Kurdish militias reclaim land, leaving Arabs homeless

The liberation had hardly begun when the eviction notices arrived.

Sometimes they came in written form, Arab residents here say. Sometimes they came in the form of carloads of Kurdish gunmen, warning Arabs who have lived here for three decades that they had three days to get out.

"They came and told us we have to leave so that there will be no killing," says Khalaf Nasaf I-Shumari, the aging sheikh of a small village called Omar Ibn Khattab, about a half-hour's drive south of the city of Kirkuk.

"They gave us a paper, signed by the local authorities, which said we have to leave in three days," says Atiye Awad I-Shummari, a resident of the same village.

"They held up their guns in my direction and told me to leave," says Alwan Humayed I-Shummari, who tried two days ago to go back to the village they fled over the weekend. They set up tents outside the larger nearby Arab village of Saad looking for safety in numbers.

It is no coincidence that all three men have the same family name. They come from the same Arab Bedouin tribe, which once wandered with their flock near the borders of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. From his earliest years in power, Saddam Hussein plucked them and thousands of other Arabs out of southern Iraq and moved them to the country's predominantly Kurdish north - an area bursting with oil.

Mr. Hussein gave the Arab migrants rich farmland that belonged to Kurdish tribes. Most of the Arab settlers were also given money to build a house. Others moved into houses that Kurds were thrown out of in Hussein's brutal campaigns against them.

Now, with Kurdish forces running Kirkuk and its environs, Hussein's "Arabization" policy is coming back to haunt its beneficiaries - shepherds and farmers who had little say in the matter. Senior Kurdish officials, in interviews, say that the Baath Party's project to turn this into a more Arab area was wrong and must be righted.

But while leaders in the two main Kurdish parties say that must be done gradually, in a legal and humane way, groups of Kurdish militiamen - and possibly lower-level officials - appear to be taking the matter into their own hands.

A Human Rights Watch team visiting the region this week said that they saw several copies of eviction notices signed by a local official for the PUK (Patriotic Union of Kurdistan), the party that now has de facto control over the Kirkuk region. The researchers say they received consistent reports from Arabs in this region that they are being threatened with force and told to leave their homes.

"The party line is that people should be returning to wherever they came from, and the way they've been evicted is this three- day notice," says Hania Mufti, the London director of the Middle East and North Africa division of Human Rights Watch. She says that US occupation forces have an obligation to stop forced population movements - a violation of Article 3 of the Geneva Convention on war crimes.

"Whatever the Kurdish forces do reflects on the US forces here, and someone has to be in charge."

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