35,000 Iraqis Marooned in Saudi Camps Decry Treatment; Some Coming to U.S.

About 35,000 Iraqis, many of them veterans of an abortive uprising against Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship, are marooned in two desert internment camps in Saudi Arabia, unable to go home for fear of execution and unable to go anywhere else because no one wants them.

Now, after almost 18 months of living in harsh desert conditions, a few hundred of the refugees have been granted political asylum in the United States, but U.S. officials say this country will ultimately take no more than one in 10. Few other countries seem ready to accept any.

In a series of recent telephone interviews, former inmates of the camps, now being resettled in the United States, complained of thirst, inadequate medical attention, ethnic persecution by the guards and, especially, betrayal by the United States.

“The Saudis hate the Iraqis, even when relations were good between the Iraqi government and the Saudi government,” said Saad, who, like all the refugees, would give only his first name. “The guards take any chance to beat you and insult you.”

“For one month or two months, the camps would be acceptable, but to live there for years is incredible,” said Haidar. “We are opposing the same dictator they are opposing, and they treat us like this.”

In many ways, the Iraqis are victims of world compassion fatigue. Their internment is not as brutal as that of civilians caught up in the disintegration of Yugoslavia. And their hunger is not as poignant as the starvation in Somalia.

But the Iraqi refugees say they thought they were among friends, only to find themselves behind barbed wire with little prospect of getting free.

And many of them blame President Bush for their predicament.

According to the refugees, U.S. radio broadcasts encouraged the uprising against President Hussein that broke out simultaneously in the Kurdish north and mainly Shiite Muslim south of Iraq in the month that followed the Persian Gulf War. Despite his defeat by the United States and its allies, Hussein had plenty of strength left to put down the rebels.

Many of the refugees now stranded in Saudi Arabia sought protection from U.S. forces after their villages were overrun.

“I myself heard President Bush saying on the radio: ‘I ask all the Iraqi people to kick Saddam out of the chair of government. We will help the Iraqi people,’ ” Saad said. “This gave them encouragement to start” the uprising.

“The United States did not give us any kind of assistance,” said Hamdi. “They just talked on the radio and said they would assist, but there was nothing.

“The American forces said that we would be in Saudi Arabia for only a few days and then we would go back to Iraq as a force to fight the dictator,” Hamdi added. “But they put us in a closed camp and treated us as prisoners of war.”

About two-thirds of the refugees in Saudi Arabia are in a camp at Rafha near the Iraqi border. This camp, reserved for women, children and families, is considered a model refugee facility. But the other refugees--all men--are kept in close confinement in the Artawyiah camp, a facility originally built to hold Iraqi prisoners of war. All the refugees interviewed for this story were held at Artawyiah.

A Bush Administration official said many of the men at Artawyiah are not rebels but Iraqi soldiers who refused to be repatriated when the war ended. The refugees agreed that some POWs were at the camp but estimated that they were no more than 10% of the population.

“We came to Saudi Arabia as refugees; we were not POWs,” Haidar said.

Although the refugees complained of having been abandoned by the West, the Administration official said inspectors from the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees and the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh have visited the facilities.

“Some of those conditions are better than conditions in any other refugee camps in the world,” the official said. “The Saudis have spent a lot of money, paid the whole cost of taking care of these people.”

The refugees do not disagree that the Saudi government has pumped resources into the camps. But they say the guards often steal supplies and sometimes act with brutality that is never shown to outside inspectors.

The refugees all say that some camp residents have been forced to return to Iraq.

One of them said the guards “were exchanging people with Iraqi intelligence for bottles of whiskey or money or like that.”

The U.S. official said that a single incident of forced repatriation has been confirmed and that those responsible have been reprimanded.

Saad and Mohammed, another refugee, also said that on at least one occasion, Saudi guards fired indiscriminately into the compounds, killing and wounding dozens of inmates. U.S. officials said they could not confirm that account.

But the biggest complaint of the Iraqis seems to be the hopelessness of their situation. As long as Hussein remains in power, they cannot go home. The Saudis have made it clear that the refugees can remain in the kingdom only as prisoners. And other countries have been slow to take them in.

Allied forces carved out a special Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq that now has its own regional government. But there is no such sanctuary in the south.