Family level support for Kirkuk IDPs

Two Kirkuk-based local NGOs, in northern Iraq, are nearing the end of a project to provide emergency health care and income generation support to some of the poorest internally displaced people (IDP) families to return to the city since last spring. Funded by Norwegian People's Aid (NPA) in the northern Iraqi governorate of Sulaymaniyah, the Kurdistan Relief Association (KRA) and the Kurdistan Reconstruction and Development Society (KURDS) began work on the project this March with a survey of 5,700 returnee families - around 40 percent of the total number believed by Kirkuk authorities to have returned. With their budget limited to US $36,000, they then selected the 300 households they considered to be the most in need. "What we did with the money is allocate it to each family depending on what they needed," KRA's Kirkuk manager Seyran Omar Ahmad told IRIN. "Some required immediate medical attention. Others had no means of income." Several IDPs were sent to Baghdad for specialist medical care they could not get in Kirkuk. The NGOs also distributed wheelchairs to the elderly and handicapped. NPA's Kirkuk project is a carbon copy of a smaller one it completed earlier this year in the mainly Kurdish town of Khanaqin in the northern governorate of Diyala. In Khanaqin, the vast majority of returnee families were farmers and income generation was limited to providing livestock for breeding. In Kirkuk, the situation proved more complicated, with some families originally from the city and others merely waiting there for reconstruction work to begin on the surrounding villages they used to live in. "Our original plan to help families rent and provision small shops proved impracticable," explained KURDS project manager Khalid Oubed Aziz, "not just because the IDPs move of their own accord, but because the local government is now trying to concentrate them in specific areas of the city." Instead of renting shops, the NGOs provided families with metal stalls, raw materials of the markets they hope will soon sit at the centre of Kirkuk's larger IDP camps. But IDP movement was not the only problem the project workers faced. There were also difficulties with the local authorities. Dismayed by the lack of coordination between NGOs working in Kirkuk and by the tendency of humanitarian organisations and central government to ignore it, Kirkuk's city council has recently set up a commission to coordinate all IDP-related matters. In the case of KRA and KURDS, the price of that coordination was that the job of entering survey data was given to an employee in the governorate building. "They cited security reasons, but I think it was just a question of power," said NPA's Kirkuk project manager Awat Yassin Abdullah. With civil servants' working days ending at 2 pm, it meant data was only entered on 1,300 of the 5,700 families interviewed. Families left out could not be included among those receiving aid. Participants in the programme also argued that the job of distinguishing really needy IDP families from the less needy was made more difficult by the intensely political aspect of Kirkuk's IDP problem. "Saddam Hussein had good reasons for treating the Kirkuk Kurds badly and the Kurdish parties have good reasons for treating them well," said Abdullah. She estimated that "about 80 percent" of returnee families have UN-built houses in Kurdish-controlled areas, houses, she added, whose sale the Kurdish parties had encouraged as a means of facilitating return. "Just because somebody is sitting in a tent," she said, "does not mean they are penniless." KURDS' Khalid Oubed Aziz said they were keeping a close eye on the situation. "It's a problem we addressed right at the start by asking both Kurdish parties to provide us with the names of all families owning property elsewhere." He added that those people were excluded from their register. Like his colleagues at KRA and KURDS, Aziz was optimistic the programme had brought succour only to those most in need. His only complaint was that the budget had been too limited. "Three hundred families out of 14,000 is a tiny number," he said. "Everywhere we went, we were met with incomprehension - why do they deserve help when we don't?"