TEHRAN: The United Nations has started moving tens of thousands of tents and blankets to western Iran in readiness for a huge wave of Iraqi refugees who are expected to escape across the border if the US and Britain launch military action to topple the Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein.

The move, which is the first concrete sign that international and Iranian officials are taking the threat of a US-led war against Iraq seriously, is described as a “contingency plan” by Pierre Lavanchy, who heads the Tehran office of the United Nations high commissioner for refugees (UNHCR).

“We’ve started to prepare for a possible influx. We are in discussions with Iranian officials”, he said. “We are taking stocks which were in place in south-eastern Iran for refugees from Afghanistan and moving them across the country to be near the border with Iraq.”

As well as tents and blankets, the supplies include kitchen utensils, plastic sheeting, pots, and jerry cans for water. They will go to the main UNHCR depot at Ahwaz, and at an office in Orumiyeh.

Food and medicine is expected to be added after a meeting tomorrow of all the Iran-based UN agencies, including the World Food Programme and the World Health Organization.

“We are already moving enough for 40,000 people. It’s better to have at least a minimum in place,” Lavanchy said.

Although Lavanchy declined to give a figure for the total number of refugees expected to flee across the border because of US air strikes and ground operations, some diplomats believe it could reach 150,000, even though Saddam Hussein is expected to close the frontiers, as he did in previous conflicts. Tens of thousands of others would be displaced inside Iraq, unable to bypass or bribe the Iraqi border guards.

In the case of a US attack on Iraq, Iran is expected to open the door.

“Foreign ministry officials have said that they will allow refugees from Iraq to enter,” Lavanchy said. “The Iraqi lobby here is much stronger than the Afghan one.”

The policy difference also seems to stem from the size of the refugee communities that are already in Iran. Iran felt it could not take any more Afghans after a registration drive last spring discovered that 2.36 million Afghan refugees were already inside the country. Only 203,000 Iraqis were recorded.

The Iranian government is just about to launch a new programme, with the UNHCR, to persuade Afghan refugees to return home now that the Taliban have been defeated.

The exodus from Iraq is expected to consist mainly of Kurds from northern Iraq. Arab Shias from the the Iraqi marshlands, which provided some of the main battlegrounds in the war between Iran and Iraq in the 1980s, were driven from their homes in the early 1990s by Saddam Hussein’s strategy of damming rivers and draining the marshes to destroy them that he suspected of being hostile to him.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.