Special report on IDPs

PART TWO OVERVIEW With an estimated 900,000 internally displaced people (IDPs) in Iraq, humanitarian organisations are putting the emphasis on providing proper shelter in the coming year for homeless people uprooted by the troubles that have plagued the country not only over the past year but the past few decades. Of this figure the majority, some 400,000 live in what are called 'collective towns' or purpose built settlements. Another 300,000 live in homes and the rest are in government or other types of accommodation. While there are no current accurate statistics at present, based on pre-war figures, the largest population of between 600,00 and 800,000 IDPs are living in the north with up to an estimated 100,000 in the south and centre, many with limited access to basic facilities. Prior to the second Gulf War a UN Habitat survey found that 40 percent of the displaced had no access to health care and that only some 57,000 people were living in adequate housing. As of the beginning of June 2003, the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) confirmed up to 40,000 registered IDPs in the south and central governorates, with other sources suggesting up to 75,000. Aid agencies say that although some IDPs have returned home it is very difficult to establish exact figures due to a lack of staff on the ground because of insecurity. Today, Iraq is struggling to give thousands of IDPs a roof over their heads as the situation of insecurity continues to be of major concern. In this IRIN special 2 part report on IDPs, we look into the past and present situation of displaced people in a country which potentially has a very uncertain future. SITUATION IN THE CENTRE AND SOUTH CENTRAL IRAQ Although there are an estimated 100,000 IDPS in the centre and south, there are no accurate recent figures on how many are in central Iraq due to various reasons including a reduced number of aid workers on the ground. However, some estimates say there are 10,000 in Baghdad alone, according to IOM. Most of the displaced in the centre are either Marsh Arabs, many of whom fled to Iran and then returned, or Al-Qilaa Kurds who supported the former Iraqi regime during the destruction of Kurdish villages in the 1980's and then fled or were thrown out of those northern governorates ruled by the Kurdish parties. Today, stories of Arabs who were displaced recently after fleeing the north following the fall of former president Saddam Hussein's regime are disturbingly similar. If you ask them, most families living in the former military barracks at Rasheed Camp in Baghdad will tell you peshmerga, or Kurdish fighters, threatened them with AK-47s, telling them to leave their houses within 24 hours. Sometimes, family members tell you their houses were flattened by bulldozers. Others say their valuables were looted as they struggled to meet the deadline. On 8 April 2003, peshmerga came to 36-year-old Bushra Kashem and her neighbours in the High Arabiya area of Kirkuk near northern Iraq. Jabar said the fighters brought big earthmoving machines, which they used to start knocking down the walls of houses in the neighbourhood. Everything happened so quickly, the families had no time to organise themselves or to protest, she said. "They said where we lived was their land, and that Saddam had sent us," Jabar told IRIN in Baghdad. "We kept silent because they were armed. We were very scared. We left everything." As she washed dishes with a hose outside the concrete barrack building on the outskirts of Baghdad, Jabar's eyes turn red as she tried to keep from crying. "It was government land that was given to us. We have a document to prove it," Jabar said, going inside to get a simple paper with a map of the neighbourhood and a signature at the bottom. An estimated 1,235 people displaced by the peshmerga in northern Iraq now live in various buildings of the former military barracks, according to figures from the IOM. Another estimated 800 or so live in former military quarters in the village of Khan Beni Sad to the north. Others live in other temporary accommodation. "It's true that Kurdish political parties in the north put up notices asking Arabs to move out of their homes," Mohammed Ibrahim Jafer, an officer at the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) political party offices, headed by Jalal Talabani, told IRIN. Talabani just finished a one-month stint as a rotating president of the US-appointed interim government in Iraq. Jafer said it was also true that peshmerga sometimes visited Arab neighbourhoods to see if people were willing to leave. But any fighters who acted "inappropriately" by forcing anyone to move would be punished, he said, asking for people with complaints to come forward. Jabar said she was afraid she would be killed if she went to the PUK office in Baghdad or in Kirkuk. Already, she said she tried to return to Kirkuk and was threatened by people she didn't know standing on her former street. "Could you live here?" Jabar asked bitterly, gesturing at the mud and the hose she is using to rinse off her dishes. "I have no place to live now." The PUK officer, Jafer said he could only sympathise with families like Jabar's up to a point. He said his family was kicked out of their house in 1975 to make room for Arab families under Saddam Hussein's "Arabisation" programme. The family fled to Iran to escape political persecution, he explained. "I feel sad for the Arabs and I can share their suffering," Jafer told IRIN. "But those who came and took my house, I cannot forgive." In an attempt to show how equitable the Kurd political parties are being, Jafar said Arab people who lived in the north before 1957 were not bothered by the peshmerga this spring, because their families are original residents of the region. Saddam Hussein destroyed an estimated 5,000 Kurdish villages in the north in the 1970s to make room for Arabs he sent to the region, Jafer said. "I did not attack the people living in my house now, but they left before I came," she explained, in a matter-of-fact tone of voice. "We didn't take any money from them when they forced us out, so we won't pay any money to them now." It's that attitude that's creating problems for aid groups and rights groups trying to help displaced people. There's not necessarily proof that one family or another has a greater or lesser claim to a particular house in Iraq, according to Baptiste Martin, coordinator for IDP projects at the IOM office in central Iraq. In many cases, an Arab family and a Kurdish family might have equal claims, Martin said. "We don't want them to hope too much," he told IRIN. "You can have two families that have the same right to a house. That's why resettlement may also be an issue." An Iraqi claim commission is scheduled to start in September to sort out property claims, but even for people with