Confusion over IDPs in government buildings

Two thieves are carrying off a bundle of long, metal supporting rods they have removed from a building whose flat concrete roof consequently collapsed. More than seven months after US-led forces entered Iraq, thieves are still dismantling the buildings comprising the Rashid camp of the former Iraqi army in Baghdad, stripping them of anything of value, down to any underground pipes they can dig up. Nearby live Iraqi internally displaced persons (IDPs) forced out of their homes in other parts of the country. The places they live in now are most often fenced off with metal sheets, some with clothes flapping on washing lines. The chaotic nature of his surroundings does not seem unusual to 22-year-old Ali Munshi, displaced from his home in the south by Saddam Hussein loyalists, who had taken it over together with everything he owned. "Our land was taken, so we need some way to feed ourselves now," Ali told IRIN as he stood guard over a house at the camp he and his family had occupied. Newly appointed government ministers condemn the practice. IDPs who steal government infrastructure must be treated as thieves, say the housing, of urban affairs and displacement, foreign and interior ministers. "They’re saying 97 percent of the people living in Rashid are looters, so kick them out," Baptiste Martin, the head of the IDP programme for the French NGO Premiere Urgence, told IRIN in Baghdad. "There’s a 9 August Coalition Provisional Authority/United Nations agreement for eviction, however, that says no-one should be evicted until another site is available for them," he noted. No-one seemed to have the authority able to decide on whether the IDPs would be able to stay or have to leave, said Amir Sabah al-Sa'idi, a self-appointed sheikh, or leader, at the camp. When there appeared to be no-one in charge, people behaved badly, he observed. "We have contacted all the humanitarian offices. They say they don’t know the future," al-Sa'idi told IRIN, with his two children by his side. "We need our voices to be heard by the public." On the other side of the highway, in another sector of the Rashid camp, are 200 Arab families who moved into it from Khanaqin in the north in May after being evicted from their homes by Kurds, who said that prior to 1975 they had lived in the houses the Arabs were occupying. In the sector now occupied by the Arabs from Khaniqin, many buildings seem to be intact, but it is hard to tell if this is attributable to the influence of the group's leaders or because people respected what appear to have been houses formerly tenanted by Iraqi army officers. "I agree that some Iraqi people are taking these things, but we are protecting the buildings because we need a place to live," Abd al-Salam Mukhi, a former tribal leader in Khanaqin, told IRIN. "We are good men. We would never accept such bad things." But Mukhi also said that inasmuch as the Kurds had seized all his private property - even the livestock - he had few qualms over using the property of the former Iraqi military. "They took everything from me, even my national identity card," Mukhi said. "Why shouldn’t I live here?" The UN or a new Iraqi government should find housing for people evicted from their homes, said Yusuf Farhan Sathi, a 53-year-old former resident of Khanaqin. He said he was very angry at first when the Kurds had told him to move out. At the time, many people in Baghdad had heard that the Iraqi army was vacating its bases, so his group had not been too worried back in May about where its members would live in the future. But now things seemed to be deteriorating, Sathi said. "This is not the right place for us," he said. "How can we live here? We feel hopeless." Because there had been so much theft at the Rashid Camp, Premiere Urgence had plans to call on the families living there to move to another former military camp, which could be better protected from looters by the people who lived there, Martin said. "We registered 410 boys in Rashid Camp - most of them were looting. We’ll try to do a psychological assessment on the camp to see how we can change their ideas," he added.