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| reports
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Kurdistan
Dispatch: Bomb Shelter
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Prime
Minister Salih and Kurdish Asylum seekers in Sweden
by:Shilan Ali Jabari June 12, 2002 Kurdistan Observer For the last year or so, many thousand of Kurds have lived in constant fear of being forced to return to an unstable Kurdistan. Many of these Kurds have legitimate fears, for they are victims of Iraq's constant and lethal Aribization campaigns of the predominantly Kurdish cities of Kirkuk, Sinjar, Khanaqin, Makhmur, Pirde, Dibs and others cities targeted for ethnic-cleansing. Then you have your second group of refugees asylum seekers who have turned towards the west, are your average run of the mill Kurd who truly feels that they have no future in a Kurdistan where 2,000 Iraqi tanks and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Republican guards are poised to enter and destroy what little the Kurds have built in the past decade of so. I was pleased when a friend of mine acompanying Prime Minister Barham Salih on his official visit to the Swedish Ministry of Migration, when that individual told me that Prime Minister Salih discourages and move to forcefully repatriate any Kurd forcefully back to Kurdistan. What pleased me more, was that Minister Karlsson agreed, and saw eye to eye with the Prime Minister of the Kurdistan Regional Government. The Prime Minister also suggested ways of addressing the problem without hurting the individual asylum seeker. In his vision to address both the concern of the Kurdistan Regional Government and the concern of the Swedish government, Minister Karlsson agreed, on behest of the Prime Minister to look into alternative ways of addressing the issue of Kurdish migration to the West. What pleased me the most, what that for the first time in modern Kurdish history, an individual representative of the Kurdish nation was able to systematically and methodolically address the issue of Kurdish asylum seekers in a logical fashion that will give a viable solution to both the Kurdish individuals concerned and the Swedish authorities. To
top everything off, the Swedish Ministry of Migration also looks forward
to the leadership of the Kurdistan Regional Government as a partner in
both cooperation and coordination in addressing the asylum issue of the
Kurds.
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