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Worldwide demonstrations
highlight the plight of Iraqis in Saudi Arabia’s Rafha
refugee camp
Ten
years after the end of the US attack on Iraq, more than
5,000 Iraqis remain stranded and largely forgotten in
appalling conditions in the Rafha refugee camp in north-eastern
Saudi Arabia. Last month, demonstrations took place
around the world to draw attention to their plight.
KHALIL OSMAN reports.
Dozens
of protesters from the Canadian Iraqi community, and
their friends and supporters, held a demonstration on
July 28 in front of the offices of the United Nations
High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) in Ottawa. They
were protesting against the miserable conditions of
Iraqi refugees marooned in the Rafha refugee-camp in
the inhospitable desert of northeastern Saudi Arabia.
The protesters delivered a letter to Ms Pat Marshal
of the UNHCR office, calling on the international organization
"to act immediately to resume the resettlement
program" for 5,200 Iraqi refugees who are still
in the Rafha camp. The letter also called on the UNHCR
"to approach interested countries with the objective
of resettling all refugees."
On June
23, scores of refugees started a hunger-strike in Rafha
that lasted for more than a month, to press for resettlement
abroad. Dozens of refugees were treated for dehydration,
exhaustion and fatigue. Refugees working at a medical
centre inside the camp, contacted by telephone, say
that more than 250 people were treated at the Rafha
centre. According to organizers of the Ottawa rally,
Ms Marshal appealed to the demonstrators to help persuade
the refugees to end their hunger strike. Similar demonstrations
were also held in Stockholm (Sweden), Copenhagen (Denmark)
and New York (US).
The refugees
are the last group of some 33,000 Iraqis who fled to
or were stranded in Saudi Arabia after the second Gulf
war. The Rafha camp was built on a military base some
12 kilometres from the Saudi-Iraqi border. It is estimated
that around 90,000 Iraqis were originally granted temporary
asylum in the then-US-occupied zone of southern Iraq
and Saudi Arabia after the war. The vast majority of
them were prisoners of war, military deserters and dissidents
who fled the country, some with their families, after
having taken part in the anti-Saddam uprising in southern
Iraq after the war. Most of the refugees did not seek
asylum or refuge in Saudi Arabia. The western Allies
airlifted them to Rafha from a transit-camp in Safwan,
in the occupied zone along the Iraqi-Kuwaiti border,
shortly before they evacuated the area. Some 66,000
of them returned to Iraq in a subsequent exchange of
PoWs. But 33,000 refugees refused to return and were
housed in two camps, Artawiyyah and Rafha. Conditions
in the Artawiyyah camp, which housed captured Iraqi
soldiers who refused to return to Iraq, were very poor.
It was eventually closed in 1992 and its residents were
transferred to Rafha.
The two
camps were established in accordance with a US-brokered
deal with the Saudi government. However, from the very
beginning the Saudi government had made it clear that
the camps were built on the condition that no refugees
will be offered local integration in the kingdom, and
that they would not leave the fenced-in 20-sq kilometre
area. The refugees can only leave their camp on a temporary
basis with special permits provided in urgent situations
such as for medical treatment in hospitals outside the
camp.
More than
25,000 refugees have since been resettled from Rafha
to other countries, mostly in North America, Australia
and Scandinavian countries. But some 5,200 remain there
in limbo, still waiting in the barren desert for a lasting
solution to their plight, amid dwindling hope and increasing
frustration. They are unable to return to Iraq for fear
of persecution. Resettlement from Rafha has come to
a virtual halt since 1997. Most of the refugees are
Shi’ah Muslims from the marshes of southern Iraq. More
than 100 of them are Afghans. They are mainly former
students who used to pursue their specialized training
in Islamic studies at the religious centres of Najaf
and Karbala, and their families. According to the UNCHR,
about 40 percent of the camp’s population in 2000 was
under the age of eighteen and one fourth was under the
age of ten, having experienced life only through the
depressing prism of Rafha.
The plight
of the Rafha refugees combines tragic elements of forced
displacement, imprisonment and callousness. UNHCR sources
say that the Saudi authorities render a high level of
material assistance to the refugees. Yet no amount of
material assistance can mask the inhumanely hermetic,
funereal emptiness of life in Rafha. The Saudis have
kept them confined to the camp, behind a double barbed-wire
fence, for more than ten years. For all this time, the
Iraqis have lived in temporary barracks-like mud-brick
canvas-roofed housing units with makeshift schools,
medical centre and other facilities. As such, the refugees
have for more than a decade lived as de facto prisoners
in the heavily guarded camp. The camp is run by the
Saudi army with advice from the UNHCR, which upgraded
its presence in the kingdom in 1992 from a liaison office
to a branch office in order to address the increasing
needs of Iraqi refugees. Saudi military vehicles regularly
patrol the camp, strictly enforcing a nightly curfew.
