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The Iraqi street could pay the price for
war
By Sreeram Chaulia
Mainstream media portrayals of the
Anglo-American threat to wage war on Saddam Hussein have
focused largely on the possible effects of such an
attack on Arab public opinion in the region. How, it is
asked in the West, will such an attack be viewed by
moderate Egyptians, Saudi Arabians, Jordanians or
Syrians - not to mention the whole Muslim "street"?
Granted, the question is important.
But
while they're at it, they might want to ask another
important question: How will an all-out attack on Iraq
affect the Iraqi street?
One answer
might lie in the fact that the the United Nations High
Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is currently moving
thousands of tents and blankets into western Iran (from
eastern Iran, where the Afghan operations are being
wound up) in anticipation of large-scale Iraqi civilian
exodus if American-led forces do the inevitable and flag
off Operation Desert Something.
In the event of
an attack on Iraq, it is very possible that large
sectors of the Iraqi street may find themselves actually
living on the street. If not dying there.
Let
the past be our guide. Saddam forced out nearly 350,000
southern Shi'ites for "disloyalty" during the Iran-Iraq
war, and they are still languishing as "old caseload" in
Iran. Another 150,000 Shi'ites were expelled from the
southern marshlands into Iran during Desert Storm in
1991, though the use of tactics such as damming rivers,
destroying homes and burning the crops of Shi'ite
minorities suspected of hostility to Saddam's regime.
Present readiness in the UNHCR is for
accommodating and succoring 40,000 refugees, but The
Guardian has reported that "some diplomats believe
refugee outflows could reach 150,000". Considering that
the UNHCR under-calculated the rate and speed of Afghan
refugees returning from Pakistan in the past six months,
it is better if the organization is prepared
logistically for receiving at least 100,000 in western
Iran.
Besides Shi'ites in the south, the Kurds
in the north, who have been enjoying a rare spell of
freedom and economic progress since 1995, are also
vulnerable to en masse coerced movement into Turkey and
Iran in the event of a US attack. During and after
Desert Storm, Kurdish uprisings in the north were
ruthlessly mowed down by the Iraqi army, allegedly
employing chemical weapons, as they undoubtedly did in
1988. This caused a gigantic outflow of 2 million Iraqi
Kurd refugees into the mountainous regions of Turkey and
Iran.
Since Turkey was unwilling to host all
Iraqi Kurds, a UN Security Council resolution launched
"Operation Provide Comfort" and set up safe havens and a
no-fly-zone within northern Iraq to house those
internally displaced Iraqi Kurds who did not manage to
cross international boundaries. The generous development
space created by UN Resolution 986, which apportioned 13
percent of oil-for-food money to Kurdish self-ruled
territories, is going to be torn to shreds if the US
attacks. For the umpteenth time in history, the
perennially oppressed Kurds will be thrown to the
merciless vagaries of Turkish and Iranian border guards
and troops.
Repressed Iraqi minorities like
Shi'ites and Kurds are especially vulnerable to
dislocation in the event of US war on Iraq if the NATO
game-plan follows the Afghan model, ie, stresses weaning
away and arming anti-Saddam groups. Needless to say, the
majority of Shi'ite or Kurdish civilians are not foot
soldiers of rebel militias that claim to be their sole
spokesmen, but Saddam is not known for making such fine
distinctions. His track record of punishing minorities
during conflict is well proven. The UNHCR should
therefore be prepared for large-scale inflows into both
Iran and Turkey should full-scale military bombing by
America begin. The example of NATO's Kosovo war in 1999
is a good parallel here, because Milosevic's forces
began forcibly driving out hundreds of thousands of
Kosovo Albanians into neighboring countries once the
bombing of Serbia intensified.
The prospect of
myriad internally displaced persons fleeing villages and
towns inside Iraq cannot also be discounted. During past
wars, Saddam has shown mastery in sealing borders and
disallowing Iraqis from becoming refugees and potential
"dissidents" for Western exploitation. If war is
imminent, the UNHCR should strengthen early warning
systems for displaced person situations inside Iraq and
be in constant communication with the Red Cross and the
UN Inter-Agency Standing Committee to bring instant
relief and respite to humans who would lose every
belonging and hit the road to an unknown destination.
Again, the comparison with the Kosovo campaign is
informative. The number of Serbs and Roma people who
were internally displaced as a result of UN-unauthorized
NATO strikes ranged between 200 and 300,000.
We
are living in an era when artificial distinctions
between "refugee" and "displaced person" are melting and
the human rights of all forcibly displaced people are
crying to be recognized. Though the visible consequence
of America's war will be snaking lines of refugees
inching their way to the nearest international border,
the humanitarian world cannot sit back and allow
depopulation inside Iraq to go unnoticed, be it in the
form of evasion from raining Western bombs or due to
orders of the Iraqi army.
Again, the projections
and conjectures on the coming war on Iraq in the
American media have to this point largely excluded the
humanitarian angle. US decision-makers have a new-found
spring in their step after the miraculous "victory" in
Afghanistan and the freeing of Kabul from the
reactionary Taliban. The poltergeists of Vietnam and
Somalia have given way to the assurance that future
American military missions will be liberating in nature.
Perhaps that will be the case. But whether it does or
not, let it not be the case that the human consequences
of war are kept under wraps.
(©2002 Asia Times
Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com
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