TANUMAH (Iraq): Five-month-old Mohsen Hussein cries incessantly in his crib as the desert winds buffet his tent near Iraq’s border with Iran.
Like the rest of his family, Mohsen is filthy and hungry. His mother can barely afford to feed herself and his siblings who scamper barefoot and unkempt in the squalor that is the Tanumah camp for Ahvaz Iranian refugees, displaced by wars and the lawlessness that pervades post-war Iraq.
Most of the residents at Tanumah, a sun-baked patch of land near Iraq’s southern city of Basra, had lived in the fertile Wasit province since Iraq seized border areas in Iran’s Ahvaz region during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s.
As indigenous Arabs, the Ahvaz were given farms by Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and lived in relative harmony with the local population.
But since Saddam was overthrown in April in the US-led war, Iraqis, angered by what they saw as the privileged position of the Ahvaz, have driven them from their homes. Now all the 214 refugees living in tents at Tanumah want to do is go back to Iran.
“The Iraqis took everything from us, our jewellry, our homes. We never needed anything from anyone but now, we can’t even get food for our children,” said Sitta Elwan, Mohsen’s grandmother.
“In the morning, the sun is unbearable and at night, the wild animals keep us awake. Our men have no jobs, our children are filthy. We just want to go to Iran but even that is a problem,” she said, her tattooed and sun-scorched face distorted with distress.
THE WAITING GAME: The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said it was working with the government of Iran and the US civilian administration in Iraq to repatriate the Ahvaz as soon as possible, but negotiations are proving lengthy.
In the meantime, the families stranded at the dusty camp eke out a living from aid packages from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and by selling their meagre belongings at the Shatt al-Arab market, 10 km away.
“When we came here three months ago after the Iraqis took our homes, we were told we’d be here for one week. Then another week went by and another,” said Radi Latfah who used to grow wheat near the southern town of Kut.
“Every day, the U.N. people come, tell us to wait for a bit more. But without work and a proper life, it’s difficult.”
Insects buzz among the animal droppings that litter Tanumah, which has no power and receives drinkable water from the ICRC every 10 days. Residents store their rations in rusty barrels and washing-up water is usually sieved and used again.
Some families, striving for normalcy, held a wedding for two of the refugees. The couple’s wedding gift was a week alone in a tent — a luxury in a camp where up to 10 men, women and children eat and sleep in the same space.
BLEAK EXISTENCE: Frustration runs high among the Ahvaz. Many are convinced that their ancestral homeland does not want them back. Clan elders tell tales of being caught in the crossfire of the Iran-Iraq war and of fleeing their homes with only the clothes on their backs.
Their bleak existence is also threatened by the Iraqi families who flock to the camp looking for shelter after losing their rented homes to their owners — the Iraqi refugees who have returned from Iran since the end of the US-led war.
Every day, the men of Tanumah trek down to the Shalamchah border post, some 20 km away to ask the Iranian frontier guards if they will allow them in. After a heated discussion — conducted through a Farsi-speaking Iraqi Shia cleric — they go home, crestfallen and envious of the Iraqis, their belongings piled high on pick-up trucks, who joyously cross into their homeland from Iran.
Spokeswoman Yasmin Keith-Krelik said the UNHCR was trying to repatriate the Ahvaz in as legal a manner as possible but a few weeks ago the patience of many camp residents ran out.
Residents say several families crossed into Iran through the heavily-mined Charhani border, but only after paying the Iranian guards a $200 bribe — a gargantuan sum for the poor Ahvaz.
Like many Iraqis disillusioned with the US occupation of their country, the Ahvaz long for the days of Saddam despite his brutal treatment of the Shia.
“We came to Iraq with zero and now, 23 years later, we’ve got zero,” said Zibari Hussein al-Hashimi. “Saddam protected us but now he’s gone. Neither Iran nor America give a damn about us. It seems we’re fated to drift all our lives.”—Reuters
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