NAJAF, Iraq, Jan. 30 -- The Shiite Muslims of Najaf went to the polls Sunday carrying decades of grief, memories of fathers wrenched from homes, scars left from torture and the names of loved ones dumped in mass graves. And they put it all in the ballot box.
"Today was the triumph over 35 years of suppression," said Nadeen Abdul Raheem, an elections official. He watched in satisfaction as poll workers sitting on blankets on a schoolroom floor counted ballots by kerosene lantern. "This is a new experience."
Iraqi election workers count paper ballots after polling stations closed in Najaf, where Shiite religious leaders had said it was a Muslim duty to vote.
(Faleh Kheiber -- Reuters)
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Election day in Iraq was an occasion of fear for many, violence for some. But in Najaf, it was a time of rejoicing.
Shiites, who make up an estimated 60 percent of Iraq's population, were kept under the thumb of rulers from the Sunni Muslim minority for most of the last century. When President Saddam Hussein was in power, Shiites were impoverished and imprisoned. They were herded into minefields during Iraq's war with Iran in the 1980s. Many were executed; their families were sent the bill for the bullets used to kill them.
The election Sunday was their victory over the dictator.
"My father helped bring this election today," said Farezdak Abdel Nibi, 34, at a whitewashed concrete school building serving as a polling station.
When Nibi was 20, he and his father were eating breakfast when Iraqi security officials burst in and took them away, he said. Their arrest came during a large roundup of Shiites by Hussein's security apparatus. Nibi and his father, speechless in fear, were taken to a police station. Nibi said he was held for 15 days. The last time his father was seen alive was three years later. After that, there was no news about what happened to him, Nibi said.
"We kept our hope that he had survived. But when we saw all the mass graves Saddam had made, I knew that we had lost him," Nibi said.
"This election is the fruit of every drop of blood that was shed in 1991," Nibi said, referring to a Shiite uprising following the Persian Gulf War that was brutally suppressed by Hussein's forces. "I thank my father. He had three sons who married. None of us had a wedding party, out of respect for him. Today, we can celebrate. Today, we will have a wedding party."
At another polling place in Najaf, Mahmoud Juwad Kathem, 46, said that for four years, he never saw the sun. During his last year in college, Hussein's secret police arrested him for belonging to Dawa, an outlawed Shiite party.
That membership cost him nine years of his life. Kathem's wrists, 14 years later, still bear scars in the pattern of the chains from which he was hung. His forearm veers in an odd direction, broken by torture. "Whether you confessed or not, you were tortured," he said.
After Hussein was ousted, Kathem went back to college, resuming his life where it was broken off in 1982. "This day means for me a new future. I am content," he said.
Throughout the day in Najaf, residents demonstrated that a new day had arrived.
Three disabled brothers, Mohammad, Kathem and Saleem Monsuour, rolled their wheelchairs more than two miles to reach the polling station.
