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Kurdish refugees stuck in squalor at stadium in Iraq 
Kurdish refugees' hope turns to misery in Iraq as political gridlock has them living in stadium 08:49 AM CDT on Thursday, October 25, 2007
KIRKUK, Iraq – The Kirkuk soccer stadium is filled with refugees uprooted by hope.
Four years ago, more than 2,000 Kurds came here to reclaim homes taken by Saddam Hussein and given to Arabs. Still they wait, living a wretched and increasingly angry existence, while Iraqi politicians seek a solution that avoids civil war.
Four hundred and seventy-three families live here in hovels built beneath and behind the stands, with sewage-strewn concrete lawns pecked at by chickens, clouds of flies during the day and nocturnal clouds of mosquitoes. They burn trash for cooking fires, steal electricity off the power lines running along the street, and bicker among themselves over whose turn it is to take a meager share of water from the coughing faucets.
Tell Habsa Taifor that you are sorry for her troubles, and she will bite your head off.
"Sorry! What does that do?" sneered the 39-year-old mother of three. "We don't want apologies. The reason our life is this way is YOU, the foreigners! YOU have an interest in our suffering!"
The stadium refugees say Kurdish politicians and the U.S. military encouraged them to rush back to Kirkuk after Mr. Hussein fled Baghdad in 2003. As many as 30,000 returned, including Kurds who lived in exile in Iran. Some reclaimed their homes, and others moved in with family or friends. Many live in refugee camps outside the city.
The hopeful refugees were told to wait while Iraqis in Baghdad worked out a constitution that promises to sort out disputed territories, such as Kirkuk, that changed hands during Mr. Hussein's drives to expel Kurds and settle Arab families in their place to strengthen Arab control of the oil-rich area. More than 90,000 Arabs were settled in the city under Mr. Hussein's Arabization campaign.
The constitution, approved by 85 percent of Iraqis in December 2005, includes a three-step process: returning to their owners homes seized during Mr. Hussein's regime, a census and a guarantee of local referenda by the end of this year on where disputed territories should wind up – in Kirkuk's case, with either the Kurdish Regional Government or with the Arab-dominated provinces.
Either way, the voters would still be Iraqis under the federal government in Baghdad. But a strong undercurrent of Kurdish nationalism has many wondering if Kirkuk might someday be the capital of an independent Kurdistan. Many call the city "the Jerusalem of Kurdistan."
With little time left in the year, the major questions about the constitutional provision known as Article 140 are undecided, including who gets to go home, who gets compensated to relocate and who gets to vote in the referendum.
When he took office last year, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki promised a census by the end of July 2007 and a vote by the end of November. No census was done, and a vote next month seems highly improbable.
The contested territories covered by Article 140 include a broad triangle of Arab-dominated Nineveh Province, where Dallas-based Hunt Oil Co. plans to drill for oil under a contract signed with the Kurdish Regional Government. The State Department has warned that the Hunt contract faces "legal uncertainties." None is bigger than whether the area belongs with the Kurds or the Arabs.
Kirkuk has more explosive uncertainties. It sits on one of the world's largest oil fields. In any division of Iraq's spoils, Arab Sunnis look to this oil field as their guarantee of economic survival. No matter what revenue-sharing deals and legal formalities are reached nationwide, many of Iraq's Arab Sunnis would find Kurdish domination of Kirkuk an existential threat.
Sunni insurgents have made Kirkuk one of Iraq's centers of violence. They set off roadside bombs to kill U.S. forces and Iraqi military contingents, and try to drive out the Kurds. They frequently blow up oil pipelines running from Kirkuk to deny the Shiite-dominated federal government in Baghdad of finances.
Kirkuk Mayor Abdul Rahman Mustafa, a Kurd, talked about these issues recently as U.S. troops blocked the streets around his office in the aftermath of a car bombing. Arab families seeking money to relocate away from Kirkuk had lined up outside, but none was hurt in the blast.
