Refugees: Death Every Day

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

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.

With reporting by Ron Ben-Yishai/Uludere, William Mader/London and J.F.O. McAllister/Washington