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The unknown future of
the forcibly displaced Kurds
The Iraqi policy of Arabization and displacement of Kurds and other
minorities from the Kurdish regions which are under Iraqi control,
continues to raise serious political, social and humanitarian concerns in
the Iraqi Kurdish-ruled region.
For
“Iraqi Kurdistan Dispatch”, Ashley Gilbertson reporting from the area
Binaslawah camp for displaced people, Arbil
suburbs, Iraqi Kurdistan, 12 April 2002
"I am a Kurd, why should I change my ethnic identity?" exclaims Ibrahim
Jamal Sayid about Saddam Hussein's attempt at Arabizing him and his family.
His refusal to submit has led him to where he talks to me from now - a
small damp tent which he has been sharing with his wife and seven children
for the last six months since being forced out of his town in the oil rich,
Iraqi controlled-area in Kirkuk Governorate. Their
tent is but one of hundreds here in the muddy suburbs skirting the city of
Arbil, the regional capital of the autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan, under the
Kurdish rule since 1991.
Ibrahim was requested by the Iraqi ruling Ba'ath party to sign a document
changing his Kurdish identity to Arabic; a document officially
called “Form of Correction of Nationality”, distributed on non-Arab
communities in the Kurdish regions which are under Iraqi control. When
Ibrahim refused to abide, his house was promptly surrounded by Iraqi forces
and he and his family were forced to leave to the Kurdish autonomous region,
leaving his land and properties to be confiscated by the Iraqi government.
Tens of thousands of Kurdish families have been forcibly displaced from
Kirkuk Governorate and other
Kurdish regions in the
past twenty years, within the framework of an Iraqi plan to displace original inhabitants of this Kurdish region and settle Arab
families in the place of the expelled Kurds and other minorities, who
refuse to “officially” become Arabs; a policy which the Kurds call
Arabization. In the past few years, this campaign has dramatically become
intensified.
Mr. Salah Dalo, the
official in charge of the third region of the Kurdistan Democratic Party,
KDP, which runs Binaslawah camp, says, Saddam Hussein's continued efforts
to 'Arabize’ the region aims at gaining a definitive Iraqi ownership and
continue to pump securely
what is today 60 per cent of Iraq's oil wealth.
Zahir Rojbayani, the head of the Arbil-based Kirkuk Cultural Centre, and
who originally comes from Kirkuk, explains that
Arabization, though only formally named in 1981 in a decree passed by
Saddam Hussein's administration, has actually been, gradually, implemented
since 1934, by successive Iraqi governments. He claims that the recent
policy is targeting the Kirkuk region not only because of its
abundant oil, but also fertile plains and major strategic military
importance. He feels that Saddam's scheme is working.
"I feel that Arabization is in its final stages,"
he says, "if the expelled people are not allowed to go back, within
one year, the Arabized towns will loose their national Kurdish characteristics, and, we will lose
Kirkuk."
"The reason is that
the expelled people who have been forced here have been and will, in time,
settle down and have jobs," he reasons, "the second generation
would not have so much enthusiasm to return".
It is for this reason that Arif Tayfur, chairman of the Higher Committee
for Confronting Arabization in Kurdistan, is setting programmes for the
expelled Kirkukis against being "assimilated here among the people -
so they don't forget the issue of return." Arif explains the
committee's various actions in combating Arabization, though it seems the
only method which could produce any fruit, is presenting legal documents,
figures, testimonies and studies on the Arabized areas to the United
Nations and international institutions to provide evidence on the Iraqi
policy and establish that these regions were Kurdish.
Arif has plans, and he
looks into the past to foresee the future - in 1991 when the Kurds
liberated Kirkuk after the Gulf war, the Arab settlers left within 24
hours, voluntarily, he says. He hopes that events may provide the opportunity for "our people to return to their Kurdish land".
Until then, the most fortunate displaced people will live in poorly
constructed collective towns that surround the major cities, miles from
Kirkuk and other Iraqi-controlled Kurdish areas. They are deprived of running water, electricity or sewage. Their less fortunate counterparts have to do with tents, flattened sheets of metal,
and homes made of mud brick,
providing housing.
The collective towns, or
Mujamma’, were built by the
Iraqi authorities as early as 1975, specifically for purposes of
resettlement of forcibly displaced Kurds, or for Arabization schemes.
Since 1991 when the Gulf War allied forces imposed a 'No-Fly Zone' over
southern and northern Iraq, Saddam's building stopped in the
Kurdish-administered areas but his Arabization programme continued, and
even intensified.
The United Nations and two local
NGOs are sole relief agencies attempting to curb the rising demands for
food and housing. With daily arrival of new families forced out of
Kirkuk and other Iraqi-controlled Kurdish regions, and existing
requirements already overwhelming, observers and officials alike say they cannot
cope .
"The UN
oil-for-food programme [commonly known here as the '986 programme'] has its
shortcomings, and the [lack of a programme for the] displaced people is one
of them." says Hoshyar Siwaily, deputy minister of humanitarian aid
and cooperation in the KDP-led Kurdistan regional government. "The 986
programme provides only emergency aid and this is not adequate ... there is
no consolidated program to resettle the displaced people, and the [lack of]
coordination [between relief agencies] has led to poor distribution of
aid" says the deputy minister.
For nearly two years,
Adil Ahmed Mohammad and his family of twelve have lived without housing or
sufficient support in Binaslawah camp. It was almost two years ago when he
was received his "notice of expulsion" from the Iraqi
authorities, and today he pores
over it again. Faded and torn, Adil may have read it a
thousand times. From the document, my translator makes out the few
belongings Adil was allowed to take - three gas bottles, a stove, pots and
pans.
