Turkish Kurds at Mahmour camp reluctant to return

It's been over three months since Turkey, Iraqi officials and the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) agreed on a plan for the organised voluntary return to their homeland of the estimated 14,000 Turkish Kurds living in Iraq. In Mahmour refugee camp, an hour north of Arbil, where just over 10,000 of the refugees (75 percent of them women and children) have been living since 1998, no one has budged. It's easy to see why. Compared to the bleak villages scattered around the rest of Mahmour plain, and the filthy streets of the nearby town, conditions in the camp are good. On the main road leading up from the checkpoint at the entrance to the camp, there is a barber's shop, a tailor's and a small grocery. Refugees tend to tomatoes and peppers in allotments hidden behind neatly built limestone walls. There are trees everywhere. Many of the houses have televisions and VCRs. One of four schools tending to 2,800 children of school-going age, Sheyid Saleh Kandal primary school would not look out of place in Turkey. Children wear the same grey frocks and form up in the same regimented lines at assembly every morning. But their lessons are in Kurdish, not Turkish, something impossible back in their home villages in Turkey's southeastern Shirnak governorate. "Why would they want to go back?" asked Stacy Gilbert, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) adviser on refugees and displaced persons for the northern region. Despite moves by Ankara to normalise relations with its Kurdish minority, Mahmour's residents are unconvinced. "The democracy we have created in this camp would be unthinkable back home," the camp's foreign relations delegate, Mehmet Chakir, told IRIN in Mahmour. "There, Kurds are oppressed. Here every one of us is free. We even have annual elections for the camp's four sub-districts." In reality, the freedom he talks of is at best curtailed, at worst a total sham. "To prevent them getting lost", visitors here are shadowed at all times by a member of the camp committee. While Turkish Kurdish refugees in other camps scattered around Dahuk governorate appear to talk freely of their hopes for the future - some wanting to return to Turkey, others to stay put - here responses are stilted and depressingly uniform. Of course it may be that all Mahmour refugees believe in what they are saying. Outsiders who know the camp well suspect the litany has as much to do with the alleged control exerted over refugees by a camp committee of at most 40 people, a group with close links to the 5,000 Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) fighters camped out in mountains on the Iran-Iraq border. Though nobody knows how this control is wielded, there is evidence that the powers-that-be will stop at little to crush dissent. A month ago, locals say, the body of a murdered refugee was found in nearby Mahmour town. Allegedly, he had been a strong proponent of allowing individual families to choose whether or not to return. Directly responsible for maintaining the camp between 1998 and last autumn, when the United Nations suspended activities in Iraq, the UNHCR continues to see to the humanitarian needs of refugees via local intermediaries. Work has begun on a fifth school and on public bathhouses. There has also been a fumigation campaign to rid houses of scorpions that killed several refugees last year. An agreement has also been signed with the University of Sulaymaniyah that will allow 40 young refugees to follow courses there. But the bulk of current efforts are towards the improvement of health care within the camp. The camp clinic currently has a staff of 11, mainly Arabic-speaking, doctors and assistants shipped in from Mosul and assisted by refugees with basic first aid training. With the construction of a new maternity clinic and dentistry centre, that number should increase. All refugees are now inoculated against tuberculosis. Since 15 February, work has also been in progress on the creation of a database and referral system for the camp's 3,500 children. Though the plan to check the health and keep records on the clinical history of young refugees was unpopular with the camp committee, 100 percent of children are now registered. The first round of check-ups is expected to end in two weeks. But the refugees say they want more. They claim the two transformers connecting the camp's electricity supply to Mahmour town are insufficient and want one for each of the camp's four "districts". "A lot of people here have bought fridges and televisions," said Mehmet Chakir. "Electricity demand is going up." He also says that two wells are not enough, demands that outsiders say have more to do with the camp committee's desire for total independence from the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) officials who run Mahmour town than any real need.