Turkey braces for refugee flood

When Turkish officials look back more than a decade to the first Gulf War, they recall some 450,000 Iraqi Kurdish refugees who climbed over snow-capped mountains to cross into Turkey. Another 1.3 million went to Iran. In Turkey, just 20,000 tents were on hand, say officials from UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees), and the Turkish government found itself scrambling to shelter and feed far more people than it anticipated. Equally important, among those refugees were thousands of militants from the PKK (Kurdistan Workers' Party), who Turkey says sneaked across the border and jacked up the violence between Kurdish separatists and Turkish forces. A recent re-emergence of fighting in the mostly Kurdish southeast raises fresh concerns here that Turkey has not seen the end of Kurdish separatist warfare.

"If there will be a stream of refugees again, we will stop them before they come to Turkey," says A. Cemil Serhadli, the governor of Diyarbakir, the main city in southeastern Turkey. If the Kurds can't be contained and housed within Iraq itself, "then a second round of camps will be constructed in border towns of Turkey." As a last resort, he says, Diyarbakir will serve as a transit point for refugees.

UN officials from Geneva, meanwhile, have arrived in Turkey and are searching for locations for Iraqi refugees. Turkish media have reported that government and humanitarian officials here have plans to erect camps at 13 sites in Iraq and five in Turkey, citing a document that was formulated and signed by Turkey's former prime minister, Bulent Ecevit. Turkey will prepare for the possibility of accommodating up to 276,000 refugees, the document said.

Although Turkish officials say they cannot estimate how much caring for refugees would cost, the potential need to deal with a refugee crisis has figured into ongoing discussions with US officials over the Pentagon's request to use Turkish facilities in a war.

Were Turkey to prevent refugees on the run from entering its borders, however, it could come under international criticism. "Our position is that the border should remain open for those seeking asylum," says Metin Corabatir, the UNHCR representative in Ankara. "The right to seek asylum is a fundamental human right, outlined in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights," and reiterated in the 1951 convention on the status of refugees.

"If there is a refugee crisis, without the permission of any government it is the right of UNHCR to have access to an endangered populations," Mr. Corabatir says. "In order to do that, we are now positioning food and non-food items." Red Crescent officials in southeastern Turkey say that they are also stocking up on tents and food, promising that - should another refugee crisis occur - they will be better prepared this time.

But some say that there will no reason for the Kurds to flee. In an invasion of the sort that US officials envision Hussein's armed forces would be neutralized so quickly that he would not be able to strike northern Iraq.

"There will be no mass exodus like we witnessed in 1991," says Safeen Dizayee, the Ankara representative of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), one of the two main parties now in control of northern Iraq. "Today, there is a good Kurdish administration in the region. There are 80,000 Kurdish troops who can put up a good line of defense," he adds.

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