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KIRKUK, 24 February (IRIN) - "Iraq and accurate
statistics," said one senior Iraqi official in
Kirkuk, "are two entirely different things." Nowhere
is this truer than when it comes to internally
displaced persons (IDPs) in northern Iraq.
Officially, 20 years of village clearances,
Arabisation campaigns in ethnically mixed areas and
a Kurdish civil war have forced around 800,000
people - out of a total population of four million -
to leave their homes. A UN-Habitat survey of October
2000 put the total at 805,505, not including IDPs
who had fended for themselves and disappeared into
the general population.
However, some experts suggest that such figures need
to be viewed with skepticism, for several reasons.
The word IDP summons up images of dire poverty and
tarpaulin. While living conditions in the collective
towns built by Saddam Hussein at Binaslawa near
Arbil or Shorj near Sulaymaniyah are far from good,
they are not significantly worse than in towns under
central government control until 2003 that were left
untouched by the former regime.
A tiny minority of Iraqi Kurdish IDPs do still live
in squalor in public buildings such as the former
Baathist military fort outside Dahuk. However, there
is now no sign in Kurdish-controlled areas of the
6,366 IDPs mentioned in the UN-Habitat survey as
living in tents. Tent-dwellers there are, but they
are either Iranian Kurds who fled violence around
the Al-Tash refugee camp near Ramadi this spring and
summer, or Iraqi Kurds returning from refugee camps
in Iran.
Working with UN Oil-for-Food funds set aside for
Iraqi Kurdistan, the Kurdish authorities have worked
efficiently to counteract the destruction wrought by
the former regime in the north. According to
Abdullah Dler, director of IDPs for the Ministry of
Humanitarian Affairs in the southern area controlled
by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), all the
villages destroyed during the 1970s and 1980s have
been partially or fully rebuilt.
"There is no IDP problem in Sulaymaniyah
governorate," Dler said, "only a problem of
returnees." He questioned the argument, common among
Kurdish officials, that everything should be done to
encourage IDPs back to their original homes.
"Why would a 25-year-old, forced from his village
when he was two and living in a city ever since,
want to return to a mountain hamlet," he asked,
pointing out that only 25-30 percent of IDPs in his
area of control had taken the decision to return.
The biggest change to have happened since UN-Habitat
and others did their surveys, has been the toppling
of Iraq's Baathist regime. In the north, this has
had three major effects on the IDP situation. First,
it has opened up vast areas of land immediately
abutting the region run by the Kurds since 1991 to
resettlement by Kurds, and to a lesser extent,
Turkoman and Christians, evicted by the former
regime. Before the war, the so-called Green Line
which marked the northern limits of Baghdad's
control was in places almost entirely depopulated,
villages emptied and replaced by military camps and
minefields.
Eighteen months ago Karahenjir, a small town of
around 1,000 houses 30 km east of Kirkuk on the main
Sulaymaniyah road, was deserted, the pasture land
that surrounded it riddled with mines. The mines
have almost all gone now, and the town is once again
bustling with life. There are two schools,
electricity, water, as well as the ubiquitous
headquarters of Kurdish parties.
The same transformation is only slightly more slowly
taking place in Qadir Karam, another small town 22
km south of Karahenjir. In these formerly highly
militarised areas, returns have not brought a new
wave of displacement. In districts such as Sheikhan
and Makhmur, southeast of Dahuk and south of Arbil
respectively, they have. Former Kurdish villages
Arabised during the 1980s are now Kurdish again. The
Arab inhabitants have fled south - to their
homelands in and around Mosul and Tikrit.
Diyala hard hit by post-Saddam movements
Diyala governorate in the northeast would appear to
be the region worst affected by this new movement.
Thousands of previously imported Arabs are known to
have fled from the towns of Khanaqin and Mandali
before or immediately after the arrival of the
Kurdish militias in spring 2003. How many new IDPs
there are is far from clear - surveying in the area
is impossible because of lack of security.
Interviewed by IRIN last September, the IDP
coordinator at the Iraqi Ministry of Migration and
Displacement Safeh Hussein said recently arrived
IDPs in Baqouba, the Diyala administrative capital,
numbered about 11,300. International NGOs working in
Diyala governorate gave a higher figure, claiming
there were 2,700 IDP families in Baqouba and 3,200
in Mugdadiyya, a town on the road to Khanaqin.
