BARDA QARAMAN (Iraq): When they came for Mohamed Omar he wouldn’t go. Not when they ordered him to report to the local police station to ‘readjust’ his nationality, not when they told him they would confiscate all his property, not when they threatened to imprison him and to deport his family.

Now Omar has spent the past three months in jail and his family have been sent to live in a town out in the desert nearly 300 miles to the west. His home, where his family had lived for generations, has been given to a local supporter of Saddam Hussein. Omar is a Kurd, from the minority who dominate the northern part of Iraq. The man who has taken his house is an ethnic Arab, like Saddam and almost his entire regime.

Omar is a victim of Saddam’s Arabization programme. When the Gulf war ended, an autonomous Kurdish region was established in the north of Iraq under the protection of British and US warplanes. Since 1991 Saddam has forced tens of thousands of Kurds, whom he sees as a threat, out of the areas that he still rules and into the new self-governing enclave.

Once the Kurds have gone, their homes and properties are given to loyal Arabs from the Ba’ath party — Saddam’s political vehicle. The demographics of key strategic regions of Iraq are thus dramatically altered.

Omar was one of the very few to resist the Arabization programme. His story was told to London’s Observer newspaper by friends and neighbours who had all decided to flee rather than risk the consequences.

“He is the only man I know who refused to do what they said,” said one. “We all say no at first but to resist them is useless. They will just jail you, break up your family or worse.”

Even refugees who reached the relative safety of the Kurdish autonomous areas more than a year ago are still frightened. Many refused to give their real names and did not want to be photographed. “I have relatives over the border. It would put them in danger,” one man said. The name Mohamed Omar is false. The details of his case are not.

But though they are keen to help the Kurds, one consequence of Saddam’s Arabization programme is troubling the British and US officials drawing up plans for a military strike to remove him. It is an issue that could make the construction of a stable state after a conflict extremely difficult. For though tens of thousands of Kurds have been forced from their homes, few have given up hope of returning to them. The prospect of a nationwide settling of old scores is very real.

Like many of those in the eastern part of the Kurdish autonomous zone, Uria Mustafa comes from Kirkuk, a city of 550,000 in the centre of a major oilfield.

A new family arrives at the Barda Qaraman refugee camp, set on a desolate rocky hillside south of the city of Sulaymania, each week. In August, temperatures reach 50 degrees centigrade. A health clinic operates twice a week and there is a small government-run primary school.

Officials from the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) — the two political groups that govern the 3.5 million Kurds in northern autonomous zones — estimate 3,000 to 4,000 people are deported by the Baghdad government each year.

Successive governments in Baghdad have mounted military campaigns against the Kurds which have forced huge population shifts.

Saddam has pursued Arabization systematically. In 1988 he used chemical weapons against the north-eastern town of Halabja and destroyed thousands of villages.

Combined with the deportations, continuing violence has made a huge demographic impact. According to one PUK official, Arabs comprised only 10 per cent of the population of Kirkuk province 50 years ago. Now Kurds are in the minority.

Most of those in the Barda Qaraman camp were happy at the prospect of US military action. “I have to ask myself if God is really good enough to grant us that,” said Umaid Latif, 43. All were looking forward to reclaiming their homes and property.

The Arabs living in them would have to flee or they would be expelled, they said. “We will not go out to revenge ourselves but they are all Ba’ath party people. Once the regime has gone they will have to go. They will become refugees themselves,” Latif said.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.