Europe already had a Kurdish problem—last week’s surge of refugees just brought the point
home. Why they won’t be the last

March 1, 2001
By Christopher Dickey
NEWSWEEK INTERNATIONAL

March 5 issue — The 33-year-old doctor took off his blue overcoat to answer a visitor’s
question. Why had he fled northern Iraq, paying smugglers $2,000 to take him through
Turkey to “somewhere in Europe”?

HE ROLLED UP THE SLEEVE of his plaid shirt. Why had he and about 900 other Kurds
squeezed into the hold of a derelict freighter called the East Sea, only to be abandoned off the
southern coast of France when it ran aground? Dr. Ihsan Ibrahim held out his withered arm.
A ragged scar wound its way over the shrunken biceps and under his shoulder. In Iraq, he
said, he was attacked one night and stabbed several times because he’d been agitating
against Saddam Hussein. “If I hadn’t made this trip,” said Ibrahim, “I would be dead now.”

In the gravel parking lot of a holding center at Frejus, not far from the fashionable resorts of
the Cote d’Azur, many of the refugees from the East Sea seemed lost last week. The French
government finally gave them permission to apply for political asylum. But many were
unsure where they would go—or even where they were. Experts on immigration see the
castaways of the East Sea as a sign of crises to come. They may well foreshadow a flood of
Kurdish refugees from Iraq (more than 3.5 million live in northern Iraq) if sanctions are
lifted and the protection of U.S. and British warplanes is taken away. Last year Iraqi Kurds
were the largest group of refugees petitioning for asylum in Germany. Last month the Italian
government inaugurated a center to handle Iraqi Kurdish refugees, who have been pouring
into southern Italy since 1996. “The Kurdish ‘problem’ is a European problem,” says
Kendall Nezan, head of the Kurdish Institute in Paris.

These independent-minded people, with their long history of rebellions and suffering, are no
longer contained by martial law in Turkey, the assassination of their leaders in Iran or nearly
genocidal repression in Iraq. Of the world’s 20 million to 25 million Kurds, in fact, an
estimated 1 million already live in the European Union. In Germany there are about
500,000, descended from the guest workers who came on Turkish passports in the 1960s.
But the number from Iraq is growing quickly, with large concentrations in Sweden, the
Netherlands and Britain, as well as Germany. About 150,000 have come to Europe in
the last decade, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees—more
than 30,000 a year since 1996. Most have been granted asylum.

Kurds have begun to integrate into the social and economic fabric of several European cities.
By one estimate, there are 3,000 Kurdish sandwich shops in the Paris area alone. The
Kurdish-born singer Dilba is a pop star in Sweden, while the actress Amira Casa is featured
in several French comedies. Kurds have also shown increasing political clout. Falaknas Uca,
a 24-year-old Kurdish German, was elected to the European Parliament in Strasbourg in
1999. Yet Kurdish nationalism is growing among the second generation in Europe, not
subsiding. Uca sits on the committee that oversees Europe’s relations with Turkey. “If
Turkey wants to be part of Europe, it can’t deny Kurds their basic human rights,” she says.
When Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan was captured by the Turks in 1998, it was
European cities that erupted in violence. Mass protests filled the streets; buildings were
occupied; some young Kurds even burned themselves alive.

For the moment, European leaders have found it impossible to agree on general immigration
guidelines, much less the particular problems of the Kurds. “Each country thinks that its
neighbor is the one that will be affected,” says Nezan of the Kurdish Institute. A senior
European Commission official reluctantly agrees. “There’s lots of talking, but not many
decisions.” Yet events looming in Iraq could force the Europeans to formulate new policies
frantically, much the way Bosnian and Kosovar immigration inspired European calls for
intervention in the Balkans. The confusion that marks policy now, in fact, is not unlike
the con-fusion surrounding the breakup of Yugoslavia. Every move is fraught with the risk
of deepening an unwanted involvement, yet current European efforts to scale back the
confrontation with Saddam may intensify the exodus.

 The mountainous “safe haven” in northern Iraq was cobbled together in the first place to
avert a refugee crisis after the gulf war, when 1 million Kurds fled toward the Turkish
border. They were afraid Saddam would use chemical weapons against them, as he had
many times in the late 1980s. The only way to keep the Kurds in Iraq was to guarantee their
protection. Since a U.N.-administered “oil for food” program was put in place in 1996 as
part of the sanctions regime, the Kurds of northern Iraq have come to depend on it for
survival, even prosperity. They receive billions of dollars out of Saddam’s reach.

 But international support for the sanctions regime is all but gone. The Bush administration
is reconsidering it. And Paris is leading European efforts to end it. Two weeks ago, after U.S.
and British planes bombed antiaircraft installations near Baghdad, French Foreign Minister
Hubert Vedrine said the strikes were “illegal” because the U.N. had not signed off. He
studiously avoided reference to the refugees of the East Sea who were, even then, huddling
in the receiving center at Frejus. But if the no-fly zone and the sanctions were to be lifted,
warns Erhard Franz of the German Orient Institute in Hamburg, “there’d be a tremendous
wave of refugees into neighboring countries and into Europe. Without the allies in northern
Iraq, Europe would have a huge problem.”

 Facing a future that promises destitution at best, annihilation at worst, many of Iraq’s Kurds
already feel they have no choice but to leave. As a result, the underground railroad to the
West is flourishing. In the northern Iraq city of Arbil passports with European visas are
openly sold in the bazaar. One vendor, who calls himself Adnan, says he used to be a painter.
Now he peddles travel documents—and one-way package trips to Europe. The most
expensive costs more than $7,000 per person, including a plane ticket from Jordan. The
cheapest, at about $2,000, has refugees traveling hidden in trucks and the holds of ships. For
the poor, conditions are grim. Last October six young Iraqi Kurds smothered to death in the
back of a truck in southern Italy. The driver dumped their corpses by the side of the road and
drove away. “As far as I’m concerned,” says Adnan, “I wouldn’t send my little brother to
Europe like that. It’s too risky.”

But many of the 910 people crammed into the hold of the East Sea said that no risk was
greater than the one they ran in Iraq. They came from the edges of the “safe haven,” near the
Saddam-controlled city of Mosul. Ahmed Khalo, 45, says his brother was killed by
Saddam’s agents: “They wanted us to collaborate with them.” Ali Hassan, 46, knew he
would have to leave after his house was searched by Saddam’s security men. His neighbor
was arrested by the same agents and was never seen again.

Ibrahim’s friends, one 25-year-old “just disappeared,” he said. Another was called away,
supposedly to do his “military service.” Ibrahim thinks he was assassinated, but he dared not
investigate. “As soon as you ask about someone who disappeared, you disappear too,” he
says. After Ibrahim was stabbed and left for dead, he believed the only way to survive
was to leave.

 “Somewhere in Europe” he’ll be safe. But sometime soon Europe itself will have to find
effective ways to help the Kurds in their homelands. If not, many more East Seas will be
coming to the West.
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The Kurdistan Observer
www.kurdistanobserver.com