Playing For Keeps
by Nyier Abdou
The fallout of the triumphant liberation of traditionally Kurdish regions in the north of Iraq has shifted a heavy burden onto local authorities, reports Nyier Abdou
It isn't hard to identify which areas of the city of Kirkuk are Kurdish and which belong to Arabs brought in under Saddam Hussein's "Arabisation" programme. Arab neighbourhoods are strikingly set apart, with good services and well-kept homes, while Kurdish neighbourhoods are undeniably poor, with crumbling structures and raw sewage running in the streets.
In this oil-rich and ethnically divided city, a perilous legal tangle awaits authorities tasked with detangling the manifold legal quandaries wrought by the Ba'ath Party's ruthlessly efficient programme to shift the demographics of northern Iraq from predominantly Kurdish to Arab.
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Pictures by Nyier Abdou:
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Because of the well-documented ethnic violence that erupted in Kirkuk once the city fell to Kurdish forces, it has become the most prominent example of the difficult issues raised by efforts to "undo" Arabisation. Arabs lured to the city by the handsome benefits promised by the Ba'ath have fled in droves, fearing revenge killings by impassioned Kurdish returnees. But the trend extends to towns and villages throughout the north, sowing fears of a wave of reverse expulsion that could end up mirroring the original campaign.
Figures from the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), whose pesh merga forces easily took the crucial northern cities of Kirkuk and Mosul during the war, maintain that some 600,000 residents in the north - mostly Kurdish, but also Turkmen and Assyrian Christians - were expelled from their homes or lands as a result of the Arabisation programme. Many still have deeds to their homes or land, but Arabs who took over those properties did so through a legal process under the Ba'ath, meaning they too have legal claims to the property.
This is not the only problem. In many cases, villages were razed and their inhabitants expelled without being re-populated by Arab settlers. Kurds who have been waiting some 15 years to return to these villages will need extensive support to start from scratch, but until now, no sign of assistance has materialised. Authorities, both in the autonomous Kurdish territories jointly governed by the PUK and the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) and within the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), have counselled patience, but after decades of brutal oppression by Hussein's regime, patience is the one thing that few people in Iraq have.
COME ONE, COME ALL
The Arabisation programme, by any account, was an extremely well planned one. The process began as early as 1963, with the coming of the Ba'ath regime, and accelerated in 1975, with the felling of the Kurdish revolution. According to Salah Rashid, the minister for human rights, internally displaced persons (IDPs) and Anfal victims in the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), the programme was executed under the aegis of a body of law issued early on by the Ba'ath for explicit purpose of depopulation. "The result," says Rashid, "is that it was all done 'legally'."
The hundreds of thousands of Kurds who were internally displaced were either ousted from their homes or left homeless when their villages were destroyed. Arabs, meanwhile, were encouraged to go north. Announcements in the papers promised that anyone willing to go would be given land for free and money to get started. Given a handsome sum of 10,000 dinars (then worth over $30,000), as well as generous loans and a hassle-free resettlement, Arab tribes from central and southern Iraq took the opportunity to make a substantial leap in their standard of living, even though they knew it was at the expense of the Kurdish population.
At the same time, Ba'athist officials were shifted to the region to swell the ranks of the security infrastructure. Over time, Arabs bought up Kurdish lands, while local Kurds either escaped to Kurdish controlled cities like Erbil and Suleiminiya or were banished to large "collective towns" - concentration camps built by the government.
While the process, combined with the merciless extermination tactics of the 1988 Anfal campaign, was a blatant case of long-term ethnic cleansing, unravelling decades of institutionalised resettlement is not as straightforward as returning a house or property to its original owner. As Rashid points out, generations of Arabs have been brought up in the region and "We cannot ask them to pay for the mistakes of their forefathers." In other cases, a house may have been confiscated and an Arab settled there, but then the house may have been sold, or even sold several times over. The result is that the person who lives there paid for it.
"These issues are very problematic," says Rashid. "We have to approach this through legal means." Rashid stressed that the support of the CPA and UN organisations is vital, and while these groups obviously carry the weight of impartial authority, they are also seen as the only source of the most vital component of "de-Arabisation": money.
"We need money for settling these cases," explains Rashid. "Maybe an Arab bought his house fourth-hand. We have the right to evict him, but we also have to be fair. We have to pay him."
INTO THE HILLS
Low, rolling hills make up the rich agricultural lands of Kirkuk province. But the picturesque scenery belies the desperate misfortune that spread through this region in the 1980s. The New York-based watchdog Human Rights Watch estimates that between 4,000 and 5,000 villages were erased here between 1977 and 1987.
