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Kurdish Iranian refugees dream of return
home
19.11.2007
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November 19, 2007
BAHARKA, Kurdistan region 'Iraq',-- Iranian
Kurds living in a sprawling refugee camp in
Kurdistan region 'northern Iraq' dream of returning
home, voicing hope that the United States will use
its might to overthrow the Tehran regime and make
that wish come true.
Close to 500 Iranian Kurds, including 150 children,
are crammed in clay or breeze-block dwellings in the
Zejnikan camp, 20 kilometres (12 miles) north of
Erbil, the capital of Kurdistan region in 'northern
Iraq'.
For most of the camp elders, home is an elusive
dream they fled more than 25 years ago after many of
them took up arms against Iran's Shiite clerical
regime in a fight for autonomy.
Amine Omar was 18 when she left her village. Now she
is 36.
"We thought we would be gone for a year or two," she
said sadly. "The Iranian soldiers were getting
closer to the village.
Our men were peshmerga (Kurdish fighters) and would
have been killed."
During the first four years of their exile, the
family home was a tent pitched in northern Iraq.
Then they were moved to Zejnikan near the village of
Baharka.
The Iranian Kurds were settled in a village that had
been built by the ousted Iraqi regime of Saddam
Hussein to house unruly Iraqi Kurds whose villages
had been razed because they refused to bow to his
rule. www.ekurd.net
Years later the regional Kurdistan government has
built 70 houses for the Iranian Kurds and the
refugees are due to get the keys to their new homes
within a month.
"We will be fine here but we want to go back home. I
am hopeful. One day we will return," said Amine.
Mustafa Maanaf, a former peshmerga fighter, firmly
believes that the US government holds his ticket
home.
"We gave up the armed struggle so as not to
embarrass our hosts, the Kurdistan government in
Iraq.
"The regime of the (Iranian) clerics will fall...
but this will only be possible through US military
intervention like what happened here.
"It is our only hope," said the 40-year-old Maanaf
who survives on a 75-dollar monthly handout from the
Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran and money he
earns working as a mason.
Party representative Mohammed Saleh, who also heads
the camp, agrees.
"We are awaiting a popular uprising in Iran backed
by the Americans," said the 43-year-old, who dreams
of taking his three children born in Iraq back home
one day.
But the dream is fading as the years go by.
Iranian Kurdish children born in Iraq know little,
if nothing, of their ancestral homeland, with fewer
having the possibility to learn to speak Farsi ever
since they stopped teaching it at the camp school.
Young people are marrying into Kurdish Iraqi
families and making roots in northern Iraq, others
leave the camp to seek jobs in Arbil while the lucky
ones have managed to emigrate to Australia, Sweden
and the United States.
According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees,
around 11,800 Iranian refugees, most of them Kurds,
live in Iraq.
Faring Zrar, 12, is one of them, and like his
elders, he dreams of Iran, which in his mind is
closer to Eden.
"When I get older I will go back to Iran," he said.
"It's not nice here. It is a desert. www.ekurd.net
"But Iran is like a paradise. Some cousins came and
they told me: there are trees, rivers. It is
beautiful in Iran and there everyone speaks
English," he said.
AFP
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