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AMMAN - About 200
Kurdish Iranian refugees who settled on the Iraqi
side of the border with Jordan within the last 14
months, will not be relocated to Rweished, UNHCR
officials reiterated during a press conference on
Monday.
The refugees refuse to relocate to the Kawa refugee
camp in northern Iraq, UNHCR Amman Bureau Acting
Representative Anne-Marie Deutschlander said
yesterday — a location that would be assisted by the
UN.
"It was made clear for over a year that they would
not be able to enter Jordan, but they are still
hoping to be resettled by UNHCR," she explained.
"They feel that if they wait, they will be
transferred to the [UN-assisted] Rweished camp and
eventually be resettled in a third country just like
the Iranian Kurds at Rweished," she added.
However, the official said that the border
settlement is not considered a real refugee camp
like the case of 'no-man's-land,' a refugee camp
also located on the Jordan-Iraq border, which has
since closed, with all 743 refugees having been
transferred to Rweished in May 2005. There are 400
refugees left in the camp awaiting resettlement.
Located in the northeast of the Kingdom, Rweished —
69km from the Iraqi border — is scheduled to close
in September.
The majority of the refugees at the border
settlement are Iranian Kurds, who fled to Iraq in
1979. There, they settled in the Al Tash refugee
camp, which officially closed in December 2005.
Since early last year, these refugees settled on the
Jordan-Iraq border because they were denied entry
into Jordan, according to Deutschlander.
UNHCR has no official figures about the border
settlement because the site is not officially
monitored by the UN.
Vandana Patel, protection officer at UNHCR's Iraq
operations unit in Amman, said the border settlement
is not a UNHCR camp and that another NGO had
provided tents for the refugees.
Jordanian authorities reiterated that there is no
possibility for the group to be allowed entry into
the Kingdom due to fears of a "pull factor" of other
potential refugees and oversaturation with other
refugees already settled in Jordan, Deutschlander
said.
An agreement was reached in September 2005 between
the Kurdistan regional government and UNHCR
guaranteeing a site in Kawa for resettlement of all
refugees who resided in Al Tash camp. So far, 1,252
refugees have relocated to the newly opened camp in
Erbil.
Deutschlander added that UNHCR called the press
conference to address allegations in the media that
the border refugees were abandoned by UNHCR.
She acknowledged that since they are refugees from
the former Al Tash camp, the border refugees are
still UNHCR clients. But the UNHCR Jordan office's
mandate is for Jordanian territory, not outside it,
which makes it difficult for UNHCR to assist the
refugees, she added.
According to the UNHCR official, the border
refugees' settlement is not officially recognised as
a "refugee camp" which makes their appeal for
resettlement impossible.
Due to administrative and security reasons, the
UNHCR Jordan office is unable to access the border
refugees or guarantee their safety, she explained.
UNHCR officials visited the area twice to appeal to
the group to relocate to Erbil, however the refugees
said that they did not want to relocate.
"Some of them said, 'we're prepared to wait until
the end.' So they're ready to have people die to get
their message across that they want to be resettled
[in a third country outside the region],"
Deutschlander told The Jordan Times.
But Deutschlander said the UNHCR was not setting a
deadline nor would they resettle the border refugees
against their will.
According to the UNHCR, there are about 1,000
refugees in Jordan eligible for UN assistance,
including 700 from Iraq. Overall, there are 15,000
registered but unrecognised refugees
www.jordantimes.com
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