Nazem Abdul-Farez, 53, stands on a dusty hilltop in what used to be his village of Gorgay Serkasa, about 40 kilometres outside Kirkuk. The area once sat on the border of the Kurdish controlled region and had been converted into a military outpost.
"When Iraqi forces left this place, we came right away," says Abdul-Farez, stroking his prayer beads and drawing nods of affirmation from the handful of farmers who have returned since the war. A few members from some 25 families have come back to Gorgay Serkasa to start settling in and a few crude houses have been pulled together, mostly built with blocks taken from nearby military structures. A rooster and a couple of hens are scattered in the yard. It's not much, but it's a start - something these villagers have been waiting for over 15 years.
In 1987, the Gorgay Serkasa, along with most of the nearby villages, was visited by the head of the district. "He came with military forces and collected all the villagers on this hill," remembers Abdul-Farez. "He said, 'We are going to destroy this village'." Accused of rising up against the regime as part of the Kurdish resistance, the villagers were told that they were now paying the price. "We'll be back in a few days," the man declared. "If we find anyone here, we'll kill them."
The authorities were true to their word. They returned with helicopters and bombed the area. The residents escaped but all their possessions were destroyed, leaving them with nothing. "I only managed to take one blanket with me," recalls Abdul-Farez. "Others didn't even have that."
For three or four months, the villagers, joined by other refugees, remained on the run, a few steps ahead of army attacks. They sought out territory held by pesh merga fighters, who provided them with guns. Counter-attacks on the army were sometimes effective, but only served to raise the ire of the military - anger that would be revisited on the Kurdish population during the Anfal. Eventually, most of the villagers ended up in the nearby collective town of Chorish, in Cham Chamal district. There the government provided residents with some land, but villagers say it was dry and infertile. "We ourselves built our houses with what we could find," says Abdul-Farez. "The government just gave us a plot of useless land."
Without resources, residents were at the mercy of the government. Some worked as labourers, others resorted to begging. Many were obliged, for want of an income, to join the Josh - the loathed militia formed by the Ba'ath that enlisted local Kurds to fight the pesh merga. Young men enraged by the state of desperation joined the pesh merga.
HOMECOMING, BITTERSWEET
In the nearby village of Chiman Saru, villagers are also beginning to return. Unlike Gorgay Serkasa, the village was never close to pesh merga activity and some residents were even soldiers in the Iraqi army. But this did not spare residents the wrath of the military, which destroyed the village three times between 1986 and 1987.
The attacks came without warning, recalls Samad Saleh Nuri, 48. The first time, the soldiers appeared early in the morning and surrounded the village. Villagers were told to get out of the houses and the military moved in with tractors, destroying all the houses. When the job was complete, the soldiers departed - the villagers stayed. Mohamed Majid Aref, 30, notes that no one told them to leave the village, so a few days later, when nothing had happened, they simply began to rebuild the village as best they could.
But the same exercise was repeated in March of the next year. The military returned, razed the houses, and left. Again, all the residents' belongings were destroyed, but no one was arrested or physically harmed. Left with nothing but to start again, the villagers tried to piece together their lives once more. Few considered leaving, even after the devastating military visits. Stories of violent expulsions were well known, but until then, all had taken place within the so-called security zone surrounding Kirkuk. Gorgay Sarkasa had the misfortune of lying within that security line, but Chiman Saru did not.
The security line proved to be a false limit, however. In November of the same year, the forces returned once more, this time to destroy more than houses.
"I dreamt it before they came," remembers Said Mahuddin, 73. "I said to people, 'We can't stay here'." But neither Said's dream, nor the bombing nearby that preceded the final attack on Chiman Saru, was enough to move people who had nowhere to go.
At 5am, the shelling began. The military surrounded the village, sealing it off. In the confusion, many escaped, but the rest were arrested. Women and children were separated and sent to prison. The men were summarily shot - although no one was sure of this at the time since there were no survivors to tell the story. "I heard their shouts," says Mohamed Abdul-Rahman, 40. "I heard them when they were shot."
His worst suspicions were proved true when one of the soldiers who had buried the victims told people where they were buried. The villagers returned to the site and dug up the grave, which remains untouched in the village today.
The women, imprisoned with their children in Amara prison, had no idea what had happened to the men. They assumed that they had been arrested as well, and it wasn't until almost a year later, when the government offered an amnesty for those hiding in the area and the women were released, that they knew of the fate of their husbands, brothers and sons.
Nergis Ali Saleh, 64, lost her son and her husband that day. "When we got out and my daughter found out they had been killed, she went mad," she says. The conditions of the prison were traumatising for many. Khadija Nuri Khader, 83, whose son was also killed, says her daughter was so affected by the incarceration that she didn't speak for 14 years. "It was hot. Our children were sick, they needed medical treatment. They stole everything from us - our jewellery, our money. We had nothing," she says.
