Focus on Mahmour camp

Salah Musa wants two things - a regular job and to go back home to his village in Turkey. The 39-year-old father of five is covered in cement dust after trying to patch up his simple house in Mahmour camp. An hour’s drive from the northern Iraqi city of Arbil, the camp is home to approximately 10,000 Turkish Kurds who were forced from their homes in the southeast of the country in the 1990s. For the last six years they have been coming to what is now a small town on the outskirts of Mahmour township. As many as 15,000 Kurdish Turks fled the clashes between Turkish troops and the Kurdish PKK (Kurdish Workers Party) group, a 15-year conflict that claimed an estimated 36,000 lives and left thousands of homes destroyed. There are some 12,000 Turkish Kurds living in northern Iraq today. The majority of them are in the Mahmour camp southeast of the northern governorate of Arbil, with the others living in cities. The refugees first settled in Atrush, where two camps were established southwest of Dahuk in northern Iraq, until they were moved to the Mahmour camp in 1998 under the government of Saddam Hussein. The office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the United States and Turkish officials are seeking a way to repatriate the Kurds, as at present there is no legal framework to facilitate voluntary returns on a larger scale, although there have been some returns from the north on a smaller scale. Turkey in the past, claimed Mahmour Camp, overseen by UNHCR, was simply a PKK base within Iraq and wants it closed down. "These people are our citizens and we are ready to take them if they want to return," a Turkish foreign office source told IRIN in Ankara. The authorities are currently in the process of trying to reach an agreement to ensure the safe return of Turkish refugees. "We are hoping for an agreement to be signed soon which we hope will offer more assistance to returnees," spokesman for UNHCR in Turkey, Metin Corabatir, told IRIN in Ankara. "The camp is civilian, with mostly women, children and elderly people. Of course if there are armed elements it is up to the host country governing authorities to separate civilian from such groups," he added. Camp residents also deny links to the PKK and say their humanitarian needs must transcend political considerations. Salah Musa has lived in the camp since 1997, but has been a refugee from Turkey for 11 years. “This is the sixth refugee camp I have been in,” he told IRIN. “I have been living like this for more than 10 years that is why I look old and my hair is grey.” The UN donated poles and nylon to help residents make the mud houses they now live in and they continue to get food rations. However, Salah said there were no jobs and no money, which made life incredibly difficult. He wanted to go back to his village in Turkey but said before this happened he would have to be assured the Kurds would not be persecuted or treated differently from Turks. He said claims that the Mahmour camp was just a front for the PKK were wrong, even though each man obviously had his own political views. Masood Sharif Tahir, 20, told IRIN he was only nine when his village of Nirwah in Turkey was destroyed and he was forced to come to Iraq. “We are refugees not PKK.” He said it was extremely cold in the houses and there was no kerosene for heating. Despite plastic sheets stretched across the roofs and held down with rocks, the rain still got in, Masood said. Sickness was a continual problem and he worried that his 18-month-old son Ahmed might spend all his childhood in such conditions. However, he still held out hope that the family could return to Turkey as long as there was freedom for Kurds there. To get to the camp’s secondary school you have to trudge through thick mud that cakes your shoes, then wade through a giant puddle at the front gate. But for teacher Esmat Hashim Yalvach it’s a trip worth making every day. Here he teaches children the Kurdish language - something that was illegal in Turkey. “We started from zero here and now we are building a generation of good people who will serve their homeland. We need educated people not ignorant people.” But he said outside the UN-funded school, life was tough for the camp’s 3,700 children. “All the problems are obvious. We have economic and humanitarian problems. There are no parks or gardens or roads - just mud - nothing for children to do." Meanwhile, Havar Mustafa Ali Ibrahim, the head of the camp’s council, told IRIN that the numbers in the camp were increasing. UNHCR had helped them greatly but with the UN largely withdrawing from Iraq since the August bombing of its Baghdad headquarters, visits were now sporadic and its headquarters at the camp was only staffed by guards. As well as Mahmour camp he said there were about seven other smaller camps in northern Iraq housing Turkish Kurdish refugees. He admitted many of the residents supported the aims of the PKK and some of the families had members who had joined the group in the mountains. However, he said the PKK had now changed its methods from fighting with guns to working democratically. “We hope that one day we can return to our homeland in Turkey if the government will give us freedom and democracy and let us live in a good way and have our language and culture.” But added that the Turkish authorities must help rebuild the homes they left behind. “This was our place of birth and this belongs to us. It’s our homeland so it’s for the Turks to reconstruct not the UN agencies. This is our demand.” Since the end of the second Gulf war earlier this year, 30 Turkish refugees assisted by UNHCR have returned home. The refugee agency has helped 2,200 refugees to return home to Turkey since 1997.