With the threat of another war with Iraq increasingly likely, University of Wisconsin students have begun to focus even more on the subject.
Though many people have opinions on the war, there are certain students on campus that feel they are affected by the threat of war on a greater level because of their Iraqi descent.
Danny Khalastchi, a senior at UW, is a first-generation American. Khalastchi’s father, Menashe, was born in Iraq and lived in Baghdad as a child. At the time, Jewish people were restricted in their travels, and at the age of 17 Menashe was forced to escape the country. He was smuggled out of Iraq into Iran with the help of a family member.
“He crossed a lot of check points,” Khalastchi said. “It was a 400-plus mile trip and at each stop he faced the real possibility of being killed.”
Once Khalastchi’s father crossed the border, he was detained for a short while by Iranian authorities until he obtained the necessary documents that would allow him to emigrate.
Khalastchi feels the reason his father and later his entire family needed to flee the country was the extreme persecution of Jews and all minorities by what would soon become Saddam’s political regime, the Ba’ath party.
“When Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr (Saddam’s predecessor) came into power in 1968, they committed a lot of atrocities,” Khalastchi said.
Upon taking power, the Ba’ath party hung 14 people in the center of Baghdad. Nine of them were Jews accused of being spies, Khalastchi said.
“It was around the late ’60s that Jews began to flee the country because of this persecution; their assets were frozen, many were forced to sign over their businesses to the government and they weren’t accepted to universities. There was real fear at the time and my family slowly began to escape Iraq,” he said.
Shahin Khalili, a UW student who has relatives in Iran, believes Bush administration should use caution with the volatile Iraq situation and avoid rushing to war
“I feel that the only reason President Bush wants to go to war is to make it seem like he’s doing something,” Khalili said.
She feels Iran, which forms Iraq’s eastern border, may end up tangled in a possible Middle East conflict.
Both Khalastchi and Hassan agreed the people of Iraq are not an enemy of the United States.
“The population of Iraq is not to blame,” Khalili maintained.
Hassan concurred.
“The citizens of Iraq detest Hussein’s political rule and should not be harmed through military action,” Hassan said.
Kahalili said President Bush must tread lightly in the Middle East.
“Bush has no sense of what’s going on in the Middle East,” Kahalili said. “We have to make sure that we know what we are doing.”
Khalastchi feels that the Iraqi people are prisoners under the Ba’ath party and under Saddam Hussein.
“I believe that something needs to be done about the problems in Iraq,” said Khalastchi, who describes himself as fearful of war. “Like most people, I am scared of what may happen if the United States does go to war with Iraq, but right now I don’t see any other option. Saddam is a real threat — not just to the people of his own country but to the safety of the entire region and subsequently the world.”
