Worldwide demonstrations highlight the plight of Iraqis in Saudi Arabia’s Rafha refugee camp

Abul Fadl

Jumada' al-Ula' 26, 1422 2001-08-16

Special Reports

by Abul Fadl (Special Reports, Crescent International Vol. 30, No. 12, Jumada' al-Ula', 1422)

Ten years after the end of the US attack on Iraq, more than 5,000 Iraqis remain stranded and largely forgotten in appalling conditions in the Rafha refugee camp in north-eastern Saudi Arabia. Last month, demonstrations took place around the world to draw attention to their plight. KHALIL OSMAN reports.

Dozens of protesters from the Canadian Iraqi community, and their friends and supporters, held a demonstration on July 28 in front of the offices of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) in Ottawa. They were protesting against the miserable conditions of Iraqi refugees marooned in the Rafha refugee-camp in the inhospitable desert of northeastern Saudi Arabia. The protesters delivered a letter to Ms Pat Marshal of the UNHCR office, calling on the international organization “to act immediately to resume the resettlement program” for 5,200 Iraqi refugees who are still in the Rafha camp. The letter also called on the UNHCR “to approach interested countries with the objective of resettling all refugees.”

On June 23, scores of refugees started a hunger-strike in Rafha that lasted for more than a month, to press for resettlement abroad. Dozens of refugees were treated for dehydration, exhaustion and fatigue. Refugees working at a medical centre inside the camp, contacted by telephone, say that more than 250 people were treated at the Rafha centre. According to organizers of the Ottawa rally, Ms Marshal appealed to the demonstrators to help persuade the refugees to end their hunger strike. Similar demonstrations were also held in Stockholm (Sweden), Copenhagen (Denmark) and New York (US).

The refugees are the last group of some 33,000 Iraqis who fled to or were stranded in Saudi Arabia after the second Gulf war. The Rafha camp was built on a military base some 12 kilometres from the Saudi-Iraqi border. It is estimated that around 90,000 Iraqis were originally granted temporary asylum in the then-US-occupied zone of southern Iraq and Saudi Arabia after the war. The vast majority of them were prisoners of war, military deserters and dissidents who fled the country, some with their families, after having taken part in the anti-Saddam uprising in southern Iraq after the war. Most of the refugees did not seek asylum or refuge in Saudi Arabia. The western Allies airlifted them to Rafha from a transit-camp in Safwan, in the occupied zone along the Iraqi-Kuwaiti border, shortly before they evacuated the area. Some 66,000 of them returned to Iraq in a subsequent exchange of PoWs. But 33,000 refugees refused to return and were housed in two camps, Artawiyyah and Rafha. Conditions in the Artawiyyah camp, which housed captured Iraqi soldiers who refused to return to Iraq, were very poor. It was eventually closed in 1992 and its residents were transferred to Rafha.

The two camps were established in accordance with a US-brokered deal with the Saudi government. However, from the very beginning the Saudi government had made it clear that the camps were built on the condition that no refugees will be offered local integration in the kingdom, and that they would not leave the fenced-in 20-sq kilometre area. The refugees can only leave their camp on a temporary basis with special permits provided in urgent situations such as for medical treatment in hospitals outside the camp.

More than 25,000 refugees have since been resettled from Rafha to other countries, mostly in North America, Australia and Scandinavian countries. But some 5,200 remain there in limbo, still waiting in the barren desert for a lasting solution to their plight, amid dwindling hope and increasing frustration. They are unable to return to Iraq for fear of persecution. Resettlement from Rafha has come to a virtual halt since 1997. Most of the refugees are Shi’ah Muslims from the marshes of southern Iraq. More than 100 of them are Afghans. They are mainly former students who used to pursue their specialized training in Islamic studies at the religious centres of Najaf and Karbala, and their families. According to the UNCHR, about 40 percent of the camp’s population in 2000 was under the age of eighteen and one fourth was under the age of ten, having experienced life only through the depressing prism of Rafha.

The plight of the Rafha refugees combines tragic elements of forced displacement, imprisonment and callousness. UNHCR sources say that the Saudi authorities render a high level of material assistance to the refugees. Yet no amount of material assistance can mask the inhumanely hermetic, funereal emptiness of life in Rafha. The Saudis have kept them confined to the camp, behind a double barbed-wire fence, for more than ten years. For all this time, the Iraqis have lived in temporary barracks-like mud-brick canvas-roofed housing units with makeshift schools, medical centre and other facilities. As such, the refugees have for more than a decade lived as de facto prisoners in the heavily guarded camp. The camp is run by the Saudi army with advice from the UNHCR, which upgraded its presence in the kingdom in 1992 from a liaison office to a branch office in order to address the increasing needs of Iraqi refugees. Saudi military vehicles regularly patrol the camp, strictly enforcing a nightly curfew. The Saudi military officer in charge of the camp at the moment is a a man named ‘Abd al-Hamid al-Turi.

