Displaced Iraqi Kurds, Wary Arabs Seek Justice

From his makeshift home in the bowels of a soccer stadium here, Bahktiar Mohammed gazes with raw resentment toward the middle-class, mostly Arab neighborhood across a debris-strewn lot where sheep gnaw at scraps of green.

“If someone doesn’t do something for us soon, we may cause some trouble over there,” warns Mohammed, one of more than 400 Kurdish refugees camping out beneath the stadium stairwells and grandstands.

Inside the Mansour neighborhood where Mohammed fixes his angry stare, Hadi Mahseen says he has no intention of giving up the home where he has lived for more than two decades. “This is not Kurdish territory,” declares Mahseen, an Arab oil worker. “This is Iraq. We will not leave for anyone.”

The clashing perspectives encapsulate one of the new Iraq’s thorniest dilemmas: how to do justice for hundreds of thousands of people thrown out of their homes during the rule of Saddam Hussein.

In coming weeks, a multinational body -- the International Office of Migration, based in Geneva -- will begin dealing with the difficult question. The IOM, whose membership includes more than 100 nations, including the United States, will start setting up offices to handle claims from people who say they were wrongly expelled during the Hussein era.

Many are Kurds forced from their villages as part of Hussein’s notorious “Arabization” movement, designed largely to install an Arab majority in this oil-producing northern region. Separate offices in Baghdad, Basra and elsewhere will handle claims from other displaced peoples, including so-called Marsh Arabs in the south, brutally suppressed by Hussein after the Persian Gulf War of 1991. Arabs who say Kurds recently forced them from their homes, or who fled in fear of retribution as the Hussein government fell, are also expected to come forward.

“This could be the largest and most complex such process ever,” says Norbert Wuehler, who is directing the effort from the IOM’s offices in Irbil, a largely Kurdish city north of here.

By some estimates, as many as 800,000 people may have been forced out of their homes during the Hussein years. But officials concede that the numbers are guesses at best.

“We really don’t have any idea how many people were affected, or how many will come forward,” said Wuehler, a German who is a leading international authority on such claims.

The United Nations and other international bodies in recent decades have set up various commissions to handle post-conflict property disputes, including claims arising from World War II, the Balkans war and the 1991 war in the Gulf. But factors unique to postwar Iraq -- including its lack of a central government and the vast sweep of Hussein’s ethnic-engineering operations -- have created a monumental challenge.

“It’s a very complex and delicate situation,” acknowledged William Eagleton, a longtime U.S. diplomat who headed an international study group examining the issue. “Resolving it is going to take time.”

U.S. authorities were keen to have some kind of an international body overseeing the effort, officials say. That’s how the IOM came into the picture.

The IOM, which often works closely with the United Nations, initially grew out of the refugee crisis in Europe after World War II and has had extensive experience with the Kurds. The IOM, funded by donations from the United States and other member nations, helped resettle hundreds of thousands of displaced Kurds after the 1991 Gulf War.

Distrust and suspicion are already clouding the effort, especially here in northern Iraq, where many Arabs fear Kurdish score-settling after decades of Kurdish torment at the hands of Hussein. The fact that the Kurds are widely seen as allies of the U.S. occupation forces -- and, indeed, accompanied the U.S. airborne troops into this city in April -- have only abetted the fears of Arabs and other non-Kurds.

On July 6, someone fired a rocket-propelled grenade through a wall of the IOM’s compound in Mosul, blasting a hole in the outer wall and sending shrapnel flying through two parked agency vehicles. No one was hurt, but the shot left its intended message.

Leaflets were later discovered linking the agency to Jewish property speculation -- one of several rumors of Jewish profiteering that have added fuel to the already incendiary panorama of postwar Iraq.

“It’s all a bit disconcerting,” conceded one staffer working on the issue of displaced people here.

Last month, two cars marked as IOM vehicles and carrying IOM staffers were ambushed near the southern city of Hillah, killing a driver and injuring three others.

The atmosphere here in multiethnic Kirkuk is far from calm. Resentments among its various inhabitants -- Kurds, Arabs, ethnic Turks -- simmer just below the surface. The non-Kurdish groups, in particular, fear losing out in the new, U.S.-administered region, a worry that both U.S. authorities and the U.S.-backed Kurdish governor of the township have attempted to defuse.

“We are dedicated to a multicultural, multiethnic society in which we all live together,” Gov. Abdulrahman Mustafa said during an interview in his wood-paneled office in City Hall, where U.S. troops maintain a security contingent.

The region of Kirkuk, with its vast oil reserves, was at the epicenter of Hussein’s Arabization plan. The idea was to maintain Arab control of the oil industry. The government ruthlessly expelled Kurds from outlying villages while providing incentives for Arab settlers from the south to relocate to the vacated houses here. Meantime, Baathist functionaries gerrymandered city limits to maximize Arab representation. Even today, no one seems to know where the actual township limits are or which group, if any, holds a majority.

