Global Policy Forum

"Iraq and accurate statistics," said one senior Iraqi official in Kirkuk, "are two entirely different things." Nowhere is this truer than when it comes to internally displaced persons (IDPs) in northern Iraq. Officially, 20 years of village clearances, Arabisation campaigns in ethnically mixed areas and a Kurdish civil war have forced around 800,000 people - out of a total population of four million - to leave their homes. A UN-Habitat survey of October 2000 put the total at 805,505, not including IDPs who had fended for themselves and disappeared into the general population.

However, some experts suggest that such figures need to be viewed with skepticism, for several reasons. The word IDP summons up images of dire poverty and tarpaulin. While living conditions in the collective towns built by Saddam Hussein at Binaslawa near Arbil or Shorj near Sulaymaniyah are far from good, they are not significantly worse than in towns under central government control until 2003 that were left untouched by the former regime.

A tiny minority of Iraqi Kurdish IDPs do still live in squalor in public buildings such as the former Baathist military fort outside Dahuk. However, there is now no sign in Kurdish-controlled areas of the 6,366 IDPs mentioned in the UN-Habitat survey as living in tents. Tent-dwellers there are, but they are either Iranian Kurds who fled violence around the Al-Tash refugee camp near Ramadi this spring and summer, or Iraqi Kurds returning from refugee camps in Iran.

Working with UN Oil-for-Food funds set aside for Iraqi Kurdistan, the Kurdish authorities have worked efficiently to counteract the destruction wrought by the former regime in the north. According to Abdullah Dler, director of IDPs for the Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs in the southern area controlled by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), all the villages destroyed during the 1970s and 1980s have been partially or fully rebuilt.

"There is no IDP problem in Sulaymaniyah governorate," Dler said, "only a problem of returnees." He questioned the argument, common among Kurdish officials, that everything should be done to encourage IDPs back to their original homes. "Why would a 25-year-old, forced from his village when he was two and living in a city ever since, want to return to a mountain hamlet," he asked, pointing out that only 25-30 percent of IDPs in his area of control had taken the decision to return.

The biggest change to have happened since UN-Habitat and others did their surveys, has been the toppling of Iraq's Baathist regime. In the north, this has had three major effects on the IDP situation. First, it has opened up vast areas of land immediately abutting the region run by the Kurds since 1991 to resettlement by Kurds, and to a lesser extent, Turkoman and Christians, evicted by the former regime. Before the war, the so-called Green Line which marked the northern limits of Baghdad's control was in places almost entirely depopulated, villages emptied and replaced by military camps and minefields.

Eighteen months ago Karahenjir, a small town of around 1,000 houses 30 km east of Kirkuk on the main Sulaymaniyah road, was deserted, the pasture land that surrounded it riddled with mines. The mines have almost all gone now, and the town is once again bustling with life. There are two schools, electricity, water, as well as the ubiquitous headquarters of Kurdish parties.

The same transformation is only slightly more slowly taking place in Qadir Karam, another small town 22 km south of Karahenjir. In these formerly highly militarised areas, returns have not brought a new wave of displacement. In districts such as Sheikhan and Makhmur, southeast of Dahuk and south of Arbil respectively, they have. Former Kurdish villages Arabised during the 1980s are now Kurdish again. The Arab inhabitants have fled south - to their homelands in and around Mosul and Tikrit.

Diyala hard hit by post-Saddam movements

Diyala governorate in the northeast would appear to be the region worst affected by this new movement. Thousands of previously imported Arabs are known to have fled from the towns of Khanaqin and Mandali before or immediately after the arrival of the Kurdish militias in spring 2003. How many new IDPs there are is far from clear - surveying in the area is impossible because of lack of security.

Interviewed by IRIN last September, the IDP coordinator at the Iraqi Ministry of Migration and Displacement Safeh Hussein said recently arrived IDPs in Baqouba, the Diyala administrative capital, numbered about 11,300. International NGOs working in Diyala governorate gave a higher figure, claiming there were 2,700 IDP families in Baqouba and 3,200 in Mugdadiyya, a town on the road to Khanaqin.