Many of the men in the camp have not seen or heard from their families in Iraq since they left the country. Single men desiring to marry and raise their own families are unable to do so because of the small number of eligible women there. Women refugees face unwarranted and excessive restrictions. The Saudi authorities prevent women from moving freely within the camp unless they are wearing a niqab and are accompanied by a male escort. Until recently, families lived together in one section of the camp, whereas single men and former PoWs lived in another. Especially during the first few years, there were numerous reports of systematic abuse of refugees by camp-guards. In 1993 the refugees’ frustration and anger over their mistreatment boiled over into clashes, in which 13 people were killed and scores of others wounded by gunfire from Saudi soldiers (Crescent International, August 16-31, 1993).

The Rafha refugees have none of the legal rights and protections afforded to refugees under international law. Saudi Arabia is not a signatory of the 1951 Convention concerning refugees or the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees. For that reason they are “guests” of the kingdom, and hence are subject to the changing whims and caprices of the Saudi authorities. The camp’s proximity to the Iraqi border, moreover, violates a UNHCR policy that asylum-seekers “should be located at reasonable distance from the frontier of their country of origin” to guarantee their safety. The Saudis have ignored numerous pleas by the UNHCR to relocate the camp away from the highly militarized zone.

Saudi Arabia also has no clear legal or legislative provisions for the protection of refugees, or for granting political or humanitarian asylum to them. The so-called Basic Law of 1992 stipulates that “the State will grant political asylum if the public interest mitigates” in its favour. In practice, none of the Iraqis who took refuge in Saudi Arabia, the vast majority of whom have well-founded fears of persecution in Iraq, has been granted political asylum. The treatment the Saudis mete out to Iraqi refugees contrasts sharply with their open-arms policy toward Kuwaiti refugees during the Gulf crisis. During the seven-month-long Iraqi occupation of Kuwait, tens of thousands of Kuwaitis sought refuge in Saudi Arabia, where they were housed in public housing units and given the right to move freely around the kingdom.

According to the UNHCR’s “Saudi Arabia: Country Profile” (September 1999), another 266 persons of concern to the commission, mainly Sudanese, Somalis and Ethiopians, were living in various parts of Saudi Arabia at the time. None of them was reported to have been confined to a refugee camp or had their freedom of movement otherwise restricted.

The desolate life of the camp, the poor prospects of resettlement to a third country, and the uncertainty of their future put the refugees in a strenuous and gruelling psychological situation. Former inmates of the camp have told Crescent International that the high levels of frustration and desperation at Rafha have resulted in a large increase in suicide attempts. The last recorded suicide took place last Ramadan, when a refugee named Mohye Khalaf decided that the only way out of the bleakness and hopelessness of the camp was to die.

An estimated 3,200 refugees have “voluntarily” returned to Iraq since December 1991. Fearing brutal retribution by Saddam’s security apparatus, most of the refugees refuse to return there, despite financial inducements of up to 10,000 Saudi riyals (about $2,700) offered by the Saudi government for voluntary return home. Some of those who returned have reportedly suffered severe punishment. Scores of returnees are said to have been imprisoned and detained. The whereabouts of many others remain shrouded in the thick cloak of secrecy imposed by Saddam’s secret police. Many of them are believed to have been executed.

The UNHCR claims that the host countries decided in 1997 to close their six-year resettlement programme for Rafha refugees. Few resettlement delegations have returned to the camp since the end of 1997. The UNHCR says that, although delegations from the US and Sweden returned to Rafha during 2000 and approved 272 and 66 refugees respectively for resettlement, “these and other countries are reluctant to consider resettling the remaining refugees in Rafha, despite many meeting resettlement criteria.”

But former Rafha refugees living in Canada, interviewed by Crescent International, are adamant that the UNHCR has been negligent in approaching interested countries. They have provided us with copies of correspondences with Immigration and Citizenship Canada in support of their point. For instance, in a letter dated November 14, 2000, Rick Herringer, director of resettlement in Canadian Immigration’s refugees branch, said: “We have received no formal request from the UNHCR to accept more cases for resettlement from the Rafha camp. Should we receive such a request we will include it as a consideration for our future planning exercise. The UNHCR is aware of Canada’s position.”

The UNHCR has promised the Ottawa protesters that it will send a delegation to Rafha to investigate the situation of the refugees and to provide answers to questions about the weakness of its efforts to resettle the refugees in other countries. Meanwhile, Rafha refugee-camp continues to be a place where there are no dreams any more, a monument to human suffering, endurance and wounded pride.