Farther north, Kurds were able to establish a semiautonomous sector, enforced by a U.S.-British “no fly” zone. But Kirkuk remained under Hussein’s dominion.

The question of the displaced people is potentially explosive. U.S. troops have already intervened on several occasions in the north in property clashes between returning Kurds and settled Arabs.

“The question of the displaced people is the No. 1 issue for us,” Mustafa said. “We want it worked out in a manner that is fair for all who live in our city.”

What qualifies as fair will be difficult to determine. Some Kurdish leaders openly call for the expulsion of all Arabs who have come to the region since the Baath Party came to power in Baghdad in 1968.

“These Arabs who have been brought here at the expense of the Kurds must leave,” said Kemal Kerkuki, a Kurdish member of the City Council and a veteran peshmerga fighter, as the Kurdish guerrillas were known. “We will not throw them out as they did to us: They will be treated fairly, humanely. But they must leave.”

He was asked about the case of many Arabs born here in recent years, the children of those encouraged to come north. Must they leave too, even if they have lived their whole lives here and have families here?

“They are the children of snakes,” replied Kerkuki, who accompanied U.S. troops into Kirkuk. “They must go.”

Such sentiments have produced deep anxiety among Arab leaders and residents here. Several thousand Arab families, fearing reprisals from the Kurds, fled to the south as U.S. troops advanced from the north. In some cases, officials report, Arab farmers on land confiscated from the Kurds even reached agreement with returning Kurdish families to split the proceeds of their harvests before fleeing -- an example some see as encouraging.

The hope is that land claims can be negotiated fairly without open sectarian warfare, or attempts at reverse “ethnic cleansing.” The difficult mission will initially fall to the IOM, which is planning on opening offices -- “reconciliation facilities” -- to handle such claims here, in Mosul, in Irbil and in Sulaymaniyah, each with a staff of about 10. The U.S. Agency for International Development is funding the project, which is scheduled to last four months. But all recognize that the project could drag on for years.

The IOM’s first task is to develop a uniform claim form for those who say they were unfairly forced from their homes. Officials stress that this includes anyone -- Kurds, Arabs, Turks, Christians -- who may have been victimized.

“We want the process to be as fair and transparent as possible,” said Wuehler, the project administrator.

In coming weeks, as offices are opened, the IOM will spread the word about the new claims procedure. Some claims already have been filed with Kirkuk officials and the U.S. military. IOM representatives will look into the claims and try to reach agreements between the parties. Complicating matters is the frequent lack of documentation among Kurdish families and the fact that many Arabs occupying seized lands may have legal titles provided by the Hussein government.

Officials stress that the program is voluntary, essentially a method of mediation. No one is to be forced off their land, though some might be offered cash incentives to leave, authorities say.

Eventually, the disputed claims may end up in the legal system of a new Iraqi government, once courts and a valid infrastructure are in place.

But that could take a long time. And spare time is not something the anxious people of Kirkuk seem to have right now.

The routing of the Hussein government prompted an initial flood of Kurdish families to return to Kirkuk. Many expected to quickly reoccupy homes they had lost to Arabs. Others expected to be given new homes as spoils of war. Kurdish and U.S. leaders quickly discouraged the influx, but several thousand remain here, living in primitive camps like the desolate site at the soccer stadium, southeast of town.

“How long must we wait?” asked Tahsin Ali Saleh, a 40-year-old father of five with a sixth child on the way.

The former vegetable vendor recalled witnessing the destruction of his ancestral Kurdish village, Qalkhani, near Kirkuk, in 1987. “I watched as the Iraqi bulldozers destroyed our home,” Saleh said as he spoke in his makeshift abode, a corner of the sweltering soccer stadium entrance area that was roped off with cords and strung with blankets. “Since then, it has been very difficult for all of us. All we have thought about is going home.”

Across the vacant lot from the stadium, Mahseen says he has heard such angry sentiments. He feels sorry for the Kurds who were expelled, he says, but he bears no responsibility. The Arab man says he came north 23 years ago from his home in Qadisiyah, south of Baghdad, to work for the state oil company, where few Kurds could aspire to top jobs. Mahseen saw his move as a job opportunity, not a part of Hussein’s Arabization plan, though he acknowledges receiving financial incentives to relocate here. His five children were born in Kirkuk, and he lives in a comfortable house in a largely Arab neighborhood.

“Some Kurdish people want everything for themselves,” said Mahseen, who, like many Arabs, sees the U.S.-Kurdish alliance as perilous for his people. “But this is our country too. They can’t just throw us out.”