For the scores of relief-agency representatives who gathered daily throughout the Gulf War planning for postwar aid efforts, the way the Kurdish refugee crisis has developed is peculiarly bitter.
“We had camps prepared in southern Iran and in Jordan that would have handled comfortably a million people,” says World Vision’s Tom Getman, who was cochairman of the cooperative effort of government and private agencies. “The Kurds in their panic went to the [northern Iraq] mountains.”
“In our lifetime, we have not had a hemorrhage of human population anything like this,” Getman says. U.S. government authorities have told relief workers to be prepared to stay for months before the suffering eases.
Other situations around the world have produced larger numbers of refugees and casualties, Getman says. For instance, the estimated 1.5 million Iraqi refugees still does not match the number of Afghans who migrated to Pakistan and Iran in the 1980s. The daily death toll from starvation and civil war in African nations such as Sudan, Liberia, and Mozambique outnumbers what has happened to the Kurds. But none matches the abrupt unpredictability of the Iraqi situation, Getman says.
On a scale of one to ten, “this is off the charts,” he says. “It literally happened overnight. Nobody had any suspicions that Saddam Hussein would vent on the Kurdish people like he did.”
Getman’s group, the Interaction Gulf Coordinating Committee, has been meeting weekly in Washington, D.C., since January. Among those working together to channel tons of food, blankets, tents, and medical supplies are World Vision, World Relief, Samaritan’s Purse, Lutheran World Relief, Christian Children’s Fund, CARE, and Save the Children. Others sending relief include Church World Service, Mercy Corps International, and Food for the Hungry.
Christians Suffer
For weeks the anguish of Kurdish refugees has been front-page news. Yet among the Iraqi refugees is another, smaller ethnic group, one that has suffered Hussein’s repression—but with much less attention from the press. An estimated 500,000 Assyrian Christians, the descendants of a religious community at least 1,500 years old, have also fled their homes. According to the Middle East Council of Churches, just under 100,000 Assyrians are estimated to be active in their Christian faith. Like the Kurds, the Aramaic-speaking group longs for autonomous rule of its territory. And they have suffered death and illness brought on by dehydration, hunger, and cold. There are reports of mass graves of Assyrian babies. Forty Assyrian men reportedly returned to their villages in late April only to be buried alive by remnants of Iraq’s army.
Since 1988, over 200 Assyrian villages have been destroyed by Hussein, says Albert Yelda, spokesman for the London-based Assyrian Cultural and Advice Center. The Society for Threatened People, based in Germany, recently reported that over the past two decades, Hussein’s regime killed 200,000 Kurds and 20,000 Assyrians. The numbers will jump much higher when the refugee death toll is added.
