Qadir Elyasi

 (Eliassi)

Bahman Qanbari

Kianoush Javanmiri

Samrand Eliassi

Rezgar Hawrami

By Kamaran Najm
QUSHTEPE

issue No:47  ( 17/10/2008)

When Hassan Pallani and his family were driven out of their camp in the Kurdish areas in 1982 by the former Iraqi regime, they never imagined they would spend the next 27 years subjugated in a desert camp near Anbar. Pallani, an Iranian Kurd, had fled from Iran some 30 years ago after the Iranian revolution of 1979 and found sanctuary in a camp near Slemani.

Today, he is married with four children, none of whom have either an Iraqi or Iranian identity. “We spent 27 years in Altash Camp near Anbar. I got married there, now I have four children but none of them have either an Iraqi or Iranian identity,” said 42-year-old Pallani who was born in Kirmanshah. Pallani’s family are not alone in their plight.

Twenty kilometers from Erbil lies Qushtepe Camp, which is “home” to nearly 250 Kurdish families from Iran. These families are among the 120,000 refugees from Iranian Kurdistan who fled to Iraq in 1979 after the revolution led by Ayatollah Khomeni.

At first the 12,000 families were sheltered in some camps around the city of Slemani but following a decision by the Iraqi regime, the families were forcibly moved to compulsory camps near Anbar.

Starting life from scratch was difficult for these families, and it was not eased in the slightest by the desert conditions of their camp. They were also unfamiliar with the language and culture of the predominately Arab-inhabited area.

The families say they were not treated as human beings. They endured this situation for 25 years. After the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003, there was an opportunity for them to escape from their desert prison and return to a normal life.

So it was that many families went back to their ancestral lands while others migrated to western countries. But there were still others who continue to spend their lives in the camps around Slemani, Erbil, Kalar and Khanaqin, waiting for a normal life to resume after 30 years of misery.

The most common grievance among these families is that they don't have the right of citizenship neither in Iran nor in Iraq. Expelling these families from Iran was under the orders of Ayatollah Khomeini who decreed that those areas were to be evacuated and ordered his subordinates to kill anyone who resisted.

Most of the settlers originally hailed from Kirmanshah and their forceful removal was at the hands of the Pasdars (Special Guards) Living in exile, and their struggle to survive without the basic necessities as well as countless other problems, have exhausted these homeless families, who describe their existence as a “slow death.”

After spending most of their life in suffering, the Kurdish settlers of Qushtepe Camp expect better conditions of life in the Kurdistan Region and regard the Kurdish government as their biggest supporter.

“We ask the regional government to provide us with the basic necessities of life because until now we are not satisfied with our life and nothing is provided for us,” said Ali Rehim, another settler.

Ali Rehim, now 51 years old, was born in Serpel Zehaw in Iran and was hit by a bomb when he was returning from Anbar to the camp he is dwelling in now. He lost a leg and an arm.

“I spent all I had to find treatment but it was useless because my condition could not be treated here. I have to go abroad to find treatment so I ask the government to help me because I am the only breadwinner in this family,” said Rehim.

Finding employment is a grave challenge for the men of these families while the women’s biggest worry is the unemployment and idleness of their husbands and sons.

Some of the youth of this camp have graduated from universities but they remain unemployed to date, while others have chosen to work as laborers. Khasiya Ezo Abdul-Rahman, a 52-year-old widow, was also born in Serpel Zehaw in Iran.

She now lives with her children in a camp near Kalar. She has to travel more than 250km from her camp if she wants to see her son.

“Once every month I go to see my son and my three grandsons. My grandsons have to be sent to Iran once every three months due to a mental illness,” she said.

The families claim that the governments do not treat them as Kurds. “We ask the Iraqi government at least to provide us with the right of refugees like any of the other countries. Even now we are treated by a decision ordered by the former regime which considers us as immigrants not refugees,” said 32-year-old Jalal Mahmoud.

The families are now dreading the coming of fall and winters. They fear their children will freeze to death under the tents. Winter is a nightmare for them every year, and they are asking the government and NGOs to extend assistance.     

Iraq Voices: Iranian Refugees in Arbil, Iraq

Mon, 02/25/2008 - 15:38

Not far from Arbil city center is a scattered speckling of UN-blue gates, tarps, and barrels. Kawa Settlement, which presently houses the residents of the now-closed camp of Al-Tash, is home to about 230 Iranian Kurdish refugee families (totaling 1,350 individuals) who fled their homes in Iran between 1979 and 1988. Women in the settlement are generally housewives, while men work in construction and the local markets. In Al-Tash many of the school-age youngsters were also employed on construction sites, but in Kawa all of the children between ages of 6 and 12 attend school, and about 90 percent of those over age 12 do as well.

