Even after missing their flight out of Baghdad, waiting at customs for five hours, and missing another connecting flight out of Chicago, six Iraqi students arrived in time for the opening ceremonies of the Harvard National Model United Nations (HNMUN) conference Thursday evening and received a full minute of applause from the 2,200 other students in attendance.

The visitors were Iraq’s first-ever representatives to the annual HNMUN conference, which brings students from around the world together to simulate the United Nations.

Arwa Nazar Hamdan, one of the University of Baghdad students, said she was surprised to receive such a warm welcome, since she had expected to be viewed as a terrorist.

“The [American] military back home treats us with hostility,” Hamdan said. “I can see it in their eyes that they look at us as suspects.”

From this early encounter, Iraqi students had the chance to dispel their misconceptions of America—and Americans’ misconceptions of them—at a series of events throughout the weekend.

Iraqi student Quasay Mehdi Hussein said this was the first time the students attended a conference where they could speak their minds freely without being told what to say. He added that he spent more time informally talking with other delegates than participating in the conference itself.

In one of these conversations, Hussein spoke on Thursday with Shira Kaplan ’08, an Israeli student, at a reception hosted by the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. The two students discussed the future of their region and how to teach tolerance for “the other side,” Kaplan said.

“As an Israeli, it was a rare opportunity to meet Iraqi people,” Kaplan recalled later.

Events throughout the weekend also allowed the students to share their perspectives on life in war-torn Iraq and the effects of the U.S. invasion.

At a panel discussion at Lamont Library yesterday, the Iraqi students’ faculty advisor, University of Baghdad professor Hamdan, said he believed the vast majority of Iraqis had opposed Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship. But he added that since Saddam Hussein’s overthrow, everyday life in Iraq had been marked by danger, difficulty traveling, and scarcity of goods.

“We never imagined that one day we’d come and have to line up for gasoline,” Nazar Hamdan said of life under Saddam Hussein’s regime. “We never experienced a shortage of anything.”

But Hussein, a graduate student at the University of Baghdad, emphasized that Saddam Hussein’s departure had empowered the Iraqi people.

“We have some democracy [now]. Under Saddam you weren’t allowed to think for yourself,” he said.

Other students at the panel echoed Nazar Hamdan’s description of a post-Saddam Iraq plagued by insecurity.

“We never feel 100 percent safe in going to university and coming back,” said Arwa Hamdan, Nazar Hamdan’s daughter. “Any second, anything could happen. We’ve had several occasions where we’re sitting in lecture and explosions would happen nearby and windows would break.”