IRAQ: Now the Ethnic Re-Cleansing Begins

IRAQ: Now the Ethnic Re-Cleansing Begins
Ferry Biedermann - IPS 4/25/03

KIRKUK, Apr 25 (IPS) - An open truck carrying an elated family and their possessions pulls up at a checkpoint set up by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) at Dakuk, just south of the oil city Kirkuk. Shaker Mahmoud Al-Zendi and his family are back after a 20-year exile.

"I had come back here in 1983 from fighting for Iraq against Iran at the Faw peninsula," says Al-Zendi, who takes his name after his village. "It had been a terrible battle, but when I got home it was worse. My whole village had been wiped off the face of the earth."

The action against Al-Zendi village was a part of the 'Arabisation' of the north by Saddam Hussein and his Baath regime. Baghdad had decided to change the ethnic balance in oil rich Kirkuk and Mosul; the local Kurds had long been seen as troublesome.

This week, thousands of Kurdish families started to move back to their old lands from around the country. Families from the autonomous Kurdish area further north had begun to return the week before.

The Baath party forced most Kurdish families into internal exile to remote and poor areas. Some 200 families from Al-Zendi were driven to Ramadi located in the dry and dusty desert towards Jordan.

Kurds are happy to return to their green and fertile fields in the north. But strangers now occupy their land, and some seem ready to fight for it.

Al-Zendi instructs members of his tribe to set up tents at the site where his village used to stand. His voice shaking with rage, he points to a distant village.

"That is still my land and I asked them to leave," he says. "The thieves just said no."

PUK officials are now supporting the claims of the returning Kurds. "The occupiers will have to go back to their home districts," says Nur Eddin Daoudi, a political officer who says his task is to escort Kurds to their original homes. "Some of them are not even real Iraqis."

The PUK is clearly aiming to reverse the Arabisation introduced by the Baath party. About 750,000 "Arabs and Bedu" in Kirkuk district will have to leave because they were "instruments of the Baath party," Daoudi says.

But the PUK will respect their human rights, he says. "We suffered and we will not do the same to others." The Arabs, he says, will be given one month to find homes and jobs elsewhere.

"But we have nowhere to go," says Sheikh Awad Bardi Owgla from Al-Wahdeh village, speaking in Arabic. This is the village Al-Zendi had pointed to.

Members of the large Al-Shamar tribe here are anxious and angry. Owgla says U.S. forces have "got rid of the government and thrown the country into chaos."

The Al-Shamar were a nomadic people who roamed the land for centuries "from the Syrian border region to the north of Saudi Arabia" says Owgla. In 1973, the government forced them to give up their nomadic existence.

Before 1974 the tribe had no nationality, he says. The government changed that, and gave them land near Dakuk.

"Those Kurds are liars," says Owgla. "They had been given land by the government just a few years before us. Most of our land was also state land, and we bought the rest from individuals."

That tallies with a PUK guideline that everybody who registered in the area before 1971 can stay. Families who registered later will have to leave, Kurdish leaders say.

Owgla concedes that his village may have taken over some Kurdish land after their expulsion in 1983. But he indicated that the issue can be negotiated.

Instead, he says, the Kurds are shooting at them. "The Americans should protect us. They protect the oil fields in Kirkuk but not our families."

The Al- Zendis in the meantime are inspecting a pile of rubble that was once the family home. "This is where I will also build my new home," says Al-Zendi, holding a handful of dust.

For now, men are living in tents to mark their presence. The women and children are staying in a house near Dakuk that Al-Zendi owned 20 years ago.

"It had been taken over by a member of the Baath party," he says. "He left some 20 days ago and I immediately sent some men to take it back." Now the women are cleaning the house out to get rid of all signs of the last occupant.

The young children are walking about in a bit of a daze; this is the first time they have seen the home of their parents. They were born in Ramadi.

"I hated Ramadi," says 10-year old Hawla. "The people there were really mean to us." She does not miss anything she left behind; not her school, not her friends. "This is our place," she says, "I feel at home."