An implementing partner of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) provides services, including electricity, water, sanitation, garbage collection, education, health care, and construction of new homes. House construction is being undertaken in three stages. The first phase saw the completion of 144 houses for 152 families, the second was for 59 structures, and at the present time there are only seven families still waiting to move from tents into houses. A deep well has also been established for camp residents. UNHCR has supported the host community as well, spending two years building a sewage system and extending the water network. The host community also benefits from access to the newly constructed health clinic and the school with nine classrooms.

During a recent visit to Kawa, several representatives of the refugee community spoke with Refugees International about their situation. One refugee told RI, “We are grateful to the government for financial assistance, but we have spiritual problems. We can’t live one without the other. As refugees, we have been residing outside our country for 29 years and have suffered a lot. We ask for three things to resolve our problems. First, we want to return under conditions of guaranteed safety and international recognition. Iran rejected this. Second, we want to be recognized as refugees by the Kurdish Regional Government. Right now we can not register cars in our names, and houses are provided to us, but they are not registered in our names. We have marriage issues. And third, some 17 individuals were recognized as refugees and designated for resettlement in Canada, but nothing happened.” In fact, Canada stopped the process of interviewing inside Iraq in 2003.

“When we lived in Al-Tash, Iraq was under Saddam Hussein’s control. When soldiers got hurt, they would hurt refugees.” Al-Tash was closed in 2005. “We are safe here, but we are homesick. It is possible to have citizenship but then there is no chance to resettle.” One teacher said that such citizenship is not formal and that it is not possible to secure Iraqi certification. She said she understood that a person would have to leave the camp to get citizenship. UNHCR assured Refugees International that this is not the case.

A refugee woman told RI that “women have no way to know themselves. There needs to be a place where women can come to learn about rights. Our difficulty is that we don’t know ourselves. We don’t know if we are Iraqi or Iranian.” The provision of a community center where such activities can take place is currently in UNHCR’s 2008 program.

The three requests of the refugees are reasonable. Refugees International urges Iran to guarantee safe return to their country of origin, and in cases where return is not possible, for Iraq to grant nationality to individuals seeking that option. We encourage UNHCR and Canada to resolve and resettle the outstanding cases. Organizations operating in the Arbil area and donors should consider supporting programs targeted to women’s rights and needs. UNHCR will continue to pursue durable solutions for this group, most notably integration and voluntary repatriation.

source: www.refugeesinternational.org

New Kawa Camp houses constructed

15 August 2005
KurdishMedia.com - By Dr.  Pary Karadaghi

he Al Tash Iranian Kurdish refugees hope that they will finally be given a chance to have free and safe lives after spending more than twenty years in the squalor of the Al Tash refugee camp in Iraq’s Anbar governorate, the country’s westernmost province commonly known as a site of violence and instability. Of the 12,000 Al Tash refugees, 3,000 have relocated to Kalar, Kifri, and Bareka in the Sulaimaniya governorate in Kurdish autonomous region in Iraqi Kurdistan. Approximately 1,200 others have sought refuge in Jordan, and approximately 800 living in the Ruweished refugee camp in Jordan, located some 60 km from west of the Jordan’s border with Iraq. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has increased its efforts to relocate these refugees by providing housing assistance in the region and working with NGOs to assist with refugee reintegration and resettlement. Desperate to be safe and acquire new refuge, these families have been moving for months. The trickle turned into a flood as violence in Iraq, concentrated in the Anbar governorate and other areas populated primarily by Sunni Arabs, peaked between the coalition and Iraqi security forces and various terrorist groups. Since the 2003 liberation of Iraq and the subsequent conflict, Al Tash residents have been attacked by insurgents and experienced frequent water, food and supply shortages, introducing further danger and hardship into the refugees’ already difficult lives. Over the last few years, some of these refugees were resettled to third countries after receiving asylum, and some refugees are still struggling and are considered “irregular movers”[1] stranded in Van, Turkey as they await decisions to be made on their fate.

A majority of the Al Tash refugees were forced to leave Iran as early as the 1979 Islamic Revolution led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a revolution that seemingly made killing Kurds legal. Since this revolution, Kurds have faced violent oppression at the hands of the Iranian regime for both ethnic and religious reasons, as the majority of Kurds are Sunni Muslims living under a Persian and Shi’i regime. We now see reenactment of similar ethnic cleansing once again as violence flares up in the Iranian cities of Mahabad, Sanandaj, Prinshar, Mariwan, Bana, and Saqiz. The people of Iranian Kurdistan have been engaging in mass protests against the Iranian regime’s repressive policies for more than a month at the current time.

According to KurdishMedia.com and the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (PDKI)[2] the government’s security forces and the military have taken heavy-handed steps to crush the mass protests, which to the present date has resulted in the deaths of over fifty Kurds. In addition, a large number of Kurds have been arrested, including prominent Kurdish human rights and women’s rights activists, journalists and writers.

Many of those who have been injured are afraid of going to the hospitals for medical care, fearing arrest and further reprisals from the security forces. A new flow of refugees is to be expected if the situation in Iranian Kurdistan continues to worsen.

