Articles |
Whose House is this Anyway? IDP and Refugee Return in Post-Saddam Iraq
Inter-University Consortium for Arab and Middle East Studies (ICAMES), Montreal daveromano{at}yahoo.ca
Although many people displaced by Saddam's regime over the years looked forward to returning as soon as the 2003 war ended, a number of problems emerged which continued to bedevil the return process as late as one year after the war. These problems included an unclear political future for the country, competing political and sectarian forces that often view IDPs and refugees as strategic tools or weapons, a hesitant and initially undecided Coalition policy on the return issue, unclear mandates for the various actors that could assist with returns, lack of funding, and most importantly of all, an extremely poor security situation which has impeded or even blocked all progress on the return issue. Nonetheless, because Iraq's Ba'athist dictatorship was the overwhelming cause of displacement in the country to begin with, the future does hold some hope for Iraqi displaced persons. This paper examines the causes of return problems in Iraq and how various authorities in post-Ba'athist Iraq are addressing the return issue. Particularly around the contested city of Kirkuk, problems relating to the return issue risk igniting ethnic conflict and possibly even civil war in Iraq as a whole. The article examines the return issue for the period from March 2003 to June 2004, focusing especially on northern Iraq and Kirkuk. The research presented here is based on fieldwork conducted in Iraq by the author between September 2003 and May 2004. The author went to Iraq independently, with the assistance of a Canadian Department of National Defence post-doctoral research grant. Interviews were conducted with US and Coalition Provisional Authority officials, Iraqi Interim Government officials, Kurdistan Regional Government officials, NGO workers, and IDPs themselves during visits to camps around Kirkuk and Baghdad.
MS received June 2004; revised MS received June 2005
1. The percentages cited here are derived from my own estimates based on various sources including the CIA World Fact Book, 2003, and a plethora of recent newspaper articles on Iraq. The figures are approximate and represent a range due to the unreliability of census data on Iraq (the last semi-credible census was taken in 1957). An additional problem with most census figures for Iraq concerns the multiple and cross-cutting identities available to Iraqis—for instance, roughly half of Iraqi Turkmen are Shiite (the other half are Sunni), and some Iraqi Kurds are also Shiite (the ‘Fayli’ Kurds, in particular), while many other Iraqis are of mixed parentage. During the past 35 years, the Iraqi government also exerted a great deal of pressure on Kurds, Turkmen, Shiites and others to register themselves as Sunni Arab. Therefore, census figures for Iraq vary wildly depending on the source.