For Shiites, a Day of Triumph

NAJAF, Iraq _ 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.'' 



 Election day in Iraq was an occasion of fear for many, violence for some. But in Najaf, it was an time of rejoicing. 



 Shiites, who make up an estimated 60 percent of the 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 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, Nabil 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. 



 Election day marked the completion of a circle for Assad Taee, a candidate for the governorship of Najaf. Arrested in Najaf in 1977 for taking part in an earlier Shiite uprising, Taee served two years in prison, was released and imprisoned again for five years, released and again participated in the 1991 uprising. Taee then fled to a refugee camp in Saudi Arabia for three years. He eventually left the camp to resettle in Finland, where he family remains. He said he returned to Iraq to help locate Hussein's mass graves. 



 With a large Shiite vote expected to support his party, Taee stood a chance to take office when the new Najaf provincial council picks the governor. 



 ``We just want to keep this train going,'' Taee said. ``For us, we have won half of what we want just by getting an election. If we win, it will be the other half.'' 



 Shiite parties have insisted that they want to govern hand in hand with the Sunnis; no Shiite leaders have publicly asserted that this was a time for revenge. But a sense of delayed justice prevailed at the polls Sunday. 



 ``This was such a happy day,'' Faheka Abedl Wahed, 31, said, brimming with excitement. ``Under Saddam, it was suffer, suffer, suffer. It was danger, prison, torture, hunger, no food, no democracy. You go to one prison and when you leave, you go to another,'' Wahed, a Shiite schoolteacher, said. 



 ``Today, for the first day, ``I feel like an Iraqi.''