Basra: Port in the Storm for Iraq’s Dispossessed

This port city, which has been damaged in two wars and a brief rebellion immediately after the Gulf War, continues to be a flash point for this region’s troubles as well as a haven for its dispossessed.

About 80 refugees from Iran walk in almost every day through Tununa, a section of Basra that was a trench-filled no-man’s-land during the eight-year Iran-Iraq War.

They are former Iraqi prisoners of that war or Iraqi civilians dispossessed during it. They receive help from the U.N. refugee program, which has a small contingent here that now feeds more than 5,000 people.

Farther south, deportees come in from Kuwait, which is expelling its non-Kuwaiti residents--Iraqis, Palestinians, Jordanians, Syrians and other nationalities. The deportees, who are sometimes left at the desert border in the middle of the night by Kuwaiti authorities--over the objections of international relief agencies--are helped by the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Iraq accepts all the deportees and is cooperative “although it is not obliged to do so,” says an official familiar with the work of the Red Cross, who asked not to be identified.

In fact, hardly anybody wishes to speak openly in this troubled region. The international agencies do not wish to call attention to themselves because Iraqi authorities resent their presence as undermining national sovereignty.

Iraqi residents are wary because the region is dangerous. Armed refugees from the post-Gulf War rebellions in southern Iraq are said to be hiding out in the marshlands near Basra, and large numbers of Iraqi troops patrol the city and its outskirts, weapons pointing ominously from the back of vans and pickup trucks.

In the great marshlands of southern Iraq, a landscape resembling the Louisiana bayous, thousands of refugees from suppressed rebellions in Basra, Karbala and Najaf, along with Iraqi army deserters from the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War, are said to be hiding out. “A lot of words have been spent on who is in the marshes--30,000 refugees or 100,000. But nobody can say truthfully,” says an international agency official.

“It is a fact that the Iraqi army was in the marshes” hunting the refugees and deserters, says the official.

When Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan, head of U.N. humanitarian operations in Iraq and the Gulf, visited the marshes July 11, there were no troops to be seen. However, a short time later a team of U.N. guards went into the area at 7:15 one morning and surprised a company of Iraqi troops just waking up and climbing out of their tanks and vehicles.

At that point, ambassadors from U.N. Security Council nations demanded that Iraq withdraw its troops from the marshes.

Iraq’s response, in a letter from Foreign Minister Ahmed Hussein Khudayer to Sadruddin, denied that refugees live in the marshes and defended the presence of Iraqi troops as necessary to prevent disruptions by infiltrators from Iran.

Still, international agencies in Basra think Iraqi troops have pulled back, possibly as a gesture to the United Nations, which Iraq wants to lift economic sanctions.

Meanwhile in Basra, a city of 1 million on the Shatt al Arab waterway that combines the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and flows into the Persian Gulf, relative quiet has been restored. Residents report hearing only occasional shooting at night.

Electricity supplies have improved even though the main power plant was knocked out in the Gulf War, but the water supply remains contaminated. The Red Cross has found salmonella and typhus and many other bacteria in the water. The fever ward at Mustafa Talimi Hospital, which is without air conditioning in the 124-degree July heat, is filled with typhoid patients.

The most visible damage in the city resulted from the rebellion in March. The provincial government building was burned, as was the building housing the Iraqi national television authority.

Accounts differ as to how the revolt began. The Iraqi government and some local residents say that Iraqi POWs, released by Iran, came pouring into the city with arms and started the rebellion.

Another account says Iraqi soldiers from the just-ended Gulf War, walking 400 miles from Kuwait to Baghdad, demonstrated in front of the government building demanding food. There was firing at a portrait of President Saddam Hussein, whereupon Iraqi government forces opened fire.

Possibly all accounts contain some truth.

“There was sympathy for their cause at the beginning,” says the resident, “because everybody wants change. But then they burned the (government) building and started looting, and the people saw that they were criminals.”