Nothing official marks the site, but Kuwait has a plan for this bleak plain beside the Iraqi border: a sprawling camp for tens of thousands of Iraqi refugees.
From Turkey to Jordan to Kuwait, Iraq’s neighbors are preparing quietly for what the United Nations warns could be an exodus equal to that from war-torn Kosovo in 1999. The nations around Iraq are loath to detail their plans, for fear of inviting a flood of refugees or appearing to condone a possible U.S.-led invasion. Nevertheless, preparations are unfolding.
“We can absorb 100,000 refugees at the border, and we have envisioned frightening scenarios of that,” said Sami Al-Faraj, a Kuwaiti government adviser on refugee and security issues.
The UN warns that as many as 900,000 refugees could surge across Iraq’s borders–equal to the number of Albanian Kosovars who fled to neighboring countries in 1999–while an additional 500,000 Iraqis could be displaced within Iraq. Without adequate food, shelter and medicine, the refugees would face malnutrition and disease, according to a UN draft report.
According to warnings Sunday by Secretary of State Colin Powell, war could be less than two weeks away–after UN inspectors issue a report March 7. One key test will be whether Iraqi President Saddam Hussein accepts the inspectors’ demand that Iraq destroy its Al Samoud 2 missiles. Iraqi officials said Sunday that they were studying the issue and had made no decision.
But it’s not just the Al Samouds that worry Iraq’s neighbors.
“More than missiles, every country around Iraq is afraid of hundreds of thousands of refugees,” said Shafeeq Ghabra, a political scientist at Kuwait University.
Global relief agencies see the makings of a humanitarian crisis. Iraq’s 26 million people already are short of food and medicine, while most of the country relies on an electric-powered system of water and sanitation that is vulnerable to bombing. Aid experts also warn that chemical or biological weapons could contaminate refugee escape routes or prevent aid groups from reaching civilians.
Publicly, Kuwait and Jordan maintain they will not accept refugees. Indeed, Jordan, traditionally a haven for thousands of Iraqis each year, recently choked off its border to all but a trickle of Iraqi civilians.
But as in Kuwait, authorities in Turkey, Syria, Jordan and Iran also are privately planning border-area camps to prevent refugees from moving farther into their countries, according to relief agency officials involved in the planning.
Kuwait plans to build a camp within the 3-mile-wide stretch that serves as a UN-controlled buffer zone with Iraq, Al-Faraj said. While the government collects tents, sanitation equipment, blankets, stoves and food, the Kuwaiti Red Crescent Society and the International Committee of the Red Cross are preparing to oversee family reunification and other services.
Destinations unknown
“Part of the confusion is that we don’t know where people will head,” a Red Cross official in Kuwait said. “Are they going to cross the desert and come here, or go to Basra [in southern Iraq]? Or are they going to stay in place?”
During and after the 1991 gulf war, 1.2 million Iraqis fled through Jordan to other places. Hussein’s forces drove an additional 1.4 million, most of them Kurds, toward Iran and Turkey.
Mindful of those past refugee patterns, Jordan has begun rebuilding a water system on the remnants of camps that housed refugees a dozen years ago, according to aid workers involved in the effort. Relief groups expect as many as 70,000 people to seek aid in Jordan.
The Iranian government has said it would provide for 200,000 refugees, most likely in 12 camps along the border.
Turkey is preparing to aid 276,000 refugees–80,000 on its own territory and the remainder across the Iraqi border. A Turkish plan calls for the military to build 18 camps, including six to be located as far as 60 miles inside Iraq, another six on Iraqi border lands and the remaining six inside Turkey.
But housing refugees within Iraq’s borders causes deep concern among human-rights groups. International law requires that asylum seekers be given at least temporary permission to cross borders and that refugee camps be placed out of harm’s way, said Jonathan Sugden, Turkey researcher for Human Rights Watch.
“Turkey cannot justify keeping its borders closed to refugees on the ground that it has set up internal `safe areas,'” said Sugden, citing the volatile tensions among Turks, Kurds and Sunni Muslim Iraqis.
Turkey has particular reason to get ready. The country found itself ill-prepared in 1991 for a flood of 400,000 refugees from northern Iraq.
U.S. military officials have said that any military action would be accompanied by an extensive humanitarian campaign, including food, medicine and other services. The Bush administration recently contributed $25 million to UN humanitarian programs in the Middle East.
U.S. commanders note that the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan did not unleash the humanitarian crisis that some critics had predicted. But relief groups caution that Iraq poses distinctly different challenges.
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Two decades of war in Afghanistan had steeled the largely rural population against relying on the government. By comparison, Iraq is a more urbanized nation whose citizens are dependent on the state for food, water and electricity.
In addition, Afghanistan was home to scores of foreign-relief groups when U.S. bombs began falling in late 2001. Iraq’s political isolation has left it with few foreign aid resources.
“We had 550 people working in Afghanistan and we have 28 in Iraq,” said James Shepherd-Barron, emergency response and preparedness coordinator for CARE International.
Concerns over UN program
A major concern among relief groups is that war in Iraq could disrupt the UN-supervised oil-for-food program, the lifeline for 60 percent of Iraqi civilians. If that system, which relies on 43,000 Iraqi workers to distribute food rations, collapses, local stockpiles are ill-equipped to make up for it.
Already juggling humanitarian crises in West Africa and Afghanistan, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees has raised less than half of the $60 million it projects would be needed for the first month of a war in Iraq.
Signs of pressure are building at the Karameh border crossing, the single gateway linking Iraq and Jordan. In recent days, only three of every 100 or so Iraqis have gained entry to Jordan, according to those who visit the border regularly.
“I tell them before we leave Baghdad that the border is closed, but they want to try anyway,” said Naji Abdullah, an Iraqi driver who makes the trip to and from Amman several times a week in his large four-wheel-drive vehicle.
Lines reportedly are long at the passport office in Baghdad. Some are buying fake Sudanese or Tunisian passports on the black market in the hope of entering Jordan as a third-country national.
One of the few to gain legal entry this month is a 20-year-old Shiite from Negev in southern Iraq who could not bear the thought of going to war.
After Iraqi commanders visited his home seeking new recruits, he decided to flee. His family offered bribes totaling $150–equal to a few years’ salary in Iraq–and last week the young man found himself on a bus with 32 other hopefuls.
At the bustling border crossing, he was among only a handful on the bus to win entry.
He lives in Amman in a dank apartment occupied by an Iraqi rug dealer. If Iraqi intelligence agents come looking for him at home, his father plans to say he went to school in Baghdad. Still, the man fears for his family’s safety.
“We are expecting the worst,” he said. “But at least here, I can survive.”