Baker Visits Kurdish Camp, Promises Help : Refugees: The brief trip takes him just inside Iraq. ‘You’ve got to do something,’ one man pleads.

Secretary of State James A. Baker III waded into a sea of Iraqi refugees Monday to promise them that emergency aid is on the way, but he could not deliver what most of them really want--the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

Standing on a rocky hillside 40 feet inside Iraq’s northern border, overlooking a mountain valley choked with the makeshift tents and cooking fires of an estimated 30,000 people, Baker pledged: “It’s up to the international community as a whole to do something about this tragic crime against humanity, and that is what we intend to do.”

But refugees and relief workers, noting that almost no food or medicine have reached the swelling camps so far, complained that the promised aid is inexplicably slow in coming. Some Iraqis expressed anger at the United States for failing to crush Hussein’s regime; others said their only hope now is permission to resettle their families in the West.

No sooner did Baker step out of his Land Rover on the Turkish side of the border and walk across a muddy dirt road to survey the scene on the Iraqi side than a desperate crowd pressed around, anxious to tell the secretary of state of their plight.

“Please, Mr. Baker,” cried a young man in English, “I want to talk to you. . . . You’ve got to do something to help us.”

The throng suddenly parted to let him through. So did a line of fierce-looking Turkish army riflemen who had marched along to protect Baker in case the crowd turned ugly.

“Our children are suffering from hunger and starvation,” pleaded the young man, Sam Timathwes, 30, who by then was standing only a few feet from Baker. “We don’t have enough water supply. . . . We need medicines, we need food.”

“We know that,” Baker said quietly.

“Some people want to go abroad,” continued Timathwes, an Assyrian Christian from the oil city of Kirkuk. “ . . . They don’t want to go (back) to Iraq, because they have lost everything--their homes, their village, their junk, everything they had. And there was bombing and shelling on our heads. . . . We are pleading with all the nations in the world just to help all these people here.”

As an ocean of anxious faces turned his way from the hillsides and the broad valley below, Baker gamely attempted an adequate reply.

“We have a rather large, big airlift going on right now, hoping to help many of you people, both on the Turkish side and on the Iraqi side of the border,” he said. “But what’s really needed, as you just pointed out, is a massive international relief effort. . . .

“The Turkish government has been as generous as they can be,” Baker said. “They have opened their border. They have given what they can give. But it’s up to the international community as a whole to do something.”

“That’s right,” Timathwes said, and a few among the handful of refugees who could hear Baker’s words nodded.

Then Baker, after only 10 minutes, marched back to his motorcade and sped north into Turkey.

The refugees applauded him heartily--more, it seemed, out of hope that it would encourage him to keep his promise than from gratitude for anything done so far.

“The United States should do more,” Timathwes said after Baker left. “I have a family of 17. We have been camping on the ground here for five days, and we have nothing.”

“I’m not happy,” said Asad Hussein, 30, a Kurdish deserter from the Iraqi army who fought in the insurrection against Baghdad last month. “Bush said he would help the Iraqi revolution. We heard it on the radio, on television. . . . But he did nothing.”

He was referring to President Bush’s call last month for Iraqis to overthrow Hussein, an appeal that many Kurds and others say they interpreted as implying a promise of support. Bush and his aides have since denied that they ever suggested that they would back regional rebellions against Baghdad.

Baker did not refer to that issue in his brief remarks to the refugees, focusing instead on his pledge to help organize an international relief effort.

But even that prompted some complaints. “Almost no aid has arrived,” said Lionel A. Rosenblatt, president of Refugees International, an American charitable organization. “These people have been eating only bread for a week. They have to walk a mile to get drinking water. The situation is pretty dreadful.”

At Border Post 49, where hundreds of Kurds and other Iraqi refugees are arriving each day, there was little sign of an organized relief effort--only a handful of empty trucks at the end of the dirt road that is the only route from Turkey to the frontier.

Entire families were camped in the open air, some under rugs or sheets of plastic draped over ropes, others with no shelter at all against the cold mountain air. Children played on the rocky green hills, but their parents and grandparents looked weary and anxious.

Along the muddy banks of a stream tumbling down a steep ravine, hundreds of women in gaily colored dresses were crowded together trying to wash clothes. They dried the laundry by hanging it on spindly trees or stretching it on rocks.