documents, arbitration could takes years, Martin said. He pointed out that similar disputes in places such as Bosnia, Kosovo and South Africa were still ongoing and now in Iraq. For the US military, displaced people are "a real headache," mainly because soldiers don't always understand the issues involved, and there's not always a neutral third party around to explain it to them, according to Lt Col Fred Sellers, who works as a liaison in some of the displaced person disputes and is based near Rasheed Camp. At the moment, soldiers can evict people from a government building, if the US-led temporary government needs to use it, he said. If no governmental agency needs the building yet, as appears to be the case with many military and special police force buildings around the country, displaced people can live there until a new government decides what to do, Sellers added. US administrators say they will hand over responsibility for Iraq to a new government at the end of June. "For example, at the agriculture ministry building in Baghdad, when workers came back to their jobs, displaced people who had moved in were asked to move to Hillsdale, a set of warehouses set up by the US military to help them," Sellers told IRIN in Baghdad. But when farmers were forced out of a desert area to make way for a US artillery practice range started asking for compensation with what seemed like astronomical sums of money, the US military was not so accommodating, he added. Many of the farmers' claims appeared to be false, although they'll probably get money from the new government, Sellers said. People living at the Hillsdale warehouses had no other place to go. "I just know it's one big mess. We do our best to sort out what's going on by sorting through documents but records have been confused and convoluted here for years. And a lot have been destroyed," the US military official maintained. To make matters more confusing, agriculture ministry workers who helped convince people to move to Hillsdale demanded money from the military when everything was settled. "They asked me for a bonus. I told them there should be some reward in helping your fellow man," Sellers said. "What am I going to do - go to the (US-led) administration and say I need money to bribe these people?" At IOM, poor security is another hindrance to helping displaced people, Martin said, from the daily attacks against US-led troops to threats against police and government workers. Many international workers, including those at IOM, are outside of the country or keeping a "low profile". The agency has a large budget to help displaced people, but "it's not easy to launch the projects I was going to launch," he explained. "I don't have the capacity to do all of these projects," he asserted. "It's really a crazy situation." The office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, (UNHCR), has come up with at least one temporary solution for displaced people in Baghdad - paying US $75-$100 per month for Palestinian refugees who were told they'd have to pay huge amounts of rent up front to stay in their homes once the regime fell. More than 400 Palestinian families were staying in tents on a soccer field at Haifa Club, a Palestinian sports club on the outskirts of Baghdad, before UNHCR was able to negotiate lease agreements on 150 apartments, Yacoub el Hillo, a UNHCR coordinator based in Amman, Jordan said. Saddam Hussein allowed Palestinians to come to Iraq and live very cheaply, but landlords didn't continue his policy once he fled from office. "This will be a solution for the next year," el Hillo told IRIN in Amman. "It's still a temporary solution. But by the beginning of next year, we should have some capacity to make a new solution with the (Iraq) ministry of labour and social affairs," he added. SOUTHERN IRAQ Similar stories are also heard in the south. Karim Shokheir is squatting in a small hall in the former naval forces building in the southern city of Basra because he doesn't have a place to live. He has been chased by the former regime since he escaped the army during the Iraq-Iran war. "I served in the army for five months and then I escaped and I came to Basra to get a day to day job as a worker. As my property is gone and I have no documents to claim my property back, I came to stay here," he told IRIN in Basra. Karim added that his father was also displaced as he was deported from the marshes and fled to the southern governerate of Emara after the water was drained from the marsh area in the early 1990s and people lost their source of income. Attia Jasim is also living in one of the former Baa'th party buildings in Basra. "My three brothers were killed in mass graves and I fled to Iran for a while, and now I can't go back to the marshes. I don't have a place to live and no source of income to rent a house so I came here," she told IRIN in Basra. In another state building in the city live 23 families who came from Iran a couple of months ago. Yasser Hassan left Iraq in 1991 and fled to Iran with his wife, children and his father after his brother was persecuted by the regime. "My father is still in Iran and I decided to come to find a job, but there is nowhere to live," Hassan told IRIN. According to a Child Protection Assessment done in October 2003 by Save the Children, within the governorate of Basra, there are approximately 5,500 IDPs from the 2003 Gulf War. In addition there is thought to be 80,000 displaced persons from the Iran- Iraq war, 17,000 Marsh Arabs displaced during the draining of the marshes and 25,000 people expelled from Baghdad who sought sanctuary in Basra. Although the recent war didn't create a large number of new IDPs, there is still a large number of them homeless from various conflicts and expulsions that need help. No tangible services for the returnees have been provided in Basra so far. The Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in the south identified a number of state buildings taken over by what they claimed were not IDPs, but rather classed as homeless people, like the central library, former tribal council building, Trade Union Headquarters and Women's Union offices. A pilot project to build 26 housing units at a cost of US $200,000 is still awaiting approval and according to the CPA, research will be carried out to find legitimate beneficiaries. Limited support, however, is about to be offered to the IDPs by INTERSOS, an Italian NGO working with UNHCR on an assessment to identify the most needy IDPs. "We will finish our assessment soon. Our team is working with local authorities of the 200 villages in and around Basra to identify the most needy. We have difficulties in finding a definition for the IDPs here. There are many people who are very vulnerable and do not fit into our categories of IDPs," Josef Pfattner from INTERSOS told IRIN in Basra. Back to Part One