Right Voices

Iraqi Expats Vote Around World

In the nations bordering their homeland, in a furniture warehouse in Australia and in an events center in London, Iraqis on Friday began voting for an interim government that they hope will bring peace and order.

“Iraqis are finally expressing themselves. It is a victory for all the dead that Saddam Hussein killed,” said Falastin Saheb, 25, an Iraqi who has been living in Syria for two years and is running a polling center there, in Rukn el-Din, a Kurdish neighborhood.

Banners outside the center read: “Let us hear your voice.”

Iraqis living outside their country will be allowed to cast their votes until Sunday, that is when their peers who live within Iraq will begin casting their votes inside the borders of their country.

“Today I feel I am voting for Halabjah (search) and the people who lost their lives there,” Rasool said, referring to the town where Saddam Hussein’s forces used chemical weapons against Kurdish rebels in 1988.

In Iran, 75 percent of the 81,000 eligible voters registered. Many of Iraq’s Arab neighbors fear the country’s Shiite Muslim majority, long suppressed under Saddam, will vote in a government that will strengthen ties Iran’s ruling Shiite clerics.

Many of the voters waiting outside a Tehran mosque used as a polling station said they came out of respect for Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani , Iraq’s top Shiite cleric, who has called voting a “religious duty.”

“It’s a very happy day for me, I am happier than on my wedding day,” said Saja Verdi, 26, an unemployed mother of two. “We are going to a start a new life in Iraq after long years of oppression.”

In Sydney, Rebwar Aziz, a 38-year-old bus driver who has lived in Australia since 1992, said voters should not be deterred by insurgent violence.

“This is freedom for Iraqi people,” he said. “The point is if you need freedom, you have to fight for it.

“I feel great. I can’t express my happiness.”