Assuming a mean of six people per Iraqi family, that gives a total of 35,400 IDPs in Arab-controlled Diyala. In a survey of Iraqi IDPs published in November 2004, the International Organisation for Migration(IOM) counted 6,882 families - over 41,000 people. In the Kurdish-controlled sub-districts of Khanaqin and Mandali, meanwhile, NGOs report a further 12,000 IDPs. Their living conditions largely appear to be tolerable, but the same is not true for many IDPs in Baqouba and Muqdadiyya.

"Their situation is very, very bad," one international aid worker told IRIN in Diyala governorate. "Many do not have roofs over their heads. They are living seven to a room, and lack essential things such as clothing." Since autumn, NGOs have been distributing plastic sheeting, blankets and 1.5 million litres of kerosene to help these people through the winter. With violence on the increase in Diyala in recent months, little more can easily be done.

Large displacements seen in Kirkuk area

But the largest movement of population to have occurred in northern Iraq since the war has been in the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, extensively Arabised since the late 1950s. Nobody knows for sure how many Kurds and Turkoman Saddam Hussein and his predecessors in power evicted from the city and surrounding areas: in Kirkuk, the politics of oil has made the characteristic fogginess of Iraqi statistics even more impenetrable.

The 2000 UN-Habitat survey counted 58,704 "victims of ethnic cleansing" in Kirkuk. The US Special Committee for Refugees estimated 100,000 Kurdish and Turkoman IDPs from the city and villages. The two main Kurdish parties, like NGO Human Rights Watch (HRW), meanwhile, put the total number at close to 120,000.

In the aftermath of the 2003 war, all agreed that Kirkuk was an ethnic time bomb, a disaster waiting to happen. It is a view that continues to be purveyed in the western press, as well as by the Kurdish authorities. The April 2004 Temporary Administrative Laws, they say, agreed all efforts should be made to wipe out the Baathist legacy of ethnic cleansing in Kirkuk. Why has nothing been done?

To all appearances, something has. The authorities in Kirkuk told IRIN in December that an estimated 14,500 IDP families had returned to the cities in Tameem governorate since the fall of the Baathist regime - approximately 90,000 people. The IOM's survey gives a higher number - 12,380 Kurdish families and 4,131 Turkoman.

In a pre-conflict UN study of Kurdish IDPs from Kirkuk, 89 percent of respondents said they intended to return. In Sulaymaniyah, IDP director Abdullah Dler told IRIN he thought over 70 percent of former Kirkuki IDPs in his area of responsibility had already done so.

"In my view," said Esteban Sacco, an Arbil-based aid worker who has done extensive survey work in newly liberated northern Iraq, "the whole return process in Kirkuk is almost complete. Only those with nothing in the [Kurdish-controlled] north have gone back. I doubt well-established, middle-class Kurds will return."

The living conditions of returnees, scattered around 67 locations within the city, is very varied. Some have rented flats. On the outskirts of almost exclusively Kurdish northern neighbourhoods, others have almost completed new houses. The less fortunate continue to live amidst the dirt of the overcrowded football stadium, and in tent villages that have sprung up on the roadside nearby.

"I would estimate that 30 percent of Kirkuk returnees are having real difficulties living from day to day," the director of Norwegian Peoples' Aid's Kirkuk office Awat Yassin told IRIN in Kirkuk. For a long time, squabbling between the various factions in Kirkuk had hampered efforts to find a solution to the IDP issue in the city. Kurds insisted all possible help should be given to them. Some of the Turkoman and Arab leaders publicly expressed doubts as to the genuineness of returnees, whom they feared were a Trojan horse for Kurdish plans to take control of the city.

Mutual distrust led in September 2003 to the collapse of an agreement to accommodate all IDPs in selected locations around the city. Deprived of the support of all sides, NGOs suspended long-term aid programmes. By December, peace had again been restored to the city council, the IDP delegates could resume work, and work encouraging returnees to move into designated areas had begun.

In the long term, however, it is unclear what will be done for these people. The new camps at Faylakh and on the Leylan road have been designated for temporary accommodation only. Observers think that the situation looks as though the Iraqi Property Claims Commission (IPCC), set up by the US-led Coalition as part of a structure to right the wrongs done in Kirkuk, will benefit only a minority of returnees.

The IPCC has the authority to award compensation to families whose property was confiscated by the former regime. The trouble is that the vast majority of those who have come back to Kirkuk since spring 2003 were renting accommodation when they were evicted, and have no land deeds to show a judge. Many of the others come from surrounding villages that were not so much confiscated as razed.