‘Arabization’ Forces Iraqi Kurds to Flee From Homes

As a cold mountain wind heralds the coming winter in northern Iraq, Hassan Kiram has taken up residence in a small triangular tent of bright green plastic without a door. So have his wife and six children.

The Kirams are recent arrivals at this squalid settlement of tents and crude clay-brick huts with roofs crafted out of cardboard and plastic sheeting that are held down by stones. The family squeezes together to sleep on mats atop an earthen floor. Otherwise, there is no furniture.

The diminutive Kurdish laborer, 38, and his family are among the latest victims of a sweeping campaign of “ethnic cleansing” that has forcibly displaced more than 1 million Iraqis since President Saddam Hussein took power in the 1970s, according to a report by the Brookings Institution in Washington. All are members of ethnic minorities.

The goal is to “subdue recalcitrant populations, take over oil-rich and fertile land, and stamp out political opposition,” adds the think tank report, which says that as many as 800,000 people have been displaced in northern Iraq and at least 300,000 in the center and south of the nation.

Having lost virtually everything but the few personal items they can carry, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis still live in destitute conditions without jobs, access to basic health facilities or prospects of a better future, charges the report, which was released in October. It also faults the United Nations and international aid groups for not devoting enough attention or resources to a crisis.

“This is one of the most profound human tragedies in modern Iraq,” said Nasreen Mustafa Sadiq, the Harvard-educated minister of reconstruction and human development in the western half of Kurdistan, the Kurds’ self-ruled area in northern Iraq.

A new survey by Human Rights Watch -- based on a recent tour of Kurdistan, where most of the internally displaced end up -- charges that the campaign ranks as a crime against humanity.

The chief targets today are the ethnic Kurds. In one of the world’s biggest ongoing human upheavals, the Iraqi government is trying to expand its hold on the oil-rich north by transforming its identity. The “Arabization” campaign has forced thousands of Kurds and other minorities to flee and replaced them with Arabs, according to international human rights groups, U.N. relief agencies and Kurdish officials.

Even cemeteries are affected, with non-Arab names on tombstones rubbed out and Arab names engraved in their place. Since April, the government has offered Arab families extra incentive in the form of land if they bring the remains of their dead relatives with them to rebury in local graveyards, say relief groups and deported Kurds. The goal is to create evidence that the Arab claim to the region goes back generations.

The new twist stems from “nationality correction” decrees by the Revolutionary Command Council, the highest governing body under the Iraqi president. Decree 199, issued in September 2001, “allows” non-Arab Iraqis over 18 to change their official ethnic identity, according to Human Rights Watch.

In reality, the regime forces minorities applying for anything official -- from school enrollment to marriage licenses to car registration -- to sign a form changing their national identity and declaring that they are Arabs, according to rights groups and Kurds.

“The whole change in demographics goes beyond pushing people out. Newborns, even Christians, are not allowed to be registered with non-Arab names. People can’t buy a home until they change their identity to Arab,” said Fawzi Hariri of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, or KDP, one of two parties that run the north.

The decrees reflect a subtle and evolving change in tactics. For years, Baghdad merely ordered minorities to be deported. But after an international outcry and growing pressure in the 1990s, Hussein’s government devised an approach that doesn’t tie it to the evictions. It is harassing Kurds and other minorities into voluntarily leaving for a simple reason: They can’t survive if they stay.

According to relief agencies, rights groups and Kurdish officials, Iraq is confiscating the U.N. food ration cards of non-Arabs. It’s pressuring employers to fire them. It’s locking up non-Arabs, including elderly women, until they agree to change their names and family histories. Those who balk are gradually squeezed out.

“The government doesn’t issue deportation orders so people can’t prove they’re thrown out. There’s no longer a paper trail,” said Sami Abdul Rahman, the KDP deputy prime minister in western Kurdistan.