Assuming a mean of six people per Iraqi family, that
gives a total of 35,400 IDPs in Arab-controlled
Diyala. In a survey of Iraqi IDPs published in
November 2004, the International Organisation for
Migration(IOM) counted 6,882 families - over 41,000
people. In the Kurdish-controlled sub-districts of
Khanaqin and Mandali, meanwhile, NGOs report a
further 12,000 IDPs. Their living conditions largely
appear to be tolerable, but the same is not true for
many IDPs in Baqouba and Muqdadiyya.
"Their situation is very, very bad," one
international aid worker told IRIN in Diyala
governorate. "Many do not have roofs over their
heads. They are living seven to a room, and lack
essential things such as clothing."
Since autumn, NGOs have been distributing plastic
sheeting, blankets and 1.5 million litres of
kerosene to help these people through the winter.
With violence on the increase in Diyala in recent
months, little more can easily be done.
Large displacements seen in Kirkuk area
But the largest movement of population to have
occurred in northern Iraq since the war has been in
the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, extensively Arabised
since the late 1950s. Nobody knows for sure how many
Kurds and Turkoman Saddam Hussein and his
predecessors in power evicted from the city and
surrounding areas: in Kirkuk, the politics of oil
has made the characteristic fogginess of Iraqi
statistics even more impenetrable.
The 2000 UN-Habitat survey counted 58,704 "victims
of ethnic cleansing" in Kirkuk. The US Special
Committee for Refugees estimated 100,000 Kurdish and
Turkoman IDPs from the city and villages. The two
main Kurdish parties, like NGO Human Rights Watch (HRW),
meanwhile, put the total number at close to 120,000.
In the aftermath of the 2003 war, all agreed that
Kirkuk was an ethnic time bomb, a disaster waiting
to happen. It is a view that continues to be
purveyed in the western press, as well as by the
Kurdish authorities. The April 2004 Temporary
Administrative Laws, they say, agreed all efforts
should be made to wipe out the Baathist legacy of
ethnic cleansing in Kirkuk. Why has nothing been
done?
To all appearances, something has. The authorities
in Kirkuk told IRIN in December that an estimated
14,500 IDP families had returned to the cities in
Tameem governorate since the fall of the Baathist
regime - approximately 90,000 people. The IOM's
survey gives a higher number - 12,380 Kurdish
families and 4,131 Turkoman.
In a pre-conflict UN study of Kurdish IDPs from
Kirkuk, 89 percent of respondents said they intended
to return. In Sulaymaniyah, IDP director Abdullah
Dler told IRIN he thought over 70 percent of former
Kirkuki IDPs in his area of responsibility had
already done so.
"In my view," said Esteban Sacco, an Arbil-based aid
worker who has done extensive survey work in newly
liberated northern Iraq, "the whole return process
in Kirkuk is almost complete. Only those with
nothing in the [Kurdish-controlled] north have gone
back. I doubt well-established, middle-class Kurds
will return."
The living conditions of returnees, scattered around
67 locations within the city, is very varied. Some
have rented flats. On the outskirts of almost
exclusively Kurdish northern neighbourhoods, others
have almost completed new houses. The less fortunate
continue to live amidst the dirt of the overcrowded
football stadium, and in tent villages that have
sprung up on the roadside nearby.
"I would estimate that 30 percent of Kirkuk
returnees are having real difficulties living from
day to day," the director of Norwegian Peoples'
Aid's Kirkuk office Awat Yassin told IRIN in Kirkuk.
For a long time, squabbling between the various
factions in Kirkuk had hampered efforts to find a
solution to the IDP issue in the city. Kurds
insisted all possible help should be given to them.
Some of the Turkoman and Arab leaders publicly
expressed doubts as to the genuineness of returnees,
whom they feared were a Trojan horse for Kurdish
plans to take control of the city.
Mutual distrust led in September 2003 to the
collapse of an agreement to accommodate all IDPs in
selected locations around the city. Deprived of the
support of all sides, NGOs suspended long-term aid
programmes. By December, peace had again been
restored to the city council, the IDP delegates
could resume work, and work encouraging returnees to
move into designated areas had begun.
In the long term, however, it is unclear what will
be done for these people. The new camps at Faylakh
and on the Leylan road have been designated for
temporary accommodation only. Observers think that
the situation looks as though the Iraqi Property
Claims Commission (IPCC), set up by the US-led
Coalition as part of a structure to right the wrongs
done in Kirkuk, will benefit only a minority of
returnees.
The IPCC has the authority to award compensation to
families whose property was confiscated by the
former regime. The trouble is that the vast majority
of those who have come back to Kirkuk since spring
2003 were renting accommodation when they were
evicted, and have no land deeds to show a judge.
Many of the others come from surrounding villages
that were not so much confiscated as razed.
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