Press Release

December 21, 1996

Telephone: (202) 483-6444

UNHCR Must Support the Refugees at Atrush Camp

(The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has decided to close down the Atrush Camp in southern Kurdistan, northern Iraq. The American Kurdish Information Network in a letter to Ms. Sadako Ogata, the High Commissioner for Refugees, urges her to desist from such a course of action. The text of the letter follows.)

We write to express our indignation and dismay over your office's decision to close down the Atrush Camp in northern Iraq. As you know, the residents of this camp are Kurds of Turkey. They first moved into the camp in March of 1994. Since then, others have joined them; today, they number some 15 thousand frail people.

On May 16, 1994, a group of Kurdish parliamentarians from Turkey visited this camp to prepare a report as to why these Kurds had decided to go below the "border" as opposed to leaving for large Turkish cities as their predecessors had done because of the Turkish war that has devastated the rural Kurdistan. Interviews conducted with one villager after the other revealed that they all had been harassed, sometimes attacked and in several instances subjected to torture and aerial bombardment for alleged ties to the members of the Kurdish armed opposition, the PKK. A 70 year old refugee was quoted as saying, "Our village was shelled for days. My house was destroyed."

On October 1, 1996, Amnesty International undertook a world-wide campaign to highlight torture, killings and the acts of disappearance in Turkey. The European Committee for the Prevention of Torture in its report describes the practice of torture in Turkey as "widespread." The UN Committee on Torture uses the term "systematic."

The Turkish government was unhappy to have its own Kurds flee from persecution lest they would be revealed in the press the to the world at large. For years, they called for the camp's closure so that these refugees, mostly children and elderly people, would not tarnish their "protected" image. Now it appears that the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has decided to do the Turkish government a favor. The Atrush camp is slated for closure.

We wish to register our indignation and urge you to reconsider your decision. Sending these people back to Turkey will only provide new names to the list of Kurdish "activists" hunted in broad daylight by members of the shadowy death squads linked with the Turkish security forces. In a report released today and noted by Reuter, the respected Turkish Human Rights Association spokesman Avni Kalkan notes that, "Only comparing figures of November 1995 and November 1996 one can see rights violations have not fallen, but increased."

Turkey, clearly, can not provide security and safety to these Kurdish refugees. We urge your office to continue to supervise the Atrush Camp or assist these refugees to find asylum in a third country. We would be most appreciative of a timely response to this humanitarian crisis as the inhospitable Kurdish winter is setting in.