Kurds make progress in rebuilding houses

Following the destruction of his village in 1987 by the former regime of Saddam Hussein, Simqo Ali Umer earned what money he could working as a day labourer on building sites in the northern Iraqi governorate of Arbil. Today, finally, he's building a house for himself. "You can't imagine how good it feels to be back on your own land, building your own place," he told IRIN in Asaba Lak, a village 40 kms south of Arbil on the Kushtapa plain. He stepped aside to make space as his mother hauled up a bucket of water to throw at the cinder block wall. "You have to keep the cement damp for three days for it to set properly," he explained. "By that time, we should have finished everything except for the roof." Eighteen families in Asaba Lak are hard at work rebuilding. Yet, though Umer agrees he probably could work faster than his neighbours, he insists there is no competition to see who can finish construction first. "The only people we really want to beat are our friends in the villages around us," he joked. Everywhere you look on this patch of plain, that last year marked no-man's land between the Kurdish-controlled north and the rest of Iraq, you see the same thing. Returning farmers and shepherds have planted tents where their villages used to stand. Some carry bricks and lay them on. Others mix cement. The trigger to all this intense activity is a project by the US-based NGO Counterpart to provide building materials for 400 families in 26 villages. "We've learnt from long experience that people are much more likely to look after houses they build themselves than ones they're just given a key too," Zuhair Namiq, a Counterpart project manager supervising the building, told IRIN. "But we've also obliged villagers to construct a model agreed on with our donors. If they want to enlarge them later, of course they can. Our concern is to stop them selling the materials we provide." Buildings fall into two categories, based on standards devised by UN-Habitat: five rooms for families with up to seven members, six for those with more. Including $250 given to families to pay for specialist workmen, the total cost of the units is, respectively, $3,800 and $4,100. Yet it is not just at the building stage that Counterpart - a master of civil society development programmes - has tried to maximise recipient participation. "Our first step was to call the headmen of the 26 villages to a three-day meeting organised with the mayor of Kushtapa," explained Counterpart programme development officer Mahmood Hassan. "They know their villages best, and they know what specific projects would be most likely to encourage more families to return." In Asaba Lak, which has a well dug by the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in the late 1990s, villagers clamour for more building materials. Twenty miles east on the main Arbil to Kirkuk highway, the situation in Sherawa is worse. "Iraqi troops filled our well in when they levelled the houses in 1987, and we have to bring water from Pirdee, 10 minutes down the road," Sherawa farmer Osman Hamid Amin, told IRIN. "There is little point in building more houses until we have a water system in the village." He points to his right, where two Counterpart engineers are surveying heights and distances for a two-pronged pipeline. "The workdays in Kushtapa were very useful," said the headman of Asaba Lak, Hasan Rahman Amin. "Before, we were dependent on outsiders to draw attention to our needs. Now I feel capable of submitting my own requests to international organisations and local government." As in other recently re-inhabited Kurdish villages, the communities of Asaba Lak and Sherawa assail the visiting engineers with demands for new clinics and schools. But they seem not just resigned to, but in agreement with the need to prioritise projects. "Once we are sure the resettlement of the villages is a success, we will move on to the construction of schools and clinics," explained Zuhair Namiq. "To improve services, we plan to build one clinic for every four or five villages." So far, there is ample evidence the resettlement programme is working. Counterpart staff say there were only two tents in Sherawa when they did their first assessment. Now there are 60. "When villagers saw work beginning in their old villages, they realised something was actually happening," explained Mahmood Hassan. "That was reason enough to leave the flats they'd been renting in Arbil for 10 years and come back to the land," he said. "With luck, we should shortly be signing a contract with UNHCR for further reconstruction in the district," he added.