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ARBIL (Iraq): Four-year-old refugee Mohammed has been waiting all his life to go home — a victim of Saddam Hussein’s bid to wipe out the Kurds of northern Iraq.
“We would love to go back. But there is nothing to go back to. They destroyed our house and we have no money. We demand compensation,” his mother Shamam Ali said at the Binaslawa refugee camp near the Kurdish capital Arbil.
The 30-year-old mother of six is among thousands of Kurds forced at gunpoint to flee their homes around Kirkuk and seek safety in the breeze-block and mud refugee camp as Saddam tried to “Arabize” the oil-rich Kurdish region.
“We though that when the Americans came we would be able to go home. But they do nothing. We are worried about our children. They have done nothing. They are the future and yet they are here in this,” Ali said, her arms protectively wrapped around her son.
Binaslawa refugee camp is home to countless fugitives from Saddam Hussein’s successive campaigns of genocide against the Kurds and from feuding until 1998 between rival Kurdish factions.
It stands as a reminder of the sufferings of the Kurdish people under the reign of the ousted and now captured Iraqi dictator and a pointer to the still highly uncertain future.
“I was threatened, imprisoned and told to leave. My house was blown up,” said former building contractor Shakur Ahmed, 42, who was forced to leave Kirkuk with his two wives and 15 children in 1994 as Saddam paid thousands of Arabs to move into the area.
DIFFICULT PROBLEMS: Under the protection of the 1991 no-fly zone over the Kurdish north of Iraq which lasted until the US-led invasion in March 2003, the Kurds developed a functioning economy with Arbil at its core and even held their own elections.
Since the settlement in 1998 of the feud between the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) — which won just over half of the 1992 vote — and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) — which took the rest, they have even developed an integrated government.
Arbil is a bustling city of one million people with no sign of being on a war footing and no evidence of the mayhem that has erupted in the south and centre of the country since March.
There may be no street lights and the roads may be in urgent need of repair, but the bright neon glow from the windows of the well-stocked shops gives ample illumination and the tide of cars driven at breakneck speed simply ignore the countless potholes.
The city, known to the Kurds as Hawler but to outsiders as either Arbil or Erbil, has even just opened its own international airport — a single runway former military airstrip in the middle of waterlogged fields.
But the Kurdistan regional government, which has its seat in Arbil some 350km north of Baghdad, wants much, much more.
It wants control over the cities of Mosul in the west of Kurdish northern Iraq and Kirkuk in the east and it wants whatever government eventually emerges in Baghdad to leave it largely alone in a future federal Iraq.
In return it is offering to share Kirkuk’s oil and to limit Kurdish territorial ambitions to within Iraq’s borders, turning its back on the dreams of many for an independent Kurdistan including the Kurdish areas of Turkey, Syria and Iran.
“We want to solve the Kurdish problems within the boundaries of Iraq,” Kurdistan Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani told Reuters in an interview.
MUTED OPTIMISM: But he warned that ignoring Kurdish demands was a recipe for trouble.
“Without the solution of the Kurdish question it is impossible for stability to come back to Iraq,” he added.
Meanwhile, outside the city there is little evidence of the difficulties facing the refugees or the authorities.
Trucks rumble along the mountain roads to and from Turkey and Iran, passing signs warning of minefields and herds of goats and cattle showing equal disdain for the dangers.
And there is a feeling of muted optimism after so many dark years of oppression.
“As Kurds we are now seeing the happiest of times. We thank very much the United States and Britain for what they have done to rid us of Saddam Hussein,” said shopkeeper Ali Ahmed, 27, selling beans, spices and honey in the mountain town of Shaqlawa an hour’s drive north of Arbil.—Reuters
