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Land of No Return

By Sharon Waxman

KIRKUK, Iraq

Even when you're 13, living in a soccer stadium has its down side.

The press box, your home for over a month, is at the top of the stadium, so every trek to the kiosk that sells gum (for you) and cigarettes (for your dad) is a five-story hike down steep, broken stairs. A trip to the outhouse -- a concrete structure over a hole in the ground -- is another walk down those same stairs.

But the worst part is the water. With only one hose available for all 700 people living in the stadium, there's always a wait. And even with the help of the men, it is a chore to haul the jerrycans up the narrow stairs.

Plus, the water's not the best. The people here say a baby died recently of diarrhea.

But Medea Nazim manages to stay cheery, since that's her nature. "I go to school," she says in enthusiastic English, exhausting her vocabulary. And there are always plenty of kids around to play with. Medea is tiny for her age, and wears a denim shirt and green sweat pants. Dimples make charming creases in her brown skin when she smiles, which is often, and her brown eyes dance.

But most of the other people in Shorja Stadium are not nearly as upbeat as Medea. About 150 families have sought shelter in this bullet-pocked, looted building since the end of the war, all of them Kurds who were once expelled from this northern city during various ethnic cleansing campaigns and purges by Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

They returned to their traditional homes to find them occupied by Arab families or gone completely -- bulldozed into piles of rubble by the former government. Some were chased from their homes in the southern Arab communities where they had resettled; others couldn't pay the rent in the economic privation of postwar Iraq.

Now all they do is wait. "We have gone to all the officials and no one is responding," says Sabah Mohamed Ibrahim, 40, the unofficial spokesman for the families living along the field, up in the press box, in the concrete hallways where they have hung sheets and patchwork rice sacks as separators. "This place is for sports, not for living. Twenty people here need operations." He kicks at a spigot near the playing field, where a rooster struts. Broken glass is everywhere. "A humanitarian organization brought us two tanks of water. They promised to turn it on. There's been nothing until now."

The families living in Shorja Stadium are just one example of a problem affecting thousands of families in northern Iraq. All over the major cities of Kirkuk and Mosul, displaced Arab and Kurdish families camp in abandoned buildings, waiting for someone to assign them some land, or to dislodge the people living in what were once their homes.

In a bombed-out Mosul military base, dozens of Arab families expelled by Kurds wither in the heat. At a prison north of Baghdad, dozens of displaced Arab families from the north have come to find shelter. And everywhere a visitor goes in Kirkuk, angry Kurds wave documents in your face, the deeds to the homes they once legally owned and were taken by Hussein.

"We are the original owners. We are not guilty, we did not do anything," said Sabr Ahmed Said, a 45-year-old engineer who is organizing 200 families to demand the restitution of a mostly empty lot that once held their homes. Chickens peck at the ground where he stands. He says it was once the room where he was married.

In 1988, Hussein expelled the Kurds here and gave this land to senior army officers, who now rent it to local merchants. "If these lands are not distributed to the original owners, there will be problems, because there are hundreds, thousands of such families," says the engineer.

Said appears to be stating the obvious, but no one, it seems, is willing to address the matter. The Americans are reluctant to evict people and want to wait until a local government can consider competing claims. The United Nations says that internally displaced persons don't fall under its mandate. Relief organizations say they cannot do more without cash, and permission from the Americans.

In the meantime, April becomes May becomes June, days turn to weeks turn to months of blazing summer heat. Conditions worsen in ersatz shelters like the stadium, teetering on the edge of a humanitarian crisis.

Medea finishes school this week. Then, like the adults, she'll have nothing to do.

U.S. Army 1st Lt. John Evans, a cop from New York on reserve duty, looks dismayed when he learns of the reported death of another child at Shorja Stadium. It would be the third in two months. (A humanitarian organization investigated the death and found recent graves, but said none of them was child-size.)

"We've been trying to get groups in there to improve conditions," he says. "We have had health teams go in there. I'm not saying they don't need help, but we've not totally ignored them either."

Evans is the man in charge at the Civilian Military Operations Center in Kirkuk, a small building beside the gutted and bombed former headquarters of Iraqi intelligence, where the U.S. occupation deals with humanitarian problems. Initially, the Army wanted to move the Kurdish families from the stadium, he says. But then they thought again: If they placed the families somewhere comfortable, that might attract dozens of new families. And then what?

Instead, the authorities made a tactical decision to leave the families where they were and not to improve conditions at the stadium too much for fear of attracting still more refugees. "If you build something, it becomes a permanent structure, and that becomes another problem," Evans says.

He also acknowledges that there has also been no progress on the stickier issue of land redistribution. The complexities of sorting out decades of ethnic repression are something the U.S. authorities here have decided is beyond their capacity.

Whoever sorts it out has a monumental task. Throughout his rule, Hussein regularly emptied villages of Kurds in an attempt to create a more Arab population in the north, where a strong Kurdish separatist movement threatened his rule.

Hussein focused many of these efforts in oil-rich Kirkuk, which he wanted firmly under Arab control. Often, Kurdish families were given "permission" to take their belongings to another city and warned not to return to their homes on pain of arrest or death. Their homes and land were given to impoverished Arabs, who were apparently happy to have them.

