Housing programme in north faces difficult choices

With only a small proportion of the 800,000 internally displaced people (IDPs) resettled since the Iraqi Kurdish region broke its ties with Baghdad in 1991, officials in the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) are in no doubt what their main priority should be. But efforts to maintain the momentum of resettlement programmes have come adrift on the still unresolved issue of building standards. "UNHCR is currently discussing the issue," Brandon Pustejovsky of US NGO Mission East, which has a project to help rebuild 20 villages in the Sheikhan district southeast of Dahuk, told IRIN. "Until it is resolved, we will be concentrating on improving communications, water and electricity." The debate swirls around the definition of "adequate housing", which 80 percent of IDPs interviewed by a UN-backed survey team in 1999 said was the absolute essential if they were to be persuaded to return to their villages of origin. In fact, the problem goes back as far as 1991, when international NGOs began reconstruction work in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq. With the newly autonomous Kurdish administration under total economic blockade from Baghdad, the situation was desperate and money almost non-existent. "Our priority in those days was providing shelter", Marinka Baumann, project manager for the Swedish NGO Qandil, told IRIN in Arbil. "We helped villagers rebuild houses in the traditional "spindar" technique: one-storey, with wooden beams holding up a mud roof." A typical Qandil-sponsored house, at the upper end of the quality range in those days, costs on average US $800. Sanitation units were shared between three or four families. Like other NGOs involved in early rebuilding projects, Qandil cut back on reconstruction work after 1996, with the arrival of money via the United Nations' Oil-for-Food programme. In large part, that was because the vast bulk of reconstruction projects now fell to UN Habitat. But it was also because Habitat's standards - and with them the price of housing units - were much higher. Head of the Dahuk branch of the KRG's reconstruction department, Ahmad Bamarni's desk is almost invisible under blueprints for villages rebuilt according to standards agreed between him and Habitat. The buildings are concrete, with living space between 70 and 80 square metres, and a cost of anywhere between $6,000 and $10,000, depending on how remote they are. Between 1996 and 2003, Bamarni said, $65 million of Oil-for-Food money was enough to build 5,600 houses and 900 km of access roads in his area of responsibility alone. With an estimated 180,000 IDPs still living in public buildings and collective villages in Dahuk governorate alone, he hoped to build 30,000 more houses in the next five years. "It is impossible to underestimate the work done by international NGOs immediately after 1991," he told IRIN. "They pulled us from the water when we were drowning. But the issue of resettling IDPs is different from providing shelter for the homeless. These people are semi-urbanised, used to far better services. You cannot send them back to the sort of mud-roofed house their fathers lived in," he added. Aid workers agree with this. Who is to argue with local authorities, they say, when they are the ones owning and managing newly constructed IDP houses, let alone with the people who are to live in them. But, with some projects under the Oil-for-Food programme discontinued last autumn, there was a widespread feeling that the standard bar has been set too high. "Daddy money has left town," Mission East's Brandon Pustejovsky said. "But the full implications of that have not yet sunk in," he added. "We're caught between the expectations of the IDPs and the exigencies of our donors," complained Mahmood Hassan, external relations officer for the NGO Counterpart in Arbil. "Most of the IDPs used to live in a one-room house, but they've seen the new houses in the village next door and they demand the same specifications. Donors then cancel one room. This pushing and shoving hampers reconstruction," he maintained. The consensus here is that there are two possible solutions to the impasse. The first, obviously, is that local authorities and international organisations agree on a reduced price for new housing. That will only be fully successful, argued Counterpart's Shahla Waliy, if people can be persuaded that Iraq's huge oil resources are not a magic wand which, when waved, creates an ultra-modern society out of nothing. The second is to concentrate on rationalising the most expensive, and marginally less controversial aspects of village rebuilding - schools and, above all, clinics. "The small village clinics built in the 1990s are often barely used today", Carole Pye, a health expert working with Help Age International in Arbil, told IRIN. "Rather than visiting the medical assistant there, villagers prefer to go straight to the doctor at the district hospital, clogging that up," she added. "If you build one big clinic for 10 villages, service will be better and it will be cheaper," she explained. Like the issue of building standards, the restructuring of the health infrastructure requires policy decisions. And until they are taken, the attempts of people like Bamarni to reconcile growing IDP demands to return with diminishing funds will only get more difficult.