The Saudi military officer in charge of the camp at
the moment is a a man named ‘Abd al-Hamid al-Turi.
Many of
the men in the camp have not seen or heard from their
families in Iraq since they left the country. Single
men desiring to marry and raise their own families are
unable to do so because of the small number of eligible
women there. Women refugees face unwarranted and excessive
restrictions. The Saudi authorities prevent women from
moving freely within the camp unless they are wearing
a niqab and are accompanied by a male escort. Until
recently, families lived together in one section of
the camp, whereas single men and former PoWs lived in
another. Especially during the first few years, there
were numerous reports of systematic abuse of refugees
by camp-guards. In 1993 the refugees’ frustration and
anger over their mistreatment boiled over into clashes,
in which 13 people were killed and scores of others
wounded by gunfire from Saudi soldiers (Crescent International,
August 16-31, 1993).
The Rafha
refugees have none of the legal rights and protections
afforded to refugees under international law. Saudi
Arabia is not a signatory of the 1951 Convention concerning
refugees or the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status
of Refugees. For that reason they are "guests"
of the kingdom, and hence are subject to the changing
whims and caprices of the Saudi authorities. The camp’s
proximity to the Iraqi border, moreover, violates a
UNHCR policy that asylum-seekers "should be located
at reasonable distance from the frontier of their country
of origin" to guarantee their safety. The Saudis
have ignored numerous pleas by the UNHCR to relocate
the camp away from the highly militarized zone.
Saudi
Arabia also has no clear legal or legislative provisions
for the protection of refugees, or for granting political
or humanitarian asylum to them. The so-called Basic
Law of 1992 stipulates that "the State will grant
political asylum if the public interest mitigates"
in its favour. In practice, none of the Iraqis who took
refuge in Saudi Arabia, the vast majority of whom have
well-founded fears of persecution in Iraq, has been
granted political asylum. The treatment the Saudis mete
out to Iraqi refugees contrasts sharply with their open-arms
policy toward Kuwaiti refugees during the Gulf crisis.
During the seven-month-long Iraqi occupation of Kuwait,
tens of thousands of Kuwaitis sought refuge in Saudi
Arabia, where they were housed in public housing units
and given the right to move freely around the kingdom.
According
to the UNHCR’s "Saudi Arabia: Country Profile"
(September 1999), another 266 persons of concern to
the commission, mainly Sudanese, Somalis and Ethiopians,
were living in various parts of Saudi Arabia at the
time. None of them was reported to have been confined
to a refugee camp or had their freedom of movement otherwise
restricted.
The desolate
life of the camp, the poor prospects of resettlement
to a third country, and the uncertainty of their future
put the refugees in a strenuous and gruelling psychological
situation. Former inmates of the camp have told Crescent
International that the high levels of frustration and
desperation at Rafha have resulted in a large increase
in suicide attempts. The last recorded suicide took
place last Ramadan, when a refugee named Mohye Khalaf
decided that the only way out of the bleakness and hopelessness
of the camp was to die.
An estimated
3,200 refugees have "voluntarily" returned
to Iraq since December 1991. Fearing brutal retribution
by Saddam’s security apparatus, most of the refugees
refuse to return there, despite financial inducements
of up to 10,000 Saudi riyals (about $2,700) offered
by the Saudi government for voluntary return home. Some
of those who returned have reportedly suffered severe
punishment. Scores of returnees are said to have been
imprisoned and detained. The whereabouts of many others
remain shrouded in the thick cloak of secrecy imposed
by Saddam’s secret police. Many of them are believed
to have been executed.
The UNHCR
claims that the host countries decided in 1997 to close
their six-year resettlement programme for Rafha refugees.
Few resettlement delegations have returned to the camp
since the end of 1997. The UNHCR says that, although
delegations from the US and Sweden returned to Rafha
during 2000 and approved 272 and 66 refugees respectively
for resettlement, "these and other countries are
reluctant to consider resettling the remaining refugees
in Rafha, despite many meeting resettlement criteria."
But former
Rafha refugees living in Canada, interviewed by Crescent
International, are adamant that the UNHCR has been negligent
in approaching interested countries. They have provided
us with copies of correspondences with Immigration and
Citizenship Canada in support of their point. For instance,
in a letter dated November 14, 2000, Rick Herringer,
director of resettlement in Canadian Immigration’s refugees
branch, said: "We have received no formal request
from the UNHCR to accept more cases for resettlement
from the Rafha camp. Should we receive such a request
we will include it as a consideration for our future
planning exercise. The UNHCR is aware of Canada’s position."
The UNHCR
has promised the Ottawa protesters that it will send
a delegation to Rafha to investigate the situation of
the refugees and to provide answers to questions about
the weakness of its efforts to resettle the refugees
in other countries. Meanwhile, Rafha refugee-camp continues
to be a place where there are no dreams any more, a
monument to human suffering, endurance and wounded pride.
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