I asked Samad Saleh Nuri how it felt to return to Chiman Saru after the fall of Saddam. "It's difficult to describe," he says. "From my childhood until now, I never tasted happiness like this."
WHOSE LAND IS IT ANYWAY?
As we drive north-west of Kirkuk, past Mosul and up towards Dohuk, we see large swathes of agricultural lands engulfed in uncontrollable fire. It's a palpable reminder that people here are taking the law into their own hands. In the town of Domiz, some 30 kilometres south of Dohuk, the US military has intervened in an experiment of act first, resolve later.
A large compound of about 800 expensive villas, Domiz was originally built for high-ranking military officers stationed at a nearby military base. In 1986, as part of the Arabisation programme, the government issued an order that allowed all public holdings to be sold to civilians - Arab civilians - at a low cost. Kurds who "changed" their nationality still needed a string of powerful connections and additional bribes if they wanted to purchase a home there.
"They told us it was better if Arabs came here," says Nashwar Ramadan Khader, of the Al-Abadi tribe, who moved to Domiz in 1996. "They said it was better than if Kurds lived here." In the spare living room of his roomy home, Khader stressed that he had bought the house from the government. Reaching behind a framed calendar on the wall - the only wall-hanging in the room - he pulls out the permission from the government and a copy of his deed.
Today American soldiers guard the entry to Domiz behind a barricade of sandbags and barbed wire. Because of its proximity to military positions, Domiz was hard hit by the war, and the residents fled early during the bombing. Still, most of the immaculate gardens and eerily quiet wide streets remain largely untouched.
Khader recalls that in the early days of the bombing, some six houses were destroyed. Accounts put the number killed between eight and 14, with one entire family buried in the rubble. "People panicked," he said. "They were terrified. All the families fled. We came back a few days later to take our things and went to Mosul."
The residents in Domiz remained in Mosul for a month, mostly with relatives. Rents skyrocketed, but people were too frightened to return to their houses, fearing violence from Kurdish squatters who claimed that the houses were on Kurdish land.
Saad Abdul-Aziz Husayn, 57, of the Al-Luazi tribe, sent his family to Mosul during the bombing, but remained at his house, along with eight other residents determined to save their homes from the wave of looters streaming north. On the seventh day of the war, pesh merga forces belonging to the KDP arrived in Domiz. The residents held on for another week, but the forces continued to threaten them, warning that the area was no longer a residential area, but a military zone. "They said, 'This is our property. It belongs to our government, and we are going to distribute it to the families of martyrs'." Husayn added that this threat was still being propagated in Dohuk.
But the residents of Domiz did not take their eviction sitting down. They assembled at the governor's office in Mosul and demonstrated daily. The demonstrations lasted for 40 days, forcing the US to broker a controversial solution. US forces cleared the Kurdish squatters from the houses and escorted the residents back to Domiz.
Despite this tense situation, Husayn insists that "Everything here is very normal." But he admits that the uneasy calm is dependent on the presence of US forces in the town. "Some people are scared, they've heard rumours that people are being threatened. Some are selling their houses, others are buying."
The situation is certainly not normal. There is a latent sense of impending doom and Kurds regularly demonstrate outside the gate. Anyone who wants to buy a house in Domiz can do so, but it is only Arabs who are selling and it is only Kurds who are buying. Asked what he thinks will happen when the Americans leave the town, Husayn gives up any pretence of optimism. "I think they [the Kurds] will come and kick us out - by force. They'll take our houses. No one knows what will happen in the future if the Americans leave."
"There are so many families desperate to sell their homes," agrees Saad Abdul-Khaleq Mustafa, a Kurdish resident who changed his nationality and now serves on the local civil council. "They're afraid of what will happen. They figure they should take the money now, while they can still sell the house, in case they are forced to give it up for free later on, when the Americans leave."
STUCK IN THE MIDDLE
The events in Domiz stand alone. The Americans are rigorously enforcing a freeze on any movement until legal means for resolving resettlement issues are set in place. First Lieutenant Keith Jennings admits that Domiz is something of an experiment in trying to integrate Kurds and Arabs in one town, but his upbeat assessment of the situation is unconvincing. "We could leave right now," he says.
"Every resident here has legal deeds issued by the government," says Jennings. In the outlying villages, there are countless cases where an Arab farmer and a Kurdish refugee both hold legal documents entitling them to the same house or plot of land. "Everyone is advancing claims, demanding what they believe is their right. This has to be judged by a court."