"We have a very big number who were kicked out by the previous regime. We haven't an exact number, because they've been kicked out and sent to other provinces since maybe 30, 35 years ago," he said. "Some of them came back to Kirkuk and are living in very, very bad situations. If Article 140 is implemented, a big part of our problems will be solved."
In the recent past, Turkish military and political leaders have talked of war if Kirkuk goes to the Kurds. After decades of fighting with Kurdish guerrillas and more than 30,000 dead, Turkey doesn't want a powerful Kurdish nation rising on its borders with Iraq. So far, Turkey has relied on alliances with their ethnic cousins known as Turkmen, one of Kirkuk's largest minorities, to block and delay resolution of the city's disputed status.
The soccer stadium refugees have sought help from all corners of the political spectrum – to no avail.
"They told us to come back," said Luqman Qadir, 40, Habsa's husband. "Now the [Iraqi] government says the Americans will do what you need, and the Americans say the [Iraqi] government will do it. So we burn between them."
Habsa and Luqman live with their three children along what was the stadium's oval track in a one-room shelter enclosed by cinderblocks and mud. This shelter has no toilet, no running water, no windows, no curtains or flowers or pictures or any of the other decorations that turn four walls into a home.
They live instead with stench, bare cement and thick blankets of yellow dust.
"This is our fuel," Luqman said, slapping a pile of refuse. "Do you know the smell of a burning plastic bottle? That's what we breathe."
Habsa said they were kicked out of their home in Kirkuk in 1995 because they refused to join Mr. Hussein's Baath Party. They left all their belongings behind. Their home was given to an Arab family, while Habsa and her family moved to the Kurdish city Sulaimaniyah, where Luqman sold vegetables as a street vendor.
Kirkuk hasn't had a proper population count in decades. Ration cards used in the city show 950,000 people living here now. Judging by Iraq's 2005 elections, most of the people are Kurds and Turkmen. Arab Sunnis, who settled here for jobs with the Iraqi national oil company and for houses handed over by the government, largely boycotted the 2005 vote.
The Kurdish regional parliament's vice president, a Kirkuk native named Kemal Kerkuki, said the best reference document for deciding who votes in a referendum on the city's future is the 1957 census. There was no doubt back then that the city was part of Iraq's Kurdish regions, he said.
"The fascist government of Saddam Hussein ... did their best to get rid of the Kurdish population," Mr. Kerkuki said.
He said a majority of the 182,000 people killed during Saddam Hussein's anti-Kurd Anfal campaign in the 1980s – many of them buried alive – were from Kirkuk.
Iraq's federal government has offered Arabs who came to Kirkuk during the Arabization era compensation of 20 million dinars, about $16,000, to move, and 36,000 families have applied. Only about 10 percent of those applicants have gotten the money, however, as opponents throw sand in the gears of the legalities.
Kirkuk's Turkmen feel as aggrieved as the Kurds. They, too, were victims of Saddam Hussein's Arabization drive, and want their property back.
Karkhi Altiparmak, head of the Turkmen Democratic Movement, says the Turkmen would fare better as part of the Kurdish region than they have with the Arabs. He also dismisses Turkey's concerns about the status of the Turkmen.
"We suffered under Saddam Hussein's regime, and Turkey never asked Saddam Hussein to do anything," he said. "That's why we believe what Turkey is doing now is not for the interest of the Turkmen, but for Turkey's own political interests."
Mr. Kerkuki says the timetable for a vote before the end of this year must be met, if only to help the Kurds in the stadium.
Muhammed Majeed Salih, 50, who lives in the stadium with his family, is a member of the stadium self-governing council. He hopes Mr. Kerkuki is right about the timetable, but he doesn't have much hope left.
"When the Americans came to Iraq, we kept shouting, 'Welcome!' Some Kurds even named their child 'Bush.' So we were expecting a lot from the Americans," he said.
But Kirkuk's territorial status is not an American responsibility, and Baghdad has little to show in the way of political reconciliation and legislative progress.
"In general," Mr. Salih said, "the idea of our arrival here [in the stadium] was not a wise idea."
