Kurds Reject Iraqi Plan to Return Home

Kurdish elders Sunday rejected an Iraqi proposal for the return of as many as 200,000 Kurds to their homes in the northern Iraqi city of Dahuk, dealing a setback to U.S. efforts to broker a solution to a massive refugee problem.

For an unusual meeting in the refugee “way station” of Kani Masi, Kurdish guerrilla representatives, Iraqi generals and U.S. Army officers were flown in by U.S. helicopter for an unscheduled parley with about 15 elders originally from Dahuk, a Kurdish city on the southern edge of a security zone controlled by U.S. and other allied forces.

The city’s former residents, who fled an Iraqi military offensive against Kurdish rebels, largely have refused to return to Dahuk as long as it is occupied by Iraqi troops. Many say they want U.S. or allied forces to take over Dahuk, as they have other towns and villages in the 3,600-square-mile security zone across northern Iraq.

The civilian leaders among the refugees “are asking for a political agreement first, and if not, (they want) a security area to go back to,” said Fadhil Merani, a representative of the Kurdish peshmerga guerrillas and secretary general of top Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani’s Kurdistan Democratic Party. “The people don’t cooperate right now without either a political solution or a security agreement.”

Failing such conditions, he said, “they would rather stay over there” in the growing refugee centers run by the allies in northern Iraq.

Merani spoke after returning to this border town from Kani Masi with two other Kurdish rebel leaders--Gen. Ali Othman of the peshmerga and Hussein Sinjari of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan--and two representatives of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s military high command.

A U.S. officer who arranged the trip, Col. Richard M. Naab, chief of the allies’ Military Coordination Center in Zakhu, said the “surprised” Kurdish elders listened to an appeal by Brig. Gen. Nushwan Danoun, the chief Iraqi military representative in northern Iraq, for the refugees to return to Dahuk.

Under the Iraqi plan, which was worked out with the allies, coalition troops would not be permitted to provide security for the Kurds in Dahuk, but a third party--possibly the United Nations--might be allowed to do so.

After conferring among themselves, the elders turned down the plan. They essentially told the Kurdish rebel representatives to go back to Barzani and ask him to negotiate with Hussein a “written agreement that guarantees the rights of the Kurds” before they would return, Naab said.

Barzani has been in Baghdad since Tuesday for talks with Hussein on autonomy for Iraq’s Kurdish population.

Naab declined to characterize the negotiations over Dahuk as “stalemated” and indicated that discussions would continue.

The rejection appears to complicate U.S. efforts to move more than 200,000 Kurdish refugees back home quickly from mountain camps and newly established way stations. The alternative that the allies seek to avoid is prolonged involvement in providing humanitarian aid and security for the Kurds in northern Iraq.

As part of a plan to transfer responsibility gradually to the United Nations, the U.S. military plans today to turn over to the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees a growing tent city of displaced Kurds near Zakhu.

In addition to formally accepting the tent city, a U.N. special envoy, Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan, is to visit Dahuk to open a U.N. “humanitarian center” today and distribute food to the few Kurds who have trickled back into the largely deserted city.

In the south, where Iraqi troops moved to crush a Shiite Muslim rebellion after the Persian Gulf War, wire services reported that Iraqi officials displayed the corpses of about 100 men they said were killed by Iranians and Shiite Muslim rebels outside the port of Basra. It was impossible to verify the Iraqi government account of the slayings or the identities of the dead.

One U.S. soldier was killed and four were seriously injured Sunday in two vehicular accidents, U.S. military authorities said. Identifications were withheld pending notification of next of kin.

In addition, a 10-year-old Kurdish girl died after being run over by a water trailer towed by a U.S. Marine truck in northern Iraq, a U.S. statement said Sunday.