Land of Their Imagination Beckons Refugees

Here, at the Rafha Camp School, there is a place called Iraq. It is a place that exists in imagination, not memory. Abdul Amir Kazem teaches his art students to paint the contours of their country from the images etched in his own mind.

He must teach these young Iraqi refugees, who have never seen anything but an empty Saudi desert, not only what a river looks like, but how the wide, slow sweep of the Euphrates looks when an Iraqi gazes upon it.

“Everyone knows water,” he explains. “I tell them a river is water, there are two shores, two sides, and the water runs through it.

“But to explain to them everything, what Iraq was like -- to try to get them to remember a place they have never seen, to plant an image of the Euphrates in their hearts, this is my real task.”

Within a week Iraq will finally become real for 300 or more refugees, stranded here in the desert for more than 12 years, who will begin returning to hometowns as far away as Basra, Diwaniyah and Baghdad.

If all goes well, all 5,088 Iraqis at this camp 10 miles south of the Saudi-Iraqi border could be repatriated over the next few months, authorities said Sunday.

“I think they will all go back to Iraq, although it will take time. For the first ones, we are speaking about days,” said Samer Haddadin, the representative here for the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.

The effects of the war in Iraq are global in scope, but in few places are they as immediate and dramatic as in this collection of cinder-block houses, single-wide trailers and dusty soccer fields that has been a safe but miserable home for the thousands of Iraqis who were not invited to settle in any other country after the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

Most have watched the television images of the fall of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s regime with a growing realization that they are nearing the end of their long sentence in purgatory and the beginning of an uncertain new existence -- this one without homes, money or jobs, in a country many have never laid eyes on.

“Believe me, I prefer death to another day of life in this camp. I dream of suicide every day,” said Mohammed Assadi, a 26-year-old from Najaf who fled across the Saudi border with his parents in 1991.

“But how can I go home in this condition, with nothing? I spent [half my life] here. Try to imagine that. If they gave each one of us a statue of gold, it wouldn’t compensate us for what we have suffered.”

“Are we supposed to feel grateful” now to President Bush? added Ahmed Yassin of Basra.

His father “didn’t help us get Saddam 12 years ago, he made us escape to here, and then he forgot us here. While meanwhile the regime was destroying our homes, our families, everything. So no, don’t say that I am happy. Don’t even think to say it.”

The Rafha refugee camp this week is a place teeming with doubts, hopes, celebrations and recriminations -- all the reactions one might expect if one were to suddenly open the door of a room in which 5,000 people had been held in suspended animation for what became, without anyone intending it to be, a large portion of their lives.

“I’m so eager to go home, I can’t think of anything else. This feeling erases any trepidations I have,” said Salim Jassim, a 37-year-old math and computer teacher who hopes to go home to Basra in the next few days.

Jassim, like the vast majority of refugees here, found himself in the midst of the Shiite uprising in southern Iraq that followed the 1991 war, after which militants -- without the U.S. backing on which they had counted -- found themselves the target of reprisals from the Baath Party regime and escaped, when they could, across the border to Saudi Arabia.

Jassim, who had just finished his degree in mathematics when the uprising began, now hopes to return to Iraq to complete a graduate degree. “Even before the American civil administrator called for Iraqis to come back to their jobs, we received some calls from religious leaders for all educated Iraqi people to come back and rebuild the country,” he said. “Naturally, the people of the country will respond to the needs of the country before any foreigner will.”

Many seemed amazed at the idea that Iraqis would decline to cooperate with U.S. forces in restoring order and basic services. “Yes, of course I will stand by the soldiers. And I will cooperate with them, side by side, in building my country. I want to say one thing, thank you, to each one of them, although we hope the occupation will not go on for long,” said Emad Khorsan, 35, who also plans to return home soon.

“For myself, I can’t summarize my feelings. A lot of things are happening inside my soul,” he said. “It’s a matter of joy and grief. And I can’t really distinguish one from the other.”

For most of the refugees, much of the decision about how soon to go home depends on what level of financial aid is available. The Saudi government in recent years has offered any of those who wanted to return under Hussein’s regime the sum of 10,000 riyals -- about $2,700 -- per person. Since most would likely have faced severe reprisals from the Iraqi government, few took the Saudis up on their offer.

Now, it is not clear how much, if anything, the Saudis will put up. Haddadin said it is likely the previous offer will remain in effect. For its part, he said, the U.N. agency will not actively promote repatriation for refugees until the situation in Iraq is more stable, but it will assist those who choose to return anyway.

“For [the U.N. agency] to be actively involved, we have to be able to guarantee a return in safety and dignity. Until this moment, we do not have those conditions 100%,” he said. “Dignity means you don’t dump people in the middle of a no-man’s land and say, ‘Here is your country. Go.’ We have to be able to monitor conditions.”

Large numbers of the refugees here say they must have far more than 10,000 Saudi riyals to begin a new life. Most of their homes were destroyed or taken over by Iraqis loyal to the regime in the wake of the 1991 uprising. Often, breadwinners were killed. And although the Saudi government has offered schooling to residents of the camp, large numbers of young men said the numbing boredom and frustration of living for years in their featureless desert prison left them unable to study, or read, or plan for any future.

“Can’t you see we are enslaved here in this desert?” said Majid Hussein of Basra. Hussein was hobbling on crutches, his ankle and foot swollen and festering with open sores. He had injected himself with a chemical, he said, hoping to be sent to a European hospital for treatment. Instead, he was sent to the camp clinic.

“This was just my foot. Many here have tried suicide,” he said. “What do you expect? I have lost my childhood, my manhood....

“Tell me, who is responsible for this misery? Who is responsible for this crime? Saudi Arabia and America. What is the benefit of giving us food and medication, without freedom and mobility? ... They tell us, go back to Iraq now, it’s better than under Saddam’s regime. But to return again only to live in another refugee camp?”

The paintings of Kazem’s students, hanging in a hall outside the camp auditorium, bear heartbreakingly little resemblance to the desert landscape around the camp, flat and so dry that it sustains not even sagebrush. One after another, the paintings show water. A small house on a forested lake with a canoe idling at shore. An orange sun slipping under a sea at dusk. The wide rivers described by Kazem.

There are also many images of birds, most of them flying. One is a parrot, draped in an Iraqi flag; Saddam Hussein, from his perch atop a horse, is aiming a pistol at it.

“Some of them who were born in Iraq have memories and paint what they remember,” Kazem said. “But most of it is just their own imaginations.”

Outside, a dozen little boys stand at attention on a stage and sing a song they have memorized, throwing shy smiles at the audience between verses. Mohammed Hussein, 10, has the loveliest voice, and his teacher holds a microphone near him when he sings, clear and sweet.

“I heard from my father that my country is an Arab country. Oh, my teacher writes a history about a child who lived without a country, and the story of this time is his own testimony,” Hussein sings. “I am singing the song of my own life.”