Palestinian refugees find temporary accommodation

Palestinian refugee Farha Selim and her family are back in a rented apartment with running water and sporadic electricity after living in a tent on a soccer field for more than a year. Selim, 55, her daughter, her son-in-law and their son Mohammed will all be living in the small three-room flat for at least another year with funds from the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Selim’s daughter, Feryal Mohammed, 27, told IRIN as she shelled peas. Even though the apartment is small and stifling in the city’s summer heat, the living room couch crammed into the entrance hall and thin mattresses on the floor in the bedrooms, it’s much better than the tent, Mohammed said. “We’re scared that after a year we’ll be thrown out on the street again, but for now, we’re OK,” Selim said, starting to cry as she thought of the alternatives. “If the government doesn’t help us, we’ll be homeless again.” Under former president Saddam Hussein, Palestinian refugees lived in houses with subsidised rents. When the former regime fell in April 2003, the subsidies stopped and many landlords raised rents dramatically, throwing many families out on the street. Most of them ended up at Haifa Camp, a former sports club with a soccer field that quickly turned to dirt as hundreds of families moved into tents there. In the immediate confusion following the invasion, aid agencies built rudimentary bathroom facilities at the camp, gave out health kits and made sure a local clinic was working. A plan was scrapped to move the families into former police barracks that still remain empty, although no one at the camp is sure why. Just a ten minute drive away from Haifa camp, Selim’s family is one of 29 who were moved to the building in west Baghdad, Ali Kilkal, the ministry of displacement and migration official in charge of disbursing US $560,000 in UNHCR funds for rent for the families, told IRIN. Kilkal has moved more than 390 families into buildings from the camp and hopes to move the final three families soon. Rents were a year in advance for the families, at $100-$150 per month for each apartment, he said. Because the ministry must now pay market prices, they’ve had to negotiate hard for the places they have found for families, Kilkal said. The ministry has changed some laws from the previous regime to make it easier to rent houses, but it cannot force property owners to go back to the rents of the previous regime - some of which were less than $20 per month, he said. “Now we can’t deal with the property owners the way Saddam dealt with them,” Kilkal said. “But now they want to make their money back". Living in an apartment for the last three weeks has been like heaven for Mustafa Khalid Mustafa, 36, his wife, daughter and son, he told IRIN. In the camp, his children were listless and often sick. Now, they’re healthy and playing with anything they see, Mustafa, said as he looked down at his daughter Senaria, examining a sweet in a brightly-coloured wrapper. “Our children are in good health, that’s all we can ask for,” Mustafa said. But there are another 45 families who still live in the camp and have no hope of leaving any time soon. Ironically, they were more well-to-do under the former regime, so they paid their rents themselves and never registered with the government, Husay Ofad, the self-named “mayor“ of the camp, told IRIN. In addition, at least three marriages happened at the camp in the last year and those new families can’t register either, Ofad said. “People are still here because the money the ministry has is not enough for all of us,” Ofad said. “We’re trying to negotiate with them. What can we do?” Another community leader worried that people remaining at the camp would be forgotten. “We ask UNHCR to renew leases with the owners. Otherwise, the ministry of migration and displacement will shirk its responsibility,” Anwar al-Sheikh told IRIN, adding that he didn’t trust new ministry officials to do the right thing. “We need to find a solution for these people,” Kilkal said. “We’re trying to find a way to close the Haifa camp.” In another ironic turn of fate, now that the Palestinian refugees have new homes for the most part, other displaced people are complaining, Kilkal said. For example, Iraqis who fled to Iran under the former regime and are now returning to find their homes destroyed or being lived in by other people, have come to the ministry to complain, Kilkal said. The ministry estimates more than 23,000 people in Iraq are displaced. Many of those were moved under the former regime’s “Arabisation” programme, which shifted southerners to northern provinces and vice-versa. In the future, Selim’s family wants to buy a house, saving a few dollars here and there, even though they said food prices had risen since the war ended. Housing prices also have gone up drastically in the last year, Kilkal said a house he bought for $30,000 is now worth $170,000 and more. “My husband and I want to buy a house, but it costs so much money,” Mohammed said. “Every time we think we have saved enough, the price goes up.”