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Kurdish refugees flee toward Iran
Iraq announces amnesty for Kurds
September 10, 1996
Web posted at: 10:45 a.m. EDT (1445 GMT)
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Thousands of Iraqi Kurds have flooded the town of Penjwin on the Iraqi-Iranian border, relief officials said Tuesday, and thousands more were on their way following the fall of Sulaymaniyah to a Kurdish faction allied with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
"A total of around 70- or 75,000 people were heading for the border or already at the border," said Rupert Colville, a spokesman in Geneva for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.
Colville said that "a very large number of people" left Sulaymaniyah ahead of the arrival of Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) fighters on Monday, but not all were expected to head toward Iran.
President Saddam Hussein on Tuesday issued a general amnesty for Iraqi Kurds in northeastern Iraq, CNN's Peter Arnett reported from Baghdad.
The amnesty will allow the free movement of Kurds in the autonomous region, a government statement said. The statement said that Iraq is ready to lift an economic embargo against the region and begin relations with rulers of the autonomous area.
It said the amnesty would apply to all Kurds except those who had killed government employees or stolen government property. It was not immediately known how the announcement would affect the exodus of Kurds toward Iran.
In describing the scope of the refugee situation, Colville said, "Some people are talking of 80 percent of the population (of Sulaymaniyah), which would be several hundred thousand people. But most of them appeared to have gone to neighboring villages and into the surrounding countryside and not to the border."
Red Cross officials still termed the refugee situation a "crisis" and said the agency was setting up medical and humanitarian facilities to assist in relief operations.
Iranian officials, who claimed that 200,000 refugees had massed along its borders, said that refugees would be allowed to cross only if their lives were in danger.
"The Iranians told us that if people really needed to cross they could cross," said Colville. "They asked us to help out and we said we would."
Iranian Interior Ministry spokesman Ahmad Hosseini told reporters in Tehran that his country hoped to avoid a repeat of the crisis that occurred in 1991 when between 500,000 and 2 million Kurds fled to Iran following a failed Kurdish uprising against Saddam.
Colville added that U.N. teams were on their way to the border with the hope of convincing refugees to remain in Iraq. Many of the refugees were sympathizers of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), an Iranian-backed rival of the KDP. But even some PUK supporters were reluctant to go to Iran.
Media Kareem, who fled Sulaymaniyah with a sister and brother, likened KDP leader Massoud Barzani to the Iraqi president, but said that Iran appeared no better.
"We don't like the system there," she said. "They are worse than the Iraqis."
The KDP, backed by Iraqi troops, ousted the PUK from Irbil in northern Iraq on August 31. Following U.S. military strikes on Iraqi military installations in southern Iraq early last week, the Iraqi military backed off from active participation in the fighting between the two factions.
KDP forces took control of northern Iraq -- where the U.S. and its allies had established a "safe haven" for Kurds -- from the PUK after a week of fighting. Sulaymaniyah, the PUK's last stronghold in the region, fell quietly on Monday night.
Jalal Talabani, leader of the PUK, warned that Saddam's support of the KDP would vanish now that the KDP had taken charge of northern Iraq.
"In aligning with Baghdad, the KDP has mounted a tiger which will destroy us all," a PUK statement said. "Once Saddam controls Kurdistan, he will no longer need his Kurdish ally and will consume the KDP and what remains of the Kurdish people."
The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.
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