By 1988, it is estimated that more than half the towns and villages in Kurdish areas of Iraq had been razed and their populations deported to southern Iraq. It was at that time that Hussein gassed the Kurdish village of Halabja to deter residents from collaborating with Iranian forces during the Iran-Iraq war.

Every time the Kurds rebelled, as they did in 1991 after the first Gulf War, or in 1998, Hussein responded with a vengeance, rounding up Kurdish men (many are still missing; the bodies of some have been found in mass graves) and using the collective punishment of evicting and destroying entire neighborhoods.

Arab families have been living in some of these homes for a decade or more. If they are evicted, they, too, need somewhere to go. Evans waves his hands at boxes filled with file folders of claims made by families to recoup houses occupied by others: 1,300 in Kirkuk so far.

"Our instructions are to take all claims, record them, keep a copy [of the deed] and give it to a deputy mayor who is charged with resettlement," he says. As of yet, there is no such deputy mayor. "Down the road it will be taken over by a civil organization to mediate, or to the judicial system."

The United Nations has decades of experience dealing with displaced persons. But "on property issues, the U.N. was not asked and is not mandated to intervene," says Malak Allaouni, the local U.N. representative for humanitarian aid. "We do monitor the situation."

Allaouni is sitting in a house that is being painted and restored for the opening of a U.N. office in Kirkuk. Like humanitarian groups, the U.N. was slow to move in here because of security risks. He agrees with the U.S. approach of limiting aid to the stadium families.

"Most of these people didn't own property. They are vulnerable people, destitute," he says. Encouraging others like them to return would be bad. "The situation does not appear suitable to have people return in a weakened economic situation. If you have too large assistance, then you aggravate the problem."

As for the mounting humanitarian problem, "the sanitation was not satisfactory" at Shorja, he agrees. "I don't know why [assistance] hasn't taken place."

Humanitarian organizations say they are trying to respond, but if the Americans will not attack the main problem -- land distribution -- then nothing they do will matter much.

"It's an unbelievable mess," says a representative for one such group, who visited the stadium recently. He asked to not be named because his group is vying for U.S.-paid contracts to help displaced people.

"The property issue, resettlement, none of it is being addressed by the OCPA [Office of Coalition Provisional Authority]. I've told them, 'You're burning daylight, get moving,' but nothing happens. They told me 'days not weeks' to start addressing wide-scale problems. That was two weeks ago," he says.

Even if the Americans don't want to evict anyone, he says, there is a lot of uninhabited land that could be quickly divvied up. Many Shorja families, for example, once lived on a several-mile-square lot about a mile from the stadium. Hussein had cleared the land to build apartment buildings for Arab families, but construction never began.

"There's low-hanging fruit here," he says.

In response, Evans says that a lead humanitarian organization will be designated soon to take charge of aid to the displaced persons, and local officials should be ensconced in office soon to look at the land issue.

"Hopefully, we can get the government up and running as soon as possible," he says. "We want to step back. We're trying to back away as quickly as possible."

The mirror image of Shorja Stadium can be found at an abandoned military base in Mosul. The remnants of fierce fighting are everywhere. Burned hulks of cars are strewn along the roadways while shards of twisted metal poke from the empty windows of bombed buildings. An anti-mine brigade is making its way through the complex, marking each cleared building with red paint.

Several hundred yards from their work, about 15 members of the Sabah family cling to civilization. Several adults and nine children moved into this army barracks recently after Kurdish fighters, pesh merga, evicted them from their home in al-Huriya, a village on the outskirts of Kirkuk.

"The pesh merga kicked us out by force. They brought guns, rifles, mortars, tanks," said Aida Sabah, 60. "We had a car. We took our mattresses, our blankets. About 150 families left. Those who didn't have a car walked."

Originally shepherds, the Sabah family had been living in various Kurdish villages since the 1980s, when they were given land by Hussein. In 1995, the Kurds returned to evict them, and in 2000 they were given other Kurdish land in al-Huriya, when Hussein expelled those residents and blew up their houses. They said the government told them to take the land.

Conditions at the army base are even more dire than at Shorja. The Sabah family has no water, no electricity and, unlike at Shorja, no humanitarian groups are helping them.

Barely a mile away, 10 more families from al-Huriya live in small, bare concrete rooms on another part of the base. These families have been here for six weeks, having fled their homes when Kurdish families warned them that the pesh merga were coming to kill them. Their situation worsens by the week. They fetch water by car from a broken spigot several blocks away. Their government rations are running out.

These Arab families say they knew that taking the Kurdish land in al-Huriya was unjust. "The government was trying to make al-Huriya into an Arabic village," says Ahmed Ali, 30. "We knew it was wrong, and it was temporary. But the government told us to go."

They do not seek to return there, they say. They just need land somewhere, and a bit of money to build a house. "We are poor people. We just need any land, even 100 meters, and we will build our houses. We won't make any trouble," said Ajem Jasem, 78.

A couple of weeks ago, the men here went back to al-Huriya to ask the Kurds for the wheat and barley they had planted in January. It is harvest time, the moment they wait for all year. The Kurds made them leave empty-handed.

The Sabah family made the same request, but they also turned to the Americans for help. "Our men went back there and talked to the Kurds. They told us: 'You have no business here.' We went to the Americans and they said, 'We will give you your rights back,' " says Aida Sabah. She doesn't know if the Americans will do anything. "We are waiting here," she says, "until God decides."






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