Kurdish Leader Calls for the Elimination of Ladenite Ansar Al-Islam.

Iraqi Kurds feel the brunt of Saddam's 'Arabization' 
The New York Times 

John F. Burns
August 13, 2002

BARDA QARAMAN, Iraq When Saddam Hussein's men came for them, Omar Osman Siddiq and his family went quietly. With his wife and eight children, Siddiq silently loaded the family's possessions onto a truck waiting to carry them away from the home in Kirkuk, a city rich in oil, where his forebears had lived for generations.

Then, at a police station, Siddiq surrendered all the personal documents Iraqis need for daily existence, including identity cards, a booklet for weekly food rations, even the registration for the family car.

Flanked by armed guards, he faced one last indignity, signing a paper attesting that everything had been in accordance with law, and voluntary.

By nightfall, the truck reached its final destination: a plot of ground in the arid desert 130 kilometers (80 miles) east of Kirkuk, just outside the 90 percent of Iraq that is governed by Saddam and inside a self-governing Kurdish enclave that leads a precarious existence under Western air protection. To finance their new life as refugees at Barda Qaraman, the Siddiqs had savings of $30.

The family's deportation in July followed their rejection of Decree 199, a presidential order issued by Saddam to reinforce a population policy that is Iraq's equivalent of ethnic cleansing. The Siddiqs are Kurds, the predominant ethnic group in northern Iraq, and Decree 199, proclaimed last year, lays down a procedure known as "nationality correction." It gives Kurds and other minorities the chance to avow that they "mistakenly" registered themselves as non-Arabs and that they wish to reclaim their Arab origins.

The policy has been used primarily against Iraq's Kurds, who make up as much as 25 percent of the country's population of 23 million, by far the largest minority. But it has been used against Armenians, Assyrians, Chaldeans and Turkmen, too, among other groups.

Creating an Arab majority on the great Mesopotamian plain north of Baghdad is not a new policy for Iraq. Nor is it an innovation by Saddam, who, like all Iraqi leaders since the state's founding in 1921, is an Arab from the Sunni sect of Islam to which most Kurds belong.

But Saddam, especially since his 1991 Gulf War defeat and the creation of the Kurdish enclave, has accelerated efforts to drive minorities out and bring Arabs in.

To resist Saddam's enforcers is to risk severe punishment, including execution, according to Kurdish refugees and human rights organizations. So the Siddiqs took care to say nothing provocative when the men with the truck arrived. The children were coached not to cry or ask questions, and above all to say nothing derogatory about Saddam.

"If you say anything, they will shoot you," said Siddiq, 38, an electrician who owned a repair shop in Kirkuk. "All I told them on the day they came for us was 'O.K., we'll leave, there's no need for any violence.' But my nerves were so taut that if I had had a Kalashnikov rifle, I would have shot every one of them."

The Kurds, as a group, have suffered much more than deportation under Saddam. During the Iran-Iraq war that ended in 1988, when Kurdish separatist groups allied themselves with Iran, his warplanes dropped poison gas on Kurdish towns and villages, killing thousands. Kurdish accounts say that thousands more Kurdish men were arrested and never seen again.

Many thousands more Kurds have disappeared since 1991, when Iraq's defeat by U.S.-led forces in the battle for Kuwait was followed by a Kurdish uprising in the north that was brutally suppressed by Saddam. That, in turn, led the Western powers to declare the no-flight zone north of the 36th parallel that created the Kurdish enclave.

Many families in the territory have stories about relatives in the areas around Kirkuk and Mosul, another oil city under Saddam's control, who have been led away by the Iraqi secret police since the 1991 uprising and have not been heard from since. Their offense, the families say, was usually that they were related to somebody who joined in the uprising.

But even families that took no part in the political upheavals have been affected by Baghdad's drive to change the ethnic composition in the oil fields.

According to U.S. figures, more than 800,000 people have fled north into the Kurdish enclave since 1991, nearly a fifth of the enclave's population of 3.6 million. But Kurdish refugee organizations say that about 250,000 of those who have moved were forced out after rejecting "Arabization," like the Siddiqs.

Rizgar Ali, a Kurdish official responsible for helping the resettlement of Kurds in the enclave, cited official Iraqi figures showing that Kurds constituted 54 percent of the population of Kirkuk Province in 1954, compared with only 25 percent now. Meanwhile, he said, Arabs have risen to more than 50 percent of the population from less than 10 percent.

Even if minority families agree to accept Arab nationality, their compliance is often only a prelude to further persecution. Human-rights reports cite cases of families that have signed the conversion papers being prosecuted afterward for having "falsely" claimed to be Kurds.

Some were then stripped of all property and moved from the northern area into the Arab heartland of Iraq. Other families have been told that their changed status makes them only "second-class Arabs," and that their homes and jobs are to be given to "genuine Arabs" who are moving north under policies that provide subsidies to Arab migrants.

In Siddiq's case, Iraqi officials visited his home three times, starting last summer, offering the family a new start as Arabs. Siddiq refused. "I know the history of Saddam against the Kurds," he said. "So I told them, 'I was born a Kurdish man, and I will die a Kurdish man.' On the third visit, they said: 'O.K., you've had your chance. Now you'll have to leave.'"

Ali, the Kurdish official, carries the wistful title of governor of New Kirkuk, which is a broad area south and west of Sulaimaniya, a Kurdish-governed city about 65 kilometers from Barda Qaraman.

But Ali, whose family was forced out of its ancestral home by Iraqi forces creating a belt of Arab-only villages east of Kirkuk in the early 1960s, believes that the deportations are laying the ground for major strife, even if the government in Baghdad changes.

If President George W. Bush succeeds in his repeated vow to use U.S. power to oust Saddam, Ali said, any future Iraqi government that wants to reintegrate the Kurds peacefully into a united Iraq will have to meet Kurdish demands for the restoration of lost property. "We shall not surrender any of our rights, not ever," he said.

In the meantime, at the Barda Qaraman refugee camp, more than 100 Kurdish families struggle to get by without sanitation, and some, like the Siddiqs, without even a tarpaulin for shelter. They say they wish only that Bush will make good on his pledge to get rid of Saddam.