U.N. Objects to Speeding All Kurds to Iraq

Struggling to avoid responsibility for any future Kurdish disaster, the chief U.N. refugee agency started registering Iraqi refugees in Turkish border camps Tuesday, saying they could stay if they did not yet believe assurances that it was safe to go home.

Thousands of refugee Kurds jammed rocky mountain passes on the first day of mass movement to the allied protected zone in northern Iraq on Tuesday, but a senior U.N. official complained that the United States and its allies were pushing too hard to get the Kurds out of the mountains and back into northern Iraq.

The allies “are steamrolling us, pushing us to take over the operation so they can get out. The whole thing is like being in a speeded-up film,” said the official in Ankara, who declined to be identified.

“We must remember that this is a very unusual situation, an occupied zone of Iraq. Our first responsibility must be to ensure the long-term safety of the refugees. If there is another massacre of the Kurds in a year’s time, the United Nations does not want to be responsible.”

The U.N. agency coordinating relief efforts, the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, said it has started voluntarily registering any refugees among the 350,000 or so still left in a dozen encampments along the 200-mile Turkish-Iraqi border.

“Even if everything goes well, 100,000 may not want to go home,” the U.N. official said.

A substantial minority of the refugees are not Kurds but Christians or members of some other minority sect. It is not clear how many may want to stay in the border camps.

“No to going to hell! No to going to Iraq!” shouted 2,000 refugees in the Yekmal border camp during a visit by a French aid official Tuesday.

Meanwhile, the Bush Administration, using stronger language than before, flatly ruled out any easing of economic sanctions against Iraq until Saddam Hussein is forced out of power in Baghdad.

“Any easing of sanctions will be considered only when there is a new government,” Deputy National Security Adviser Robert M. Gates said in a speech to the American Newspaper Publishers Assn. meeting in Vancouver, Canada.

Times staff writer David Lauter contributed to this article.