Iraqis in U.S. Remain Hopeful
Of Finding Missing Loved Ones
In Detroit, Church That Hussein
Built Prays for His Defeat in War
By JEFFREY ZASLOW
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
DETROIT -- Sacred Heart Church on Seven Mile Road is the church Saddam Hussein built.
In 1980, Reverend Jacob Yasso flew to Baghdad and met with Mr. Hussein, who wanted to help Iraqi Christians who had come to America. That year, Mr. Hussein sent $1.5 million to cover the church's debt and build a social hall and day-care center.
Last Friday night, 450 parishioners gathered at Sacred Heart for a service. They prayed for Mr. Hussein's overthrow. They also prayed for a miracle -- that loved ones who disappeared in Iraq during the dictator's reign would be found alive after the war.
Father Yasso says more than half of the parish's 1,200 families have missing loved ones in Iraq. The 70-year-old Iraqi-born priest says he decided Mr. Hussein was "evil" in the years following his meeting with the ruler, as newcomers to his church told their stories about the regime. "I shook his hand in 1980," he says. "Now, he is the devil."
Throughout the Detroit area, home to about 90,000 people of Iraqi descent, anxious families are contemplating their old ties to Mr. Hussein and allowing themselves to dream that vanished relatives could reappear.
"Until you see the body, you never lose hope," says Nick Najjar, 43, an Iraqi Christian and a real-estate salesman here. He says his first cousin disappeared, as did 20 villagers from his hometown of Alkosh in northern Iraq. "If Saddam is toppled, people hope American soldiers will go to the jails and get out the missing."
Most Iraqi-Americans acknowledge that the likelihood of tearful reunions is remote. Some 250,000 people have been arrested and remain unaccounted for under Mr. Hussein's rule, according to Human Rights Watch. "We are wishful thinkers, but it's not realistic to believe we'll find our loved ones alive," says Imam Hassan Qazwini, the religious leader of the Islamic Center of America here. Fourteen of his relatives, he says, are unaccounted for.
Detroit's Iraqi community, the largest in the U.S., is made up mostly of Chaldean Roman Catholics, who began arriving here a century ago. Chaldeans, a non-Arab ethnic group who speak Aramaic, constitute about 5% of Iraq's population. About 15,000 Detroit Iraqis are Shiite Muslims, members of Iraq's majority religious group. Most of these Shiites fled Iraq in recent years to escape persecution from Mr. Hussein, who leads the secular Baath Party but is a member of the Sunni Muslim minority. Starting in about 1982, the U.S. viewed Mr. Hussein, then fighting a war with Iran, as a strategic partner. U.S. efforts to maintain relations with him continued until he invaded Kuwait in 1990.
Until recently, many of Detroit's Chaldeans and Muslims feared speaking out against Mr. Hussein, frightened of reprisals against their relatives in Iraq. Now, emboldened by the war, they're more vocal. Several Iraqi-American groups say they plan to seek a full accounting of their missing loved ones after the war. They envision open trials, input from U.S. law groups and Internet databases cataloging the missing. They're also debating whether lower-level officials in Iraq should be held accountable for the disappearances they oversaw.
"I don't blame them," says Mr. Najjar, who says secret police abducted his father and later executed him. "If they didn't do what Saddam said, he'd have killed them, too. If you're going to punish everyone who did something wrong, you'll punish 70% of the Iraqi people."
Reports that Mr. Hussein's regime is putting up strong resistance haven't dimmed the Chaldeans' hopes. "Saddam will be out," Mr. Najjar says. "Maybe he'll be elusive, like Osama bin Laden, but he won't remain in power."
A few of the missing have resurfaced in the past, including last October when Mr. Hussein issued an amnesty to certain prisoners. Farid Towana, 34, a Chaldean hotel clerk, says he was arrested in Iraq in 1987 and accused of being an anti-Hussein socialist. He says he endured five years of beatings and electric shocks. Once, his hands were tied behind his back and he was suspended from a ceiling, dislocating his shoulder. His life was spared in 1992, when Mr. Hussein sought to appease United Nations human-rights officials by granting some political prisoners amnesty.
In prison, Mr. Towana met many of those later considered "missing." About 50 doctors and engineers were incarcerated with him, he says, but one day they were removed. He believes they were shot in the prison yard. "I still see their faces," he says. Mr. Towana hopes one day to extract justice -- but not through violence. "I'll take my revenge through the courts," he says. "I don't want to repeat the tragedy of what they did to me."
As Iraqis here become more outspoken, some simmering tensions within the community are surfacing. Members of the Iraqi Democratic Union of America, a longtime anti-Hussein group of Chaldeans based in suburban Detroit, say several thousand local Iraqis have supported the dictator over the years. If those people are invited to help in reconstruction, the Democratic Union and other activists say they will protest. Still, Nabil Roumayah, an officer in the group, says he is forgiving of church leaders who took Mr. Hussein's money early in his regime, "when not a lot of people saw through Saddam."
Those who knew of the regime's tyranny often kept quiet. Souad Mansour, 52, says she was scared to mention publicly that her brother and sister disappeared two decades ago. Family members in Iraq, she says, "always told me, 'Don't open your mouth in America, because they'll kill us.' " Now, the former Kmart clerk clutches black-and-white photos of her missing siblings, Tamader and Khalid, and speaks of her brother's sharp intelligence and her sister's green eyes.
Tamader was abducted from her engineering job in 1979 after she criticized the regime. Khalid, a college student who Ms. Mansour says had compared Mr. Hussein with Adolf Hitler, disappeared a year later. Ms. Mansour believes that if her siblings weren't killed early on, they were murdered in recent years to ease prison overpopulation.
Rumors about the missing are common in Detroit's Iraqi community, with some members saying the people who've disappeared may emerge as bargaining chips by Mr. Hussein's regime. For many people, the uncertainty over loved ones can be debilitating. Among Detroit's Iraqi Shiite refugees, many of whom were tortured themselves, "a sizable number are suffering from extreme emotional depression," says Hassan Jaber of the Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services.
Father Yasso often counsels refugees who are new to Sacred Heart. He says a mother and daughter-in-law told him they had asked to see their loved one in an Iraqi jail. A few hours later, authorities knocked on their door. "You asked to see your son? Here is your son," the mother was told. The man had been chopped into seven pieces. Another body part was given to the wife. "Here is your husband."
The Islamic Center's Imam Qazwini, 39, hears similar accounts and empathizes. His abducted family members include his grandfather, Mohamad Sadiq, who was a prominent imam in Iraq. The grandfather was beaten and taken away in 1980, Imam Qazwini says, after refusing to bless Mr. Hussein's decision to wage war with Iran.
Imam Qazwini and his family would like to go back to Iraq to conduct an investigation, he says. "If they died, where are their remains? Were they put in acid pools and their bodies melted? Are there any records? When the borders open, we will be there asking these questions."
Amir Denha, publisher of the Chaldean Detroit Times, never criticized Mr. Hussein in print, which led some in the community to consider him pro-Saddam. Mr. Denha confirms he didn't attack the Iraqi government, saying he "tried to stay away" from politics.
Now, however, he is speaking out. He says there will be records of many of the missing, but they won't be on paper. "A lot of people will go to Iraq and say, 'I am the record. I know you took my loved one, and now, I want to know what became of him.' "
Write to Jeffrey Zaslow at jeff.zaslow@wsj.com1
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