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Women widowed by Saddam's ruthless Anfal
campaign get little relief
29.2.2008
By Barham Omar in Shorsh (ICR No. 247, 29-Feb-08) |
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Kurdistan: Anfal widows get little relief, women
widowed by Saddam’s ruthless Anfal campaign continue
to struggle 20 years on.
February 29, 2008
Sulaimaniyah, Kurdistan region 'Iraq'.
Sabri Fatah has struggled to keep her head above
water since 1988, when her husband disappeared after
being arrested by Iraqi troops during Saddam’s Anfal
campaign.
Fatah, 40, lives with her two daughters in Shorsh
camp, which lies 80 kilometres west of Sulaimaniyah,
in a small two-room house given to her by relatives.
“We can’t afford to rent a house,” said 40-year-old
Fatah, adding that their main source of income is a
monthly pension from the Kurdish Regional
Government, KRG, of 120 US dollars, which barely
covers their basic needs.
During the summer, the widow and her two daughters
aged 22 and 23, work in the fields, picking tomatoes
and harvesting chickpeas to make some extra money.
In winter,www.ekurd.net
there
is no work to be found in the town and they have no
way of supplementing their government pension.
Fatah’s husband is thought to have been among an
estimated 182,000 Kurds killed during the notorious
Anfal operation of the late Eighties. Today, the
survivors find it hard to makes ends meet.
Shorsh was built by Saddam's regime as an internment
camp for Kurds whose homes were razed during the
military onslaught. At least 2,000 villages were
destroyed and tens of thousands were forcibly
displaced during the campaign, according to Human
Rights Watch.
Today, 1,700 Anfal widows live in the camp,
according to the Kurdistan Women’s Union.
An official survey conducted last year found that
Anfal widows make up about 15 per cent of the Iraqi
Kurdistan population - an exact figure was not
provided. It also established that more than 40 per
cent of them have no jobs and are totally dependent
on their government pension.
The Kurdish government has given each of the Shorsh
widows a patch of land to build their own home, but
they have no money to do so.
Rahma Hussein, 38, lives with her father in a
single-room house in Shorsh. She was married for
just five months when her husband was seized by
Iraqi troops from their home in Karezay Dalo, a
village in Kirkuk province. He was never seen again.
That year, she spent months in detention camps in
Iraq’s western deserts. When she was freed, she
returned home to find that her house had been razed
along with the rest of her village.
A few months ago, she took a job as a janitor in one
of the schools in the camp to supplement her
pension. But social custom precludes women of her
age from working, so she quit.
“People were looking down at me,” she said. “[Now] I
don’t know what to do. I borrow money to survive and
then pay this back when I receive my pension.”
Gulala Aziz, who represents Anfal victims in the
Kurdistan parliament, said that the government is to
blame for the lack of services and care available
for the widows.
“The problems of the Anfal people will never be
over,” she said.
“The government has [done] very little for [them].
For example,www.ekurd.net
when
they distributed those patches of land, the
officials told them that the government would only
be able to build 200 houses.”
Aziz said the government wanted to build homes in
Shorsh, but camp representatives turned down the
offer because they were concerned that some widows
would miss out.
Aziz has long campaigned for the rights of widows,
in 1999 helping to push through legislation that
ensured that the government would not be able to cut
their pensions if they were to remarry.
Chnar Sa’d, the minister for Martyrs and Victims of
Anfal, said her ministry has put in a request for
funds to regenerate parts of the region that were
badly hit by the Anfal campaign. “We have submitted
a project to the council of ministers to provide us
with a special budget,” she said.
Sa’d declined to say how much money has been
requested nor how it will be spent.
Aziz criticised the government for its failure to
produce a strategic plan to help regions affected by
the military campaign. “If the government continues
to work [at this rate], it will not be able to
provide a decent service for these areas, even in
the next 15 years.”
Barham Omar is an IWPR contributor in
Sulaimaniyah, Iraq's Kurdistan region
iwpr net
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