Without papers, Kurds have trouble qualifying for aid from either Kurdish groups or the United Nations. And without a ration card, the internally exiled minorities have no access to food baskets provided by the World Food Program to Iraqi families.

“It can take months to verify their circumstances and get them back on the list for rations. In the meantime, these people are also unemployed and have no source of income,” said Salah Rashid, the minister of human rights for the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the political movement running eastern Kurdistan.

Without deportation evidence, tracking the flow is also more difficult. The monthly influx has varied widely in recent years, from a few dozen families to up to 3,000 people, Kurds and relief groups say. Some families are merely dumped at one of the checkpoints into Kurdistan. Others make their own way across the no man’s land frontier. And many move in with extended family members already forced into the north.

Before he reluctantly opted to leave the city of Kirkuk on Oct. 30, Kiram had been increasingly harassed. He said he was ordered to abandon his Kurdish family name or face unemployment -- and then jail. The family of eight was told to leave its rented home so the government could build a road, with no alternative provided.

“One of the hardest parts was taking my kids out of school. Now they don’t have a home -- or a future. But what else could I do?” he said, as the children, ages 4 to 18, meandered among the debris of the makeshift camp.

The family spends much of its day searching for large stones to begin building a one-room shanty, like others in Burda Qaraman, a dusty settlement without proper sanitation in the foothills of rugged mountains.

Throughout northern Iraq, the United Nations has set up a series of more-regulated camps with larger tents and access to running water, communal toilets and limited electricity.

Just down the road from the Kirams, Gola and her two sons have lived in tent No. 53 at Takia Camp since an Iraqi truck dumped them and a few belongings at the edge of Kurdistan on Sept. 2. Takia is home to dozens of Kurdish families who live in dusty 12-foot-by-12-foot tents. Some claim to have been stuck here since 1998 in the long wait for alternative shelter.

Gola is a prematurely aged Kurd with weathered hands who asked that her last name not be used because two other sons are still hiding in their hometown. She said she had long been harassed by Iraqi secret police. Her husband was imprisoned in 1981 and then disappeared in 1984, although she still holds out hope that he wasn’t executed.

The last straw was in August, Gola said, when Iraqi agents came to the home where her family had lived for three generations and demanded their food ration cards. Then she was taken to police headquarters, where she was held until two sons arrived and offered to take her place so she could go home. They were then told that if the family didn’t leave the area, the sons would be held indefinitely in another jail.

“I didn’t need to think very long. I’d lost my husband, I wasn’t going to lose my sons,” she explained, tears trickling down her cheeks. The family home was immediately occupied by Arabs, she added.

New arrivals to the camps typically spend at least a year and often two enduring bitter winters and searing summers before they are moved out of tents, said Sadiq, who works for the KDP government. And only 10% to 15% find new jobs. Many aren’t allowed to bring documentation that proves they were trained or had job experience.

The Brookings report charges that the outside world has not helped in part because it views the problem as temporary -- decades after the internal expulsions started.

“More than 400,000 displaced persons in the north are reported to live in ‘collective centers,’ many in an advanced state of decay with insufficient infrastructure,” it says. “A further 57,000 live in barracks, including more than 6,000 still in tents.”

Iraq’s displaced are a major and growing drain on the north’s limited resources. Kurdish leaders and relief groups fear they may be inundated with a new influx if the U.S. opens a military campaign against the Iraqi regime. Tens of thousands could flee to the northern enclave, which is already in effect liberated from Baghdad’s control and watched over by U.S. and British warplanes.

What to do with the refugees will be one of the biggest challenges faced by any post-Hussein government, international groups warn.

“Any new government will have to address these issues as a high priority if it is to secure the unity and stability of Iraq. And this will not be easy,” warns the Brookings report, written by John Fawcett and Victor Tanner.

Sorting out ownership could even become the source of new tensions, the report warns.

“It will require the return or resettlement of hundreds of thousands of displaced people, in many cases to areas already occupied by others.”