The Toronto Star
September 1, 2006 Friday

Another view of Iraq: Love, peace, tolerance
by Nicholas Keung, Toronto Star

As an elementary school teacher in Baghdad, Janet Irmya used to take
her students to both mosques and churches to teach them about
tolerance and celebrate the rich diversity of Iraqis.

Irmya is ethnically Armenian, with a different mother tongue,
religion and culture from her Assyrian husband, Simon. But their
differences don’t matter to the couple, who both speak Arabic and
proudly share the same homeland.

"Whether you were Turkomans, Kurdish, Arabs, Sunnis or Shiites, we
were all very mixed together and we respected and appreciated our
differences," Irmya recalls of the days before she and her family
moved to Toronto in 1981. "It’s sad to see Iraqis fighting Iraqis,
and we still ask the question why people have forgotten the peace and
harmony that we grew up with in Iraq."

While members of the 20,000-strong Iraqi-Canadian community are in no
mood to celebrate what’s going on in their homeland – where daily
violence is driving deep wedges between the nation’s ethnic and
religious groups – they believe they still have something invaluable
to show to their countrymen and other Canadians.

Volunteers from various Iraqi ethnic groups have together planned a
three-day Iraqi Heritage Festival that starts today at the
Scarborough Civic Centre, showcasing their culture.

"We all come from the same land and we share the same identity as
survivors," explains Ghina Al-Sewaidi, president of the Iraqi
Canadian Society of Ontario. She refuses to talk about Iraqi politics
and emphasizes that the group is social, not political, in nature.

"There is the misconception that the Iraqis are divided and we don’t
get along with one another, which is not true," adds the Toronto
criminal lawyer, an Arab, who arrived Canada in 1988. "We want people
here and in Iraq to see that the Iraqis are one united community,
that we are one people and we all love peace."

Essentially, the festival is a reminder of the racial harmony that
existed in Iraq before Saddam Hussein seized the reins of the Sunni
Muslim Baath Party in 1979 and began pitting Iraq’s ethnic and
religious groups against one another for political advantage.

Despite their obvious differences, Toronto’s various Iraqi groups
have much in common. By and large highly educated, they fled their
homeland for the peace and freedom Canada offered.

"It’s a small community (of 7,000) in Toronto and we have to count on
each other," says Najiba Al-Jaddou, a Turkoman landscape designer
from Kirkuk. A Sunni, she’s married to a Shiite.

But it wasn’t until Saddam Hussein’s downfall more than three years
ago that Canada’s Iraqis began to feel safe from the watchful eyes of
the regime and started to mingle again.

"The community has had a really low profile out of fear. It just
wasn’t active," says Yelimaz Jawid, a Kurdish-Iraqi. "When I joined
the (Iraqi) society, there were only 20 members at our annual
meeting. This year, we had 261 members there."

In fact, the Iraqi Heritage Festival was initiated in 2004 as a
celebration, a hopeful gesture marking what might have been a new
beginning for Iraq.

"It was a sensitive time and we picked the timing deliberately. But
it wasn’t really a celebration. There’s no happiness to it, because
people there and here both were suffering from the war in Iraq," says
festival volunteer Buthina Ezat, who is a Mandean – a tiny gnostic
sect with roots going back to the time of John the Baptist.

"We just wanted to let people know how we used to live together and
remind them of our good old days. The bottom line is we are all
Iraqis," she notes. "Iraq is the home where we all belong. We should
be celebrating each other’s differences, like we do in Canada."

The festival – from 6 to 9 p.m. today and Sunday, and tomorrow from
noon to 9 p.m. – will showcase Iraqi handicrafts, literature and
poetry, ethnic fashion and arts, as well as traditional dances, music
and films. Admission is free.

GRAPHIC: Carlos Osorio toronto star Najiba Al-Jaddou wears her
mother’s abaya, a traditional garment that will be showcased at the
three-day Iraqi Heritage Festival. Organizers hope the event will
show Torontonians that Iraqis of different backgrounds live together
in peace.