They bury the babies first thing every morning in the Kurdish refugee camp above the Turkish village of Isik Veren. The name means, “that which gives light.” The babies–about 20 last Wednesday, but the numbers vary with the weather–die each night of cold and starvation and disease. The tiny bodies are carefully dressed in their best clothes, and often swathed in traditional head scarves of black and white checks. Then they are laid to rest in shallow mass graves. Mourners ring the little mounds with stones. Soon there will be hundreds, perhaps thousands, of these rings, anonymous reminders of the vast human tragedy now unfolding in the high, freezing mountains that form the border between Iraq and southeastern Turkey.
I have been in refugee camps in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East but this tragedy is somehow different. Healthy children and old people are dying simply because the world hasn’t reacted fast enough to save them. The few doctors in the area expect a leap in the numbers of deaths in the next few days as diseases now incubating take hold. The trained experts of the international aid agencies seem to be far behind–when I tried to call a top U.N. aid official in Ankara last week to get an assessment of the problem, his secretary told me, “His job is not to talk to reporters, it is to have meetings.” Lionel Rosenblatt, president of the Washington-based advocacy group Refugees International and a veteran field worker with experience in the Cambodian refugee camps formed in Thailand after the Khmer Rouge terror began, had just returned from the camps in the Cukurca. He found no U.N. presence there at all. “What we’re seeing here is the exact reversal of almost all other refugee crisis,” he said. “In Ethiopia , or Sudan, or Cambodia, you see broken-down skeletal people coming in, and you settle them and build them back up. Here you are seeing relatively strong, healthy, determined people coming in–and you watch them breaking apart in these camps because they don’t have food, shelter, medicine and the other essentials to sustain life.”
Food was the only assistance I saw at the camp above Isik Veren, which is one of the major camps strung along about 60 miles of border from Uludere in the west to Cukurca in the east. It was being given out by Turkish soldiers, untrained young men whose distribution technique resembled feeding time at the zoo. Loaves of bread, bags of potatoes and flour, packets of noodles, sacks of apples were simply thrown off the back of trucks into a desperate crowd. The strongest got the most food; the weak got trampled underfoot. The seething mass of people literally stormed the trucks, and the soldiers, after finding that firing in the air did not stop them, started beating them back with rifle butts and sticks. I saw men staggering out of the crush, bleeding heavily from facial cuts, but still smiling because they had managed to grab some bread or a bag of potatoes. In the worst melee, Kurds who had produced knives to cut open sacking suddenly started slashing at one another to get to the supplies inside.
A Turkish government minister made a prediction last week. Kamran Inan, the minister od state in charge of the southeastern regions of Turkey, told me in Ankara, “You Western reporters are going to go down to the camps, and you’ll write what you see-and soon Turkey is going to start getting the blame for a disaster which was caused by Saddam Hussein. You’re already forgetting who started all this.”
The still lethal armies of the man “who started all this” have driven hundreds of thousands–possibly as many as 2 million of his own non-Arabic people–from their cities and villages in northern Iraq into the mountainous border regions of Iran and Turkey. It has been a murderous onslaught, and a refugee doctor, Ahmad Mohammed from the town of Zakhu, described how Iraqi soldiers, following his own refugee column, had seized a handful of stragglers “and cut off their heads, and held them up like this.” He mimed a head being held high.
Words start to lose their meaning in this part of the world. The word border conjures up a vision of crossings with flags, demarcation posts and other indicators of where one country ends and another begins. “Camp” suggests some sort of organized grouping of tents or huts, out in the open but with facilities like showers and latrines. The border in this area, as one Kurd said this week, is “maybe one, maybe two mountains over.” The mountains here run up to 12,000 feet; across the snowcapped crags and plunging inclines is an imaginary line separating Turkey from Iraq. A “camp” like the one above Isik Veren, near the center of a region where at least 200,000 refugees are trying to survive, is a sprawl of improvised tents in the trees 7,000 feet up a steep mountainside.
There is no heat, no power, no paths and few real tents. Water is in such short supply that to supplement the occasional tanker from the valley, teenage boys are sent up to the 10,000-foot ridge to bring back bags of snow, which people gobble because they are too thirsty to wait for the lumps to melt. The absence of toilet facilities has created a major health hazard; the contents of the reeking patch off to one corner of the site are washed among the shelters when it rains or snows, as it did last week. As Ahmad Hussein, a storekeeper from Duhuk in northern Iraq, said in broken English, “There is no anything.” He was slumped in the mud beside a steep track leading down from the “camp.” The road from the valley below is so bad the food trucks can’t reach the refugees. Anyone lucky enough to win the fight for a bag of food has to lug it a further 2,000 feet up a 45-degree slope.
The people now trapped on the mountain slopes are not the tough Kurdish fighters who have lived in, and off, these mountains for years. They are teachers and flatland farmers and doctors and office workers. They are old women like one I saw earlier this week, sitting in the middle of the track, picking fragments of broken macaroni from the dust because she was too weak to join in the mass fight for food. They are men like an English-speaking engineer from Zakhu, Hawzad Hajji, who arrived at the camp five days ago. He and his family haven’t eaten for two days, but he was glad that at least he made it into Turkey. He said something that had the crowd around him nodding in agreement when translated. “Even if Saddam is killed, I will never go back to Iraq, because all our lives there, we Kurds have lived in fear and in war.” Doctor Mohammed put it even more strongly: “If they try to force me to go back to Iraq, I will kill my wife and children first, and then myself.”
Not that their prospects are much better where they are. The Turkish government is not allowing the refugees out of the mountains and down to the relative comfort of the valleys below-those do not leak down are rounded up and returned, sometimes at gunpoint, to the mountains. The Turks fear the development of permanent settlements of unhappy exiles “like Palestinian camps,” as one official said, settled in a region where a low-level separatist Kurdish insurrection has been sputtering along for years. The Turks have no faith that Western countries , where many of these people say they would like to go, will take a sizable number of refugees. In August 1988, for example, 60,000 people swarmed over the border from Iraq after Saddam used poison gas on Kurdish villages. The West clucked and threw up its hands and took just 600 refugees. Almost 30,000 of those 1988 refugees are still stranded in Turkey.
Today’s dilemma is not a Turkish or Iranian problem in any sense other than that they happened to be the closest sanctuaries for persecuted foreigners. If the gulf war hadn’t started, the Kurdish people would not have made their bid to free themselves from a tyrant, and ultimately left themselves open to the onslaught of reprisal. The burden is on the West. As Kamran Inan said to me, “You can’t just salve your conscience in the West by throwing these people a few million dollars for food and medicine….. Those who have come here don’t belong in Turkey and they don’t want to be here, but they know from their past experience they will be killed if they try to go back to Iraq if the present regime is in control.”
American protests that they don’t now want to interfere in Iraq’s internal affairs are a little hard to take. Just a few hours’ flight away in another mountainous Muslim country, America has for years been backing a rebellion with massive arms supplies. If a few weeks ago America had supplied Kurdish fighters with a fraction of the Stinger missiles and other weapons which it has poured into Afghanistan to arm the mujahedin rebels, the Kurds, who are brave and skilled fighters, would have been able to protect themselves.
It seems to me that if a coalition of Western and Arab nations could form itself a few months ago to free the people of Kuwait, and if they could spend billions of dollars and risk thousands of lives to achieve that aim, then in all conscience they have to work out how to do it again for a people far more helpless than the Kuwaitis ever were.