Currently, the most urgent issue is the harvest. In many cases, Kurdish farmers have deeds to lands that were confiscated by the government and then rented out to Arabs. They want to return to their lands immediately, but the land is being farmed by Arab settlers. Because it is time for the harvest, a solution needs to be arranged immediately. In most cases, the disputes have been resolved with both the Arab and the Kurdish sides agreeing to a 50-50 split - a temporary solution backed by the KDP and PUK.
"For now we are saying both deeds are legal," says Jennings. "The Kurds have agreed to sharing the land because the KDP told them to." But the Arab farmers are the "most current" inhabitants of the lands and they are the ones who planted the last season. "They're obviously getting the short end of the stick," says Jennings.
As we leave the American base, we see a number of Arabs heading for the base to take up a further complaint. They are from the Al-Hadidi tribe and have lived in Domiz since 1996. They bought up their agricultural lands from the landlords in Mosul and rent them to farmers, splitting the proceeds. The land-share agreement is even worse for them, since if the Kurds take 50 per cent and the farmer the other 50 per cent, they will receive nothing.
"The Kurds want half the harvest," says Sabbah Khalil Ahmed. "It's not fair. They want to take the proceeds by force - they're just taking advantage of geography." He added: "When the regime fell, we thought we'd actually get a larger profit this year from the harvest, but the opposite has happened."
Ahmed Abu Khais Hanesh, 47, is the sheikh at the local mosque. He concedes that Kurds should be given a share of the harvest, but says the landlords cannot be left out. He suggests that the farmers, who planted the harvest, should take 50 per cent and the landlords and Kurds should split the rest, each taking 25 per cent.
Ahmed notes that some Arab villagers haven't even been given that choice. In numerous disputed villages which came to be inhabited by Arab settlers, like the villages of Kre Faham and Tel Mishref, Arab residents were run out of town, their houses looted, and have not been able to return.
HARVESTING THE CLAIMS
Dana Hassan, who heads the Resettlement and Rehabilitation Programme at the Suleiminiya-based REACH humanitarian group, warns that waiting for local authorities or the CPA to address the needs of local returnees and de-Arabisation is an exercise in futility. A small NGO established in 1995, REACH began its work in the region following the freedom provided by Operation "Provide Comfort". Part of the Iraqi Kurdish NGO Network (IKNN), a group of more than 35 Iraqi organisations, REACH was one of the first groups to help locals and the US military to get basic services like water treatment up and running after the fall of Kirkuk.
"We went and met with some of the leaders in the tribal areas where the Arab settlers came from, many of them from the Al-Ubaydi tribe. There's a lot of tension there about resettlement," says Hassan. Meanwhile, Kurds who want to return are waiting for a solution to come from above. "They think the US government is superman and will provide everything. This is just not going to happen."
Hassan says his group has been facilitating dialogue to help people return through an arrangement of sharing the land, or at least this year's harvest. "We started doing this on our own," he says. His discussions with local authorities were supportive, but all he was hearing was that it would take time to make assessments and set up offices to handle the requests. But Hassan was unwilling to wade through the bureaucracy. "I said, 'Let's make a plan now'."
The situation is even more complicated in cases of two claims to the same house. KRG Interior Minister Faraydoun Abdul-Khader insists that Arab residents will have to be compensated and removed. He maintains that in Kirkuk, most of the Arab settlers were wealthy and have their own family lands elsewhere in Iraq. "Most people returned to these lands. Yes, they were scared after Saddam was removed - they were scared of revenge. They knew they were occupying Kurdish properties."
Asked if the expelling Arabs from the north would not replay the sins of the past, Abdul- Khader is adamant. "Look, this is very important. These were people brought by the Ba'ath, and they weren't brought here for humanitarian purposes. It was for a very shameful purpose: to change the demographics of this region."
Abdul-Khader was equally sceptical of schemes that would allow the sharing of properties between Arabs and Kurds in an effort to ease reconciliation. "Give me your address," he scoffs. "I will come and share your house."
When I spoke to the IDP Minister Salah Rashid, he seemed to echo the mantra of wait and assess, stressing that a delicate situation needed to be handled carefully. He was not aware of REACH's work, signalling that the PUK's obsession with caution will ultimately bear no fruit, since humanitarian groups will inevitably move faster and on their own. The efforts on both sides are admirable, but they bode ill for engendering a problem of mixed signals among IDPs - something that may end up introducing more confusion in an already tense situation teetering on the brink of internecine violence.
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– Nyier H Abdou
Nyier H Abdou
Al-Ahram Weekly
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E-mail: Nyier H Abdou
This article was first run on Al-Ahram Weekly
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