The homecoming
The bittersweet Kurdish return to Kirkuk is keyed into the politics of demography and humanitarian aid, writes Judit Neurink from Kirkuk
"We dreamt of this," says the old woman living in Kirkuk's football stadium. "I prefer to be here, in this state, than to die someplace else. This is the ground of my birth." Behind her blankets are draped on lines, covering a previously green section of the football pitch. As a child plays around her, other women inch forward to listen.
The modern stadium currently harbours about 200 Kurdish families in makeshift concrete block houses that lack doors, windows and privacy.
The families at the stadium are some of the approximately 15,000 Kurds who returned to Kirkuk after their expulsion by Saddam Hussein's regime. Starting in the 1980s Hussein ordered about 100,000 people to leave as part of his Arabisation policy in the oil-rich city. The expelled were mostly Kurds, but included Assyrians and Turkomans. Many Kurds fled to the Kurdish region of the no- fly-zone shielded from Saddam's rule. Others crossed into Iran or moved to poor quarters without water or electricity near Kirkuk. Upon hearing that their hometown had been taken by the Kurdish peshmerga (resistance fighters) and American military, many returned.
"Until this spring I lived in a house I rented in Chamchamal," says the old woman in the stadium, referring to a Kurdish town just beyond the line that demarcated the autonomous Kurdish region of post-1991 Iraq. "When I heard Kirkuk had been liberated, I returned immediately."
Like many others, she had no house to return to. Arabs enticed to move to the city as part of the Arabisation scheme often took the houses of the evicted Kurds as their own. Some of the returnees have coerced -- through threats or force -- these Arabs to abandon the houses. Others have just erected rudimentary dwellings for themselves around the city. Among these are Kurds whose homes were demolished following their expulsion.
In a little camp near the stadium about 30 sand-coloured tents shelter tens of Kurdish families. The cold metal of aluminium water tanks contrasts sharply with the chaos of tent lines draped with clothes and the scattered carpets, pots and pans. In a corner of the camp women and children are baking bricks from red mud in order to build a toilet.
"They promised us they would build houses for us. Now they say it won't be before January," says Madzadik, a 49- year-old woman who has been living in the camp for about a month. She returned from Iran, where she had lived for seven years. Like the old woman in the stadium, she feels no regret having left a comfortable rented house for the poverty of the camp: "This is my land, this is worth it." But she agrees the situation is difficult. The drinking water from the tanks is salty, the nights are getting colder and the $100 promised to them have never materialised.
The promises Madzadik refers to were made by the Kurdish parties, the people in the camp say. It appears that these parties too are trying to change the ethnic composition of the oil rich town. They seek to reverse Saddam's attempt at ethnic cleansing by drawing Kurds back to their hometown and creating a new demographic status quo. In fact, both the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), the main parties ruling the Kurdish region, want Kirkuk to be part of this region in the federation of Iraq which they hope will be formed after next year's proposed elections. Kirkuk is currently in the hands of the Americans and ruled by a multi-ethnic council reporting to the American-appointed Interim Governing Council in Baghdad.
However, not all the returnees to Kirkuk have accepted the wait-and-see attitude of those in the camp, who anticipate outside aid. Around the town simple houses and concrete block quarters are emerging daily. Just outside the town, the spacious barracks of the Iraqi army are being redecorated by their new civilian Kurdish inhabitants.
In one new quarter some men are roofing a simple dwelling. One of them says he was forced to sell his house in Kirkuk to a Kurd working with the Ba'th Party before fleeing. To reconstruct their lives here in their hometown they work without the benefit of outside help, spare the daily water delivered by a UN water truck. Nor is there electricity or plumbing in these dwellings as the quarter's muddy roads hint at the winter ahead. "My house has no windows or doors," says a man, "and tonight was really very cold. I thought: I wished I was with the Ba'th Party -- at least I would be warm."
An old woman calls from behind the barbed wire that constitutes part of her tiny dwelling. She was evicted from her house in Kirkuk in the 1980s because two of her sons were Kurdish peshmerga. Both were killed and she spent two years in prison. "Now I am poor and I am living here," she confesses. "My body still aches from the prison. I want a good house, and the Kurdish government has to give it to me. We suffered so much and we gave up so much for the Kurdish struggle. We should be rewarded."
A few months ago she went to Suleimaniya, in the Kurdish region, to ask the PUK to help her. She was put on a list of family members of martyrs -- Kurdish resistance fighters who have been killed -- but has heard nothing since.
Kurds living in the stadium are also trying to attract attention to their plight. Mohammed Ibrahim Rebas is among the group appointed by the stadium's families to negotiate aid from the authorities. "We went to the Americans and to the Kurds to talk about our problems," he says, looking at the nearly empty field where kids are playing. "We expect the Americans and British to take up our cause. They have liberated Kirkuk. And we want to be able to enjoy the freedom too."
Looking at the dire housing situation, with harsh winter fast approaching, would it not have been wiser to stay away from Kirkuk until the situation improves? Rebas smiles defiantly. "We want to be able to enjoy the fact that we are free of the Ba'th Party, and in our own town."
Al-Ahram Weekly Online : 27 November - 3 December 2003 (Issue No. 666)
Located at: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/666/re5.htm