Posted on 04/20/2003 4:52:48 PM PDT by blam
Kurds reverse ethnic cleansing
(Filed: 21/04/2003)
Arabs are being forced from the homes they seized after the first Gulf war in a dispute which threatens more conflict, reports Alex Spillius in Kirkuk
For Khalid Abdullah, the knock on the door came at 10 o'clock on Friday night. A gang of four scowling armed men in civilian clothes barked instructions to leave his home within a week.
"They said you are not from Kirkuk, you must go back to where you came from," he recalled, still visibly unnerved by the visit.
The men were Kurds. Khalid, dressed in full-length dishdash and black and white chequered headcloth, is unmistakably Arab.
Dozens of other houses in the middle-class Hai al Nasir suburb of the city were targeted on the same night, and all given the same message: leave or face the consequences.
Kurds were once the largest community in Kirkuk, a key northern oil centre. Over 30 years Saddam Hussein's regime reduced the Kurds, seen as an unreliable separatist fifth column of rebels further north, to a minority.
Arabs were elevated to numerical supremacy by a systematic process of "Arabisation".
Kurdish civil servants were dismissed or transferred north. Non-Arabs (Turkmens and Assyrians were also latterly targeted) were forbidden from buying property. Kurds were intimidated and deported; an estimated 100,000 were forced out after the post-Gulf war 1991 uprising alone. Sunni Arabs from central regions were resettled in massive numbers.
But since the city's capitulation to US and Kurdish rebel forces 10 days ago, all that has changed. Now the Arabs are being forced out as a new wave of ethnic cleansing has taken root.
Judging its rights and wrongs, its heroes and villains and dividing lines, is far from simple. It is one of the messes of Saddam's legacy that threaten to destabilise Iraq's next phase.
A multi-ethnic hotbed and home to around 40 per cent of the country's vast oil reserves, Kirkuk is a pivot on which stability in the new Iraq hinges and from which, alternatively, conflict may spin.
Confronted with dire threats by the gangs, which have plagued all but the oldest Arab quarters, many Arabs have fled, while Kurdish families are beginning to return and re-occupy their old homes or take over property vacated by Arabs.
In Hai al Nasir, some Arabs were guilty of no more than moving to Kirkuk 25 years ago under government auspices for a better life as a policeman, hospital supervisor or teacher. Those that have so far defied the threats live in constant fear of a more violent visit from the Kurdish gangs.
Other arrivals were members of the feared security services or ruling Ba'ath Party. Many ran away during the American bombing, fearing revenge once it was over, and will however be missed by no one except the wives, sisters and children they have left behind.
As we spoke to Khalid, a retired middle-ranking police officer, a crowd emerged from the rows of concrete bungalows, each with a small garden and metal gate. The crowd murmured sympathetically as he explained how as a civil servant he had been obliged to join the Ba'ath Party but had never got involved.
A near-hysterical woman pushed herself forward from the throng demanding help. She spoke good English. "We can't sleep at night. You don't know when they will come and make us leave. We want security above all."
She demanded we walk around the corner to her father-in-law's house. On the front wall the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), one of two leading Kurdish parties who have moved into the city, had written: "This house belongs to the martyr Fedayat." She said the day before a Kurdish family had arrived to clean the house and move in furniture.
"Who is this Fedayat? We don't know him! My father-in-law left Kirkuk 18 months ago," wailed the woman, a high school teacher called Nihal Khamil.
Once Nihal had left one of her neighbours said: "She should know who Fedayat [a Kurdish activist] is. Her father-in-law had him killed."
This neighbour, an Arab woman in her 60s, accused Nihal and her father-in-law of reporting her to the secret police for supporting the uprising. She said she was jailed for 20 months in 1992, lost her job in a hospital kitchen and has not worked since.
Rafat Abdullah, the local head of the PUK, is feeling the stress of these complications. Complainants besiege his office every day. "Some Arabs just want some money to leave and go back to their original towns, which is fine. Others want to stay," he said.
"For Kurds it is very difficult. They want to come home, they have suffered a lot. Emotions are high." His party seems to have done nothing to rein in the gangs.
There are cases where both an Arab and a Kurdish family hold deeds to a property. "We have told them to wait and see what the new government says," he added.
That wait, likely to be at least six months, may prove too long for the likes of Khalid Abdullah, and for Kurds waiting to find a home in their birthplace.
Vengeance is Mine, saith the Lord. Even for those that do not know Him.
Lol. This would be the "good" ethnic cleansing, I guess. If people aren't allowed to take back what has been stolen from them, it would only encourage theivery.
These Arabs are not Palestinians, they are mainly from Iraq. However, your point stands, in that Palestinians who try to move into any other area of the Middle East would be resented. The Palestinians of the West Bank dream of the day when they do what the Kurds are doing now - tell the settlers to get moving. It was the same thing in Indonesia in 1999-2000 - when the central govt changed all these indigenous people who had Javanese settlers foisted on them suddenly took their revenge. Locals know who dispossessed them, they don't forget.
I was merely commenting on the "rightness" of the cause depends on the one being moved.
Don't know.
I find the spin put by the paper outrageous. If you seize my house, and I later come to claim it, am I involved in ethnic cleansing?
IN this case, the article itself states the facts correctly, yet a contradictory conclusion is shoved down the throat of the reader. This reads like the SOviet press of 1970s.
All the Jewish settlements are built on undeveloped land. They are not built on Arab villages and no Arabs were expelled in order to make way for Jewish settlements. The Palestinians of the West Bank dream of the day when they can drive out the Jews--because they want a completely ethnically-cleansed, Jew-free Palestine.
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