IRAQ: Thousands of Palestinians, Iranian Kurds and Syrians who have been living in Iraq for decades have been evicted from their homes since the Baathist regime fell in April. The former government provided these refugees with asylum, education and cheap rents, writes Michael Jansen.
Yesterday, the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) reported that since May landlords have ordered 800 Palestinian families, about 4,000 people, from their homes in Baghdad. Another 200 families have been told to leave their apartments by the end of the month, when their children have completed their school examinations. Most of the Palestinians have been living in Iraq since the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948.
A UNHCR spokesman, Mr Kris Janowski, said that the families who have been evicted are being looked after in tents until they can be moved into empty government buildings, where they can be better accommodated during the hot summer months.
UNHCR staff also visited the al-Tash refugee camp, west of Baghdad, where they found that many of the 12,000 Iranian Kurds who left their homeland after the 1979 Islamic Revolution were being intimidated and terrorised by local people. About 900 refugees who fled al-Tash in April and May remain in a tented encampment close to the Iraqi-Jordanian border, afraid to go home to Iran and unable to enter Jordan or return to al-Tash.
UNHCR is also providing shelter for some 600 Syrian refugees who fled their country for political reasons in the 1960s and 1970s.