Adil was a farmer. He owned fifty seven sheep and a plot of land. He was
first expelled in 1991, after the Kurdish uprising and lived one year with
his family in refugee camps in Iran before "secretly" returning
to Kirkuk area to work in the countryside. He did not inform the central
government of his return. Eventually, the military began harassing his
family, and he was forced to work for Iraqi officers without pay "all to make me leave".
He received official instructions to depart Kirkuk on the 3rd of September
2000, since then he has lived in a tent.
Like the majority of the displaced people, he cannot find a job. Of his
eleven children, one has found work when he became a Peshmarga, member of
Kurdish armed forces, but his salary provides for only one.
Sadly, Adil's story is not unique. People here have no income and for
survival rely on the 986 programme which supplies food baskets monthly,
consisting mostly of wheat-flour and rice.
"I expect the [Kurdistan Regional] government and the United Nations
will help one day," Adil says quietly "but now, our future is unknown".
With no real concern by
the international community, Saddam Hussein’s forcibly displaced people remain waiting for their unknown
destiny, and like most of the Iraqi Kurds, in the event of the various
possible scenarios of the US expected intervention in Iraq, they do not
know if they have to hope for the better or expect the worst.
“Tens of thousands of Kurdish families have been forcibly displaced … within
the framework of an Iraqi plan to displace original inhabitants of the
Kurdish region and settle Arab families in their place … a policy which the
Kurds call Arabization”‘If the expelled people are not allowed to go back,
within one year, the Arabized towns will loose their national Kurdish
characteristics, and, we will lose Kirkuk’, says Zahir Rojbayani .‘I expect
the [Kurdistan Regional] government and the United Nations will help one
day,’ Adil, a displaced Kurd from Kirkuk, says quietly ‘but now, our future
is unknown’
Victims of Arabization
Wahab Mashoor Muhammad and his sons © 2002 Christopher Allbritton
BINISLAWA DISPLACED PERSONS CAMP, Iraqi Kurdistan -- The day is hot, damn
hot. It's the middle of July, and the air is dry and thirsty with the
thermometer bumping against the 45 degree Celsius mark. Little dust devils curl
up around my heels as I walk. Yet inside a tent that 11 people call home, the
water is cold and refreshing and the hospitality is genuine.
Abdullah Salam, my guide from the Kurdistan Democratic Party, and I have come
here to Binislawa where thousands of tent homes are set up and tens of thousands
of people wait for relief from … someone. As we approach one tent, Wahab Mashoor
Muhammad, 49, greets us and welcomes us into his home.
It's not much, to be honest. The floor is poured concrete and the walls are
cinderblocks packed with mud to hold them in place. Poles support the canvas
"roof" which is all that protects them from the winds and the cold of winter.
There is no heat or running water. But it's clean, and Wahab's wife and
daughters arrange pillows for us to sit on. Another daughter brings me a glass
of water from a plastic cooler.
He's been here since July 18, 2001, almost a year to the day that I visit.
He's from Kaznafar, a village outside Kirkuk, the largest Kurdish city in Iraq,
where he was a taxi driver. He was forced to leave his home with a few blankets,
some kitchen items and his family when he refused to change his nationality from
Kurdish to Arab under a program called "Arabization" that Saddam Hussein's
regime has been engaging in since the 1970s. In other parts of the world, it
would be called ethnic cleansing.
"I'm a Kurd," he says. "How can I be an Arab or change my nationality? It's
wrong for a man to deny his nationality."
Arabization has been going on since the 1920s, ever since the Kingdom of Iraq
was created out of the ashes of the Ottoman Empire by the United Kingdom. But it
was intensified after 1975 after the Algerian Agreement between Iran and Iraq,
under which the Shah cut his support for Kurdish rebels in Iraq. Kurds are
forcibly evicted from their homes in Kirkuk, Mosul and other oil-rich regions of
northern Iraq unless they agree to have their registered nationality changed to
Arab. If they refuse, which many do, they are expelled from their homes, usually
with only a few hours to gather their possessions and turned north, to the
Kurdish enclave in the north. Arab families are lured from the south to the
vacant Kurdish homes in the north with money, land and pickup trucks, all
confiscated from the displaced Kurds. It is estimated that more than 8,000
families live in Binislawa. That's more than 50,000 people.
NATO went to war in 1998-99 in Kosovo and Yugoslavia to prevent this kind of
stuff.
But changing his ethnicity isn't all Wahab was expected to do. The Iraqis
demanded he join the elite Jerusalem Brigade, which now holds positions about 20
km outside of Arbil. So named because Saddam has said this fighting force will
be the one to liberate Jerusalem from the Jews, the Kurds say that the road to
Jerusalem runs through Kurdistan. Wahab was being told he must be prepared to
make war on his own people.
Since he refused all this, he was expelled, along with his wife, his mother
and his eight children. Now they all live in a tent, and they might be
considered the lucky ones. - In 1983, 8,000 Kurds were "disappeared" by the
Iraqi regime.
- In 1987-88, 180,000 people disappeared or were executed under the Anfal
Campaign. "Anfal" is a principle from the Koran and it allows the looting of a
non-Muslim population when Muslims conquer them.
- In 1988, Halabja became a nightmare when Saddam used chemical weapons
against women and children, killing 5,000 people in about 15 minutes. More than
10,000 people were injured and the region suffers from lingering health
problems. In all, more than 200 villages were gassed and no one is sure how many
people died. There have been no studies on the after-effects of the chemicals on
the population or the environment.
So, Wahab is understandably anxious to see Saddam go. "If Saddam is
overthrown, I would run back to Kirkuk!" says Wahab. "My family has been living
there for 300 years."
© Iraqi
Kurdistan Dispatch, 2002
Photo Credits Ashley Gilbertson, 2002
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