour van ride and a snowstorm Saturday night because he wanted to send a message to President Bush through a ballot box.

"What is causing terrorism to grow in Iraq is the occupation," said Ziyadi, 38, an auto inspector whose family remains in Baghdad. "Getting an Iraqi government in Iraq is the only way out and the only way to stop the insurgency."

Ziyadi, along with the 11 other expatriates who joined him in the trek from Quincy to the voting station in the Washington suburb of New Carrollton, cast his vote for the United Iraqi Alliance, the Shi'ite coalition that is expected to dominate the Iraqi National Assembly.

Shi'ites make up the majority of Iraqis but faced oppression under Saddam Hussein's regime.

About 26,000 Iraqi expatriates in the United States, and 280,000 worldwide, registered to vote in the election, a small fraction of the eligible voters outside Iraq. Despite bad weather and tight security, turnout at the five US polling places over the weekend was expected to top 90 percent, according to the Geneva-based International Organization for Migration, which organized the election outside Iraq.

In Chicago, where 6,400 people had registered at two sites, expatriates made long journeys -- from Lincoln, Neb., El Paso, Milwaukee, and the Dakotas -- to cast their votes.

"If bullets were coming down all 600 miles, I was coming to vote," said Qadir Aware, 52, a Kurd who runs a multicultural center in Sioux Falls, S.D. Aware, who voted for a Kurdish slate at the Rosemont Convention Center just outside Chicago, arrived with 10 other Kurds from North and South Dakota and Minnesota. His finger was stained with the purple stamp proving he had voted.

Aware, a former Kurdish freedom fighter from Sulamani in Kurdistan, left Iraq in 1975 and took refuge in Iran, where he met his wife. During Hussein's rule, he said, 39 members of his family were killed. One, a cousin, was an artist who had both eyes mutilated; another cousin, a political poet, had his fingers cut off to prevent him from writing. Both died within six months, Aware said.

"The life of Iraqi people, and especially the Kurdish people, fought to see this day, and it is shameful for us if we don't come to vote and bring freedom and democracy," Aware said. "Given the chance, they can be a mecca of democracy in the Middle East."

About 90 percent of the estimated 30,000 Iraqis in the Chicago area are Assyrian Christian, a minority that had little voice under Hussein's rule. Casting a vote yesterday was a chance to be heard, many of them said. Among them was Edward Odisho, 66, a linguistics professor at Northeastern Illinois University who also taught at a university in Baghdad before fleeing Iraq in 1980, the year after Hussein took power.

"It's something that really is larger than words for us," said Odisho, who voted at the second Chicago-area site, the ChaldoAssyrian Community Center in Skokie. "It's the transformation from the culture of bullets into the culture of ballots."

Considered an intellectual in Iraq, but an opponent of the Ba'ath party, Odisho was under continual surveillance. He was questioned by the secret police and eventually subjected to a travel ban. Once the ban was lifted, he made his way to Britain and Rome before moving to the United States in 1981. Odisho, who voted for a slate led by an Assyrian, recently has worked with the State Department on linguistic and education issues for a postwar Iraq.

Through Saturday, about 3,500 expatriates had voted at the two Chicago sites, and officials expected most of the rest to turn out yesterday. In Washington, a little more than 2,000 had voted as of yesterday morning, a turnout of about 80 percent.

Polling also took place in and around Detroit, Nashville, and Los Angeles. Security was high at the polling locations, with bomb-sniffing dogs and metal detectors.

Despite the fortifications outside, a celebratory mood prevailed at the Ramada Inn conference room where votes were cast in Maryland yesterday. "It's a new hope," said Washington resident Reem Khalil, 42, like Ziyadi a Shi'ite who voted for the United Iraqi Alliance. "It's a right that I never dreamed of having."

To register, Iraqi expatriates needed only to prove that they or their fathers were born in Iraq. Many of the voters in New Carrollton were US citizens, but only one interviewed said she had also voted in the American presidential election. Neither Ziyadi nor Radhi al-Janabi, the organizer of the Quincy van trip who skipped several days of work to cast a ballot in Maryland, voted in November.

Iraqi voters questioned yesterday had mixed feelings about the US invasion but expressed unanimous contempt for the insurgents.

"They're not going to stop us. They are bad people, killers," said Karwan Faraj, 32, who fled from Kurdistan in 1997 and settled in Bucks County, Pa.

Wirzbicki reported from New Carrollton, Md.; Ferkenhoff reported from Chicago.