For “Iraqi Kurdistan Dispatch”, Ashley Gilbertson reporting from the area
Binaslawah camp for displaced people, Arbil suburbs, Iraqi Kurdistan, 12 April 2002

"I am a Kurd, why should I change my ethnic identity?" exclaims Ibrahim Jamal Sayid about Saddam Hussein's attempt at Arabizing him and his family. His refusal to submit has led him to where he talks to me from now - a small damp tent which he has been sharing with his wife and seven children for the last six months since being forced out of his town in the oil rich, Iraqi controlled-area in Kirkuk Governorate. Their tent is but one of hundreds here in the muddy suburbs skirting the city of Arbil, the regional capital of the autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan, under the Kurdish rule since 1991.

Ibrahim was requested by the Iraqi ruling Ba'ath party to sign a document changing his Kurdish identity to Arabic; a document officially called “Form of Correction of Nationality”, distributed on non-Arab communities in the Kurdish regions which are under Iraqi control. When Ibrahim refused to abide, his house was promptly surrounded by Iraqi forces and he and his family were forced to leave to the Kurdish autonomous region, leaving his land and properties to be confiscated by the Iraqi government.

Tens of thousands of Kurdish families have been forcibly displaced from Kirkuk Governorate and other Kurdish regions in the past twenty years, within the framework of an Iraqi plan to displace original inhabitants of this Kurdish region and settle Arab families in the place of the expelled Kurds and other minorities, who refuse to “officially” become Arabs; a policy which the Kurds call Arabization. In the past few years, this campaign has dramatically become intensified.

 Mr. Salah Dalo, the official in charge of the third region of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, KDP, which runs Binaslawah camp, says, Saddam Hussein's continued efforts to 'Arabize’ the region aims at gaining a definitive Iraqi ownership and continue to pump securely what is today 60 per cent of Iraq's oil wealth.

Zahir Rojbayani, the head of the Arbil-based Kirkuk Cultural Centre, and who originally comes from Kirkuk, explains that Arabization, though only formally named in 1981 in a decree passed by Saddam Hussein's administration, has actually been, gradually, implemented since 1934, by successive Iraqi governments. He claims that the recent policy is targeting the Kirkuk region not only because of its abundant oil, but also fertile plains and major strategic military importance. He feels that Saddam's scheme is working.

"I feel that Arabization is in its final stages," he says, "if the expelled people are not allowed to go back, within one year, the Arabized towns will loose their national Kurdish characteristics, and, we will lose Kirkuk." 

"The reason is that the expelled people who have been forced here have been and will, in time, settle down and have jobs," he reasons, "the second generation would not have so much enthusiasm to return".

It is for this reason that Arif Tayfur, chairman of the Higher Committee for Confronting Arabization in Kurdistan, is setting programmes for the expelled Kirkukis against being "assimilated here among the people - so they don't forget the issue of return." Arif explains the committee's various actions in combating Arabization, though it seems the only method which could produce any fruit, is presenting legal documents, figures, testimonies and studies on the Arabized areas to the United Nations and international institutions to provide evidence on the Iraqi policy and establish that these regions were Kurdish. 

 Arif has plans, and he looks into the past to foresee the future - in 1991 when the Kurds liberated Kirkuk after the Gulf war, the Arab settlers left within 24 hours, voluntarily, he says. He hopes that events may provide the opportunity for "our people to return to their Kurdish land".

Until then, the most fortunate displaced people will live in poorly constructed collective towns that surround the major cities, miles from Kirkuk and other Iraqi-controlled Kurdish areas. They are deprived of running water, electricity or sewage. Their less fortunate counterparts have to do with tents, flattened sheets of metal, and homes made of mud brick, providing housing. 

 The collective towns, or Mujamma’, were built by the Iraqi authorities as early as 1975, specifically for purposes of resettlement of forcibly displaced Kurds, or for Arabization schemes. Since 1991 when the Gulf War allied forces imposed a 'No-Fly Zone' over southern and northern Iraq, Saddam's building stopped in the Kurdish-administered areas but his Arabization programme continued, and even intensified. 

The United Nations and two local NGOs are sole relief agencies attempting to curb the rising demands for food and housing. With daily arrival of new families forced out of Kirkuk and other Iraqi-controlled Kurdish regions, and existing requirements already overwhelming, observers and officials alike say they cannot cope .

"The UN oil-for-food programme [commonly known here as the '986 programme'] has its shortcomings, and the [lack of a programme for the] displaced people is one of them." says Hoshyar Siwaily, deputy minister of humanitarian aid and cooperation in the KDP-led Kurdistan regional government. "The 986 programme provides only emergency aid and this is not adequate ... there is no consolidated program to resettle the displaced people, and the [lack of] coordination [between relief agencies] has led to poor distribution of aid" says the deputy minister. 

 For nearly two years, Adil Ahmed Mohammad and his family of twelve have lived without housing or sufficient support in Binaslawah camp. It was almost two years ago when he was received his "notice of expulsion" from the Iraqi authorities, and today he pores over it again. Faded and torn, Adil may have  read it a thousand times. From the document, my translator makes out the few belongings Adil was allowed to take - three gas bottles, a stove, pots and pans.

Adil was a farmer. He owned fifty seven sheep and a plot of land. He was first expelled in 1991, after the Kurdish uprising and lived one year with his family in refugee camps in Iran before "secretly" returning to Kirkuk area to work in the countryside. He did not inform the central government of his return. Eventually, the military began harassing his family, and he was forced to work for Iraqi officers without pay "all to make me leave". He received official instructions to depart Kirkuk on the 3rd of September 2000, since then he has lived in a tent.

Like the majority of the displaced people, he cannot find a job. Of his eleven children, one has found work when he became a Peshmarga, member of Kurdish armed forces, but his salary provides for only one.

Sadly, Adil's story is not unique. People here have no income and for survival rely on the 986 programme which supplies food baskets monthly, consisting mostly of wheat-flour and rice.

"I expect the [Kurdistan Regional] government and the United Nations will help one day," Adil says quietly "but now, our future is unknown".

 With no real concern by the international community, Saddam Hussein’s forcibly displaced people remain waiting for their unknown destiny, and like most of the Iraqi Kurds, in the event of the various possible scenarios of the US expected intervention in Iraq, they do not know if they have to hope for the better or expect the worst.