According to the same sources[3] the Iranian state has implemented de facto martial law in many parts of Iranian Kurdistan. Furthermore, the state has extended its military presence in Kurdistan since the protests began, and has reportedly deployed over 100,000 troops and helicopter gunship to the region. In one incident on August 3, 2005, in the city of Saqiz, a military helicopter gunned down civilians. The number of dead and injured is rising, among them a number of women and children. In a statement dated August 5 2005, Amnesty International[4] expressed alarm at the cycle of violence in Iranian Kurdistan and called for an investigation into the killing of demonstrators, and furthermore demanded that officials suspected of responsibility for human rights violations such as extrajudicial executions should be brought to justice in accordance with fair trial procedures.

As these events, which will likely increase the magnitude of the Iranian Kurdish refugee issue, occur in Iran, a chronic refugee population in Al Tash continues to exist. Al Tash is in an extremely dangerous location, close to the city Ramadi, capital of the restive Anbar governorate, which has been a stronghold of terrorist organizations in Iraq. In this dangerous region, the refugees are being dragged into violence that has nothing to do with them. These refugees and their families left their country of origin and then experienced the first Anfal campaign of the early 1980s. Deported the Al Tash camp, they awaited execution and lived were forced to live in squalor conditions. They became pawns of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s political games before the International Red Cross and UNHCR intervened. Since the liberation of Iraq from Saddam’s regime in 2003, these refugees have remained in the Al Tash camp, where they are now susceptible to attacks by the attacks by terrorists that plague much of Iraq. Approximately 3,500 refugees still live in Al Tash despite persistent danger due to the security situation in the region and inhuman living conditions. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have been unable to meet their needs due to instability and increasing terrorist attacks on humanitarian relief workers in Iraq.

During a recent trip to Iraqi Kurdistan, I had the pleasure of visiting the refugees and talked to their team and village leaders, called Anjumans, and saw first hand their dire conditions and needs. Each Anjuman or team leader is responsible for approximately 30 to 50 families and speaks for them. They are without legal papers, have menial jobs, mostly in construction, if they can compete with workers brought in from Fallujah and other places who have agreed to work for very little. Many of their children and now their grandchildren have been born into the life of a refugee, knowing only the living conditions of a refugee camp. They have not received the education or the skills they need to succeed in life and become self-sufficient and contributing members of society; they have only known a life of struggle for basic necessities that we take for granted. Local universities and vocational training institutions in the University of Salahuddin in Erbil governorate and the University of Sulaimaniya now stand ready to take those who seek higher education.

In the little village of Bareka, where I met with a few of the team leaders, close to Sulaimaniya, approximately 250 houses have been built for these refugees through UNHCR funding as well as the efforts of the international donor community and non-governmental organizations. An additional 300 units are needed to meet the needs of remaining homeless refugees in the region. An additional 500 units with support services, income generation and health services could assist the remaining Al Tash families in a transfer to safe territory and facilitate their local integration. The host communities of Kalar, Kifri, and Bareka, will welcome these refugee families. The community leaders, Anjumans, teachers of schools, the little under equipped health clinic, they are all in favor of the relocation of these families to their respective communities. They are willing to share the little they have. Neighborhoods are packed with “guests from Al Tash” and the schools can be expanded to take in more children. This is the “Kurdish hospitality” we can see across all borders in Kurdistan on all levels. We saw it following the influx of refugees into Iranian Kurdistan, who were stranded in the cold mountains after the failed uprising that followed the 1991 Gulf War. We see similar hospitality in Diyarbakir, Mardin, Silopi, Zakho, Duhok, Sulaimanya and Erbil. We Kurds must welcome the Al Tash stranded refugee families with proverbial open arms, continuing a proud and noble Kurdish tradition of hospitality.

The safety and well being of the remaining Kurdish refugees in Al Tash is in jeopardy. They need to know a life without intimidation, attack and intolerable living conditions. Freedom and opportunity are the basic rights that the Al Tash refugees have requested for the past twenty years. The UNHCR and the US government stand ready to help make the transition of these refugees to safer regions within Iraq smoother. The Al Tash refugees will face increasingly dire conditions if this opportunity to assist them is ignored. To save their lives, they must not be forgotten. They need secure shelter and life’s daily necessities. They ask for a chance to live their lives with security and hope, a chance that other Al Tash refugees and many Anfal Kurdish victims never received. Let us not walk away from this responsibility. In a speech made earlier this year regarding world poverty, South African former President Nelson Mandela and 1993 Nobel Peace laureate said, “Sometimes it falls upon a generation to be great. You can be that generation.” The new generation of Kurds in many parts of Iraqi Kurdistan knows freedom, and the generation of Kurds who comprise the political and social leadership in today’s Iraqi Kurdistan know both the trials and tribulations of living under a constant threat without basic rights and the feeling of liberation after a lifetime of dedication to the Kurdish cause. It is now time for both of these generations to make the necessary steps to aid their brothers who are living in terror, poverty, and uncertainty in Al Tash.