TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/042291/0422000.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 8.6 KB | 194 lines

                                      
                                            WORLD, Page 36

REFUGEES

Death Every Day


Relief organizations are in a grim race to get aid to the Kurds
before the toll from hunger, cold and disease takes a terrible
leap -- and so far the helpers are running behind

By GEORGE J. CHURCH -- Reported by Ron Ben-Yishai/Uludere, William
Mader/London and J.F.O. McAllister/Washington


    In the morning, men dug three small holes in the ground
on the slopes of Dugen mountain, barely inside the Turkish
border with Iraq and near the town of Uludere. Crying softly,
a young woman approached through heavy rain, opened a blanket
held close to her chest and handed the body of an infant swathed
in a burial cloth to a man in a large turban. He laid the small
body in a hole already filling with water; he and others
shoveled in earth. The men crouched and, as one prayed aloud,
murmured after him in low voices. Their faces, and those of the
women of the mother's family who huddled, nearby showed only
numbed resignation.

    Little wonder. Death is becoming not just an everyday but
a many-times-a-day phenomenon among the Kurdish refugees camped
along the border. That morning on Dugen mountain, nearly 6,600
ft. above sea level, two more babies who had died the night
before were buried. The milk in their mothers' breasts had
dried up because the women were ill nourished and exhausted from
flight. So the infants were fed a little sugar dissolved in
water melted from dirty snow. That drink gave them fatal
diarrhea.

    Conditions practically guarantee more deaths. "There are
sometimes up to 40 people living under the same tent," reports
Dr. Gerard Salerio of the voluntary organization Medecins du
Monde (Doctors of the World), who returned to Paris from Uludere
late last week. ``These are not even tents; they are stretched
blankets. People are too ashamed to relieve themselves during
the day, so they do it at nighttime, between the tents. There
is no hygiene anywhere." One doctor serves 100,000 people. As
a result, says Salerio, "every day, 20 children are buried
between the tents. Older people are dying too; so are younger
adults. They are dying, dying even as I speak."

    Many more will die unless massive help from outside
arrives quickly. But attempts to coordinate an international
relief effort got off to a late start. At the end of last week,
however, U.S. military forces stepped in to begin a major
effort. Some 50 big helicopters will ferry food, blankets and
tents to Kurds on otherwise inaccessible mountaintops. U.S.
soldiers will enter Iraq to set up organized refugee camps to
replace the sprawls of squatters. The undertaking, dubbed
Operation Provide Comfort, aims at supplying at least one meal
a day to 700,000 Kurds for a month or so, until the U.N. and
private relief organizations can pull themselves together enough
to take over.

    Will even that be enough to keep the death rate from
taking a terrible leap? If not, it is hard to see what would do
so. At week's end Washington counted $245 million contributed
or pledged by 26 nations for relief since April 1, about $45
million from the U.S. But these sums are far from adequate.
Moreover, not much of the money has yet reached the refugees in
the form of food, water, tents, blankets, medicine and other
supplies.

    Worse, distribution of whatever goods have come close to
the Turkish frontier has been held up by some appalling snafus.
Late in the week 21 planeloads of relief supplies had been
delivered to the eastern Turkish town of Diyarbakir, but much
of the material failed to get past the airport. Other supplies
are rotting in the rain aboard trucks stuck on the dirt roads
of southeastern Turkey.

    Turkish authorities say they have been overwhelmed by the
sheer mass of refugees. The total number of northern Kurds and
southern Shi`ites fleeing toward Iran or Turkey is estimated at
almost 2 million. Many, like the 200,000 or so on the
mountaintops around Turkish Hakkari, can be reached only by dirt
roads often made impassable by mud. "We can send aid only on
mules," says a Turkish official.

    Another reason exists for the Kurds' sufferings: the Turks
adamantly refuse to let many of them cross the frontier. The
Turks fear that the refugees will join Kurdish Turks in forming
a political bloc demanding more autonomy than Ankara is willing
to grant.

    The Kurds on Dugen mountain are not permitted to descend
into the valley below because that would mean allowing them
deeper into Turkey. So about 20 Turkish doctors waiting with
medicine and ambulances in Cizre, 29 miles away, cannot reach
them; the vehicles cannot navigate the dirt track up the
mountain. Every once in a while, when the track dries out a bit,
Turkish soldiers send up a tractor-trailer piled with loaves of
bread -- the only food that reaches the refugees. On the
mountaintop, the trailer is swarmed by struggling, fighting
Kurds. The Turkish soldiers fire shots in the air and even swing
rifle butts to hold back the crowd, but in vain; within minutes
the trailer is stripped of its cargo. U.S., British and French
pilots drop some supplies into the mountains by parachute from
cargo planes, but nowhere near enough to alleviate most of the
suffering.

    Officials of both international relief organizations and
governments insist that the greatest imaginable humanitarian
assistance can only be a temporary palliative for the pain
suffered by refugees in hordes as vast as those of the Kurds and
Shi`ites. In the long run, officials say, there must be a
political solution that would make it possible for the refugees
either to return to their homes or to find some place where they
can settle permanently.

    Unfortunately, that is somewhat like saying the ideal
Arab-Israeli solution would be one pleasing to both Ariel Sharon
and Yasser Arafat: true enough, but terribly hard to envision.
The refugees insist that they will never feel safe in Iraq with
Saddam Hussein in power, but the U.S. and its allies are as
loath as ever to become enmeshed in the long civil war that may
be required to topple the dictator. There seems to be little
hope of persuading any of Iraq's neighbors to let in unlimited
numbers of Kurds: Syria and Iran, which have large indigenous
Kurdish populations, share Turkey's fears of internal political
disruption.

    British Prime Minister John Major elaborated an idea first
advanced by Turkish President Turgut Ozal for a stopgap
solution: U.N.-sanctioned "enclaves" (later changed to "safe
havens") inside Iraq where the refugees would be protected from
attack by Saddam's forces. The idea, as such, proved difficult
for some members of the U.N. Security Council. Such powers as
the Soviet Union, China and India feared setting a precedent of
intervention in what have always been considered internal
affairs that could someday be applied to their treatment of the
Baltic republics, Tibet or Kashmir. Washington saw little chance
of getting a resolution through the Security Council.

    The U.S., however, accomplished somewhat the same purpose
unilaterally. Backed by Britain and France, it warned Saddam not
to use either fixed-wing aircraft or helicopters north of the
36th parallel, with the implicit threat that if he did they
would be shot down, and not to employ armed forces of any kind
to interfere with relief work anywhere in Iraq. The less than
10% of Iraq that lies north of the parallel takes in all the
areas where the Kurdish refugees are now concentrated. So
Washington's action in effect establishes most of northern Iraq
as a safe haven in which Kurdish refugees would be protected
from attack and U.N. and other officials could distribute relief
unhindered. That would also foil two of Saddam's objectives: to
tighten his control by pushing rebellious populations clear out
of the country and to use refugees in effect as an offensive
weapon by forcing them across frontiers in numbers large enough
to disrupt the societies of neighboring countries.

    The danger is that a safe haven will become the
semipermanent home of Kurds who will turn into an embittered,
stateless and disruptive population. But no political solution
to prevent that can be quickly engineered, and the search for
one must not be allowed to distract anyone from the immediate
problem. That is, quite simply, to save the lives of the
thousands of Kurds who will die every day that foot-dragging,
bureaucratic bumbling and political maneuvering delay
desperately needed relief.