Refugee Camp Plan Pleases Turks, Confuses Relief Experts : Reaction: A Kurdish rebel leader scoffs at Hussein’s offer of amnesty and also welcomes the U.S. aid effort.

The Turkish government Wednesday applauded President Bush’s plan to build giant camps for Kurdish refugees inside Iraq, but the decision blindsided international relief experts and American military planners here struggling to catch up with the needs of a half a million desperate people.

“It was like the start of the war all over again--somebody calling in the middle of the night to say, ‘Turn on CNN,’ ” said one American official here, wondering how the new plan will work and how it will change what is already the biggest humanitarian effort in American military history.

In other developments:

* Secretary of State James A. Baker III and the foreign ministers of the 12-nation European Community agreed that the United States and its allies already have ample legal authority from the U.N. Security Council to maintain safe camps for Kurdish refugees in northern Iraq.

* Iran withheld comment on Bush’s plan, but sources in Tehran said the regime was angered by the President’s apparent linking of aid to Iran with the issue of American hostages in Lebanon.

* Calling Iraqi President Saddam Hussein “an injured dragon,” a major Kurdish resistance leader scoffed at Hussein’s offer of amnesty and welcomed Bush’s plan to aid his people.

In Turkey

For Turkey, which has kept the refugees barricaded on its mountain border on the grounds that it cannot care for them on Turkish soil, the American decision was good news.

“Turkey’s proposal to care for the refugees in Iraq has finally been accepted by the whole world,” said Hayri Kozakcioglu, governor of southeastern Turkey with headquarters in Diyarbakir, the world’s largest Kurdish city.

Kozakcioglu said Turkey will provide logistics support for the new camps to be located in northern Iraq on flatlands close to the Turkey-Baghdad highway and starting not far from the Turkish border.

Close to half a million Iraqis, most of them Kurds, are jammed into about a dozen miserable holding areas in the cold, rain-swept mountains along the Turkish-Iraqi frontier. Despite a swelling relief effort by Turkey, international agencies and private aid groups, hundreds of refugees are dying daily of dysentery, dehydration and exposure, relief specialists say.

With Diyarbakir as the arrival point for donations by air, supplies to the refugees fleeing Hussein’s army are beginning to build up with the help of American military personnel.

“The U.S. military is doing a terrific job in unloading the stuff and transferring it to trucks chartered in the name of the Turkish Red Crescent,” said Susan E. Carroll, an official in the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. She said a planeload of 650 tents from Pakistan was unloaded in 50 minutes. Turkish officials, renowned for their hidebound bureaucracy, were quickly and effectively clearing incoming supplies and people, she said.

At the Diyarbakir airport Wednesday, American soldiers operating forklifts were unloading relief supplies from military aircraft from Bulgaria and the Soviet Union, tents from Italy, baby food, medicine and cots from Germany and medical kits and baby formula from the Netherlands.

One U.N. relief planner was openly skeptical that, in an aid effort already far behind initial American projections, the United States could have camps up and running within two weeks, as the Bush Administration promised Wednesday.

“Starting from scratch, it would take us six weeks to be ready for the first 10,000 refugees,” he said. A camp for 100,000 refugees such as the United States envisions--far too big in the U.N. view--would require an area of nearly 2 1/2 square miles, the expert said.

A relief effort plagued by a slow start, lack of coordination, appalling weather, formidable terrain and a woeful lack of roads is at last picking up momentum, thanks principally to the massive airlift of supplies.

In the first nine days, a U.S.-British-French airlift delivered 1,350 tons of supplies to the refugees, said Navy Cmdr. John Woodhouse, spokesman for the U.S. military in Diyarbakir. As a measure of what is still to come, the United States is promising to deliver more than a pound of food and supplies per person for up to 700,000 people--about 350 tons a day.

In Iran

Sources in Iran said the Tehran regime was angered by one particular segment of Bush’s announcement Tuesday on new U.S. efforts to aid the Kurds in Iran and Turkey--his comments that apparently linked aid to Iran to the American hostages in Lebanon.

In comments that were not widely reported Tuesday, Bush sought to explain why the United States was actively aiding the Kurdish refugees in Turkey but not those in Iran.

“You’ve got to be a realist--I mean, the Iranians have strained relations with the United States of America. . . ,” Bush said.

“I’ve said over and over again I’d like to see improved relations with Iran. They know what our bottom line is, and our bottom line is those hostages.

“I am not going to forget those Americans that are held hostage, and I’m not suggesting Iran holds them, but I am suggesting Iran could have a great deal of influence in getting them out of there.”

Although Iran has been widely thought to influence the Shiite Muslim terrorists who are believed to hold 11 Western hostages in Lebanon, including six Americans, Iranian officials say they have no direct control over them.

Bush’s comments may chill the recently warming relations between Washington and the regime of President Hashemi Rafsanjani, according to foreign diplomats and Iranian sources in Tehran. “I think the government’s reaction will be negative,” said a prominent editor, “because aiding the refugees is a humanitarian question--unrelated to the hostages in Lebanon.”

And a Middle East ambassador added, “Bush’s statement reduces the possibility of action on the part of the Iranian government--because it could be perceived as an ultimatum about the hostages.”

“People in this part of the world do not react favorably to ultimatums.”

In Iraq

Inside Iraqi Kurdistan, rebel leader Jalal Talabani, head of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, welcomed Bush’s plan to carve out camps for refugees in northern Iraq.

“This is good news and another step forward,” he told an Associated Press correspondent at a makeshift rebel headquarters on the mountain heights above Sulaymaniyah, a Kurdish stronghold now occupied by the Iraqi army.

“We welcome this step, but this is not enough. The Kurdish problem is not a problem of refugees. Our people . . . feel they are not alone now and that some countries are ready to protect them.”

Talabani made it clear that leaders of the Kurdish insurgency have no faith in Hussein’s promises of amnesty and political reform. “Saddam is a dragon who devils his own people, and now he is more dangerous than ever because he is an injured dragon,” the rebel leader said.

Montalbano reported from Diyarbakir and Tuohy from Tehran. Times staff writer Nick B. Williams Jr. in Nicosia, Cyprus, and free-lance writer Hugh Pope contributed to this report.