“You are seeing everything we have,” said Abdul Rahman Kittani, a retired teacher from the Iraqi Kurdish town of Dahuk. “We have no food, no drinking water, no tents. . . . But that’s not our problem. Our problem is finishing the (Iraqi) regime.”

Baker heard little of that discontent. Before visiting the border camp, he met for 20 minutes with a group of Iraqi exile leaders--but they had no time to do more than plead for aid.

“They didn’t let anybody ask him” about U.S. policy during the ill-fated insurrection, said Noori Briefkani, one of the exiles. “He said he’s going to try to make everything OK now. . . . But if the Americans had only fought for two more days (during the war with Iraq, in February), Saddam would be gone and this problem wouldn’t be here.”

But Baker had not come to hear those complaints. Instead, his brief mission to the border was one part photo opportunity--to show the Bush Administration’s concern for the refugees in a graphic way while the television cameras rolled--and one part hand-holding, to reassure the government of Turkey that it will not be left carrying the entire burden of the refugee problem.

At a military briefing (to which reporters and cameras were pointedly admitted), the local Turkish military commander, Brig. Gen. Kamil Basar, peppered Baker with a barrage of detailed statistics about the influx of refugees.

“What’s the total?” Baker asked.

The general paused, did some quick addition with aides and offered 285,000--a number slightly below the government’s official estimates.

“The number is still increasing,” Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Alptemocin chimed in. “We estimate in the coming week that the number will increase to between 500,000 and 600,000 people.”

“The Turks are very worried about being left holding the bag,” a U.S. official said. Part of the problem, he acknowledged, is that the government of President Turgut Ozal does not want to add to Turkey’s already restive Kurdish population. But another element, he noted, is economic. “If these people stay in Turkey, it will be an economic disaster,” he said. “Unemployment in some parts of eastern Turkey is already as high as 60%.”

Accordingly, while Turkey has formally opened its borders to the refugees, in fact the government appears to be doing everything it can to keep them on the Iraqi side.

Gen. Basar noted--for the first time in public--that the Turkish army has sent troops across the border at those points where Iraqi refugees have gathered, to “secure the area against attacks by the Iraqis.”

There was no indication that the army has actively restrained any of the refugees from entering Turkey. But the Turks are trying to deliver as much aid as possible on the Iraqi side of the border, and the frontier zone is so remote that there is no practical way for the refugees to come north.

Indeed, so wild and unmarked is the border that Baker and his aides didn’t realize, at first, that they had walked onto Iraqi territory. Only when local officials pointed out a border marker, a simple concrete plinth on a crag just behind them, did they realize they were on Saddam Hussein’s land.

“I don’t think he intended to do this,” one embarrassed Baker aide confessed.

REACHING OUT TO THE KURDS

Here are some of the main aid contributors for the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi refugees along the Turkish and Iranian borders. Private charities and relief groups have also sent supplies :

MONEY AND SUPPLIES

* United States -- Launched airdrop of food, blankets and clothing to refugees along Turkey-Iraq border. Pledged up to $10 million from its Emergency Refugee and Migration Assistance Fund.

* Britain -- Pledged $1.77 million in emergency relief and $35 million for a U.N. relief fund. Has sent or pledged about 200 tons of tents, blankets, sleeping bags, army rations and other supplies, some of which will be airdropped. Additional shipments of blankets, tents and children’s clothes sent overland.

* France -- Pledged about 280 tons of food, tents, blankets and medical supplies to beairdropped. Also promised to supply Kurds in Iran with about 1,000 tons of aid.

* Germany -- Dispatched four planes carrying 40 tons of tents, beds, medicine and medical supplies to border area. Also authorized an additional $10 million in aid.

* Japan -- Contributed $10 million to U.N. disaster relief agency.

* Spain -- Dispatched two planes carrying 11 tons of food, 5,000 blankets and 150 tents.

* Switzerland -- Agreed to pay for $2 million worth of food aid.

PLEDGES OF AID

* Denmark -- $1.4 million.

* European Community -- $180 million.

* Netherlands -- $2 million.

* Norway -- $1.6 million.

* Sweden -- $1.32 million.