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About The Battalion. (College Station, Tex.) 1893-current | View Entire Issue (June 25, 2003)
■:' ■ : - : > ‘l-r'' : : : v ; ■ V.:: j ' Wednesday, June 25, 2003 the BATTAll Bitter Homecoming For Iraqi Kurds By Sharon Waxman THE WASHINGTON POST KIRKUK, Iraq — Living in a soc cer stadium has its down side. The press box, which some now call home, is at the top of the stadium, so every trek to the kiosk that sells gum and cigarettes is a five-story hike down steep, broken stairs. A trip to the outhouse is another walk down those same stairs. But the worst part is the water. With only one hose available for all 700 people living in the stadium, there's always a wait. And it’s a chore to haul the jerrycans up the narrow stairs. Plus, the water’s not the best. The people here say a baby died recently of diarrhea. But Medea Nazim, 13, manages to stay cheery, since that's her nature. “I go to school,” she says in enthusiastic English, exhausting her vocabulary. And there are always plenty of kids around to play with. Medea is tiny for her age, and wears a denim shirt and green sweat pants. Dimples make charming creases in her brown skin when she smiles, which is often, and her brown eyes dance. Most of the people in Shorja Stadium aren’t as upbeat as Medea. About 150 families have sought shel ter in this bullet-pocked, looted build ing since the end of the war, all of them Kurds who were expelled from this northern city by Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. They returned to their homes to find them occupied by Arab families or gone completely — bulldozed by the former government. Some were chased from their homes in the south ern Arab communities where they’d resettled; others couldn’t pay the rent in the economic privation of postwar Iraq. Now all they do is wait. “We have gone to all the officials and no one is responding,” says Sabah Mohamed Ibrahim, 40, the unofficial spokesman for the families living along the field, up in the press box, in the concrete hallways where they’ve hung sheets and patchwork rice sacks as separa tors. “This place is for sports, not for living. Twenty people here need oper ations.” He kicks at a spigot near the playing field, where a rooster struts. Broken glass is everywhere. “A humanitarian organization brought us two tanks of water. They promised to turn it on. There's been nothing until now.” The families living in Shorja Stadium are just one example of a problem affecting thousands of fami lies in northern Iraq. All over the major cities of Kirkuk and Mosul, dis placed Arab and Kurdish families camp in abandoned buildings, waiting for someone to assign them some land, or to dislodge the people living in what were once their homes. a Vm not saying they don’t need help, but we’ve not totally ignored them either. Lt. John Evans U.S. Army In a bombed-out Mosul military base, dozens of Arab families expelled by Kurds wither in the heat. Everywhere a visitor goes in Kirkuk, angry Kurds wave documents in your face, the deeds to the homes they once legally owned. “We are the original owners. We are not guilty, we did not do any thing,” said Sabr Ahmed Said, 45, an engineer who is organizing 200 fami lies to demand the restitution of a mostly empty lot that once held their homes. