Jawad Izzeddin has not been to Iraq for five years. Today, Jawad lives in Brussels, in Belgium, where he works in an Iraqi restaurant. Back in Baghdad, he was a teacher. He fled Iraq as the security situation deteriorated following the invasion of 2003. Hanging in his shop is a large picture of him and his wife, Najla, voting in the 2005 elections.

“There were no polling stations in Belgium in 2005, so we went to Holland to vote,” Jawad says proudly. “I will participate again this time because I don’t want to lose my right to vote.”

Many Iraqis are in the same position as Jawad. Electoral centers outside Iraq are few in number. Exiles, like Jawad and 24 year-old Akko Ali, who works in a factory in Norway, will have to cross borders to vote but they are determined to exercise their rights.

Akko says he will take a day off on polling day to travel from Norway to Sweden and he is preparing himself for voting. “Regardless of ethnic identity, Kurds and Arabs should vote. The future of our country is at stake,” he said. Akko intendes to wear Kurdish national costume when he goes to vote and will carry the flag of his people.

Preparing for the participation of exiled voters, the Independent High Electoral Commission (IHEC), selected 15 countries where polling centers will be open on the 5th and 6th of March for voting. There will be a total of three hundred stations in these countries.

Saad al-Rawi, a member of IHEC’s external Election Commission, told Niqash, “There are no statistics on the exact number of Iraqis living in diaspora, but there are around 1.9 million voters outside Iraq with the right to vote.” Al-Rawi said that Syria, Jordan, Iran, UAE, Turkey, USA, Sweden, Holland, Canada, Germany, Britain, Australia, Lebanon and Denmark would operate electoral centres. Egypt is likely to announce that it will also allow an electoral center to open in Cairo. He added that all Iraqis living outside Iraq have the right to vote with no discrimination as long as they have an identity card.

Eight seats are allocated to Iraqis living in the diaspora under the new electoral law. However, rather than the diaspora forming an independent district, votes cast outside Iraq will be counted among the rest of the ballots cast in the voters’ provinces back in Iraq.

The challenge ahead, according to Iyad al-Samuraei, the speaker of the House of Representatives, is that IHEC has no registry book with the names of Iraqis living abroad. This makes it difficult to assess properly the efficiency of this special voting arrangement and it is also difficult to ensure its integrity. Gaps such as these leave the election more open to manipulation and fraud, a result of the law being built through compromise, according to Samuraei.

Despite these objections, Iraqis abroad, like Sana Ibraheem, a student at Amsterdam University in Holland, are impatiently looking forward to voting in the forthcoming elections to stay in touch with their country and to influence its politics.

“These elections will change the political map in Iraq, so I must participate,” she said.

Sana has lived in Holland for ten years. She was two years old when her father was arrested and executed by the Baathist regime on the grounds of his relations with a hostile political party. She is optimistic about the future of democracy in Iraq. She has bought herself a large Iraqi flag and plans to paint her face with a map of the country on election day.

“I want to have a role to play in changing the Iraqi political map and to participate in pushing forward the democratic development of my country. I would be happy to color my fingers with the elections’ ink.”



(Photo by Ali Yussef/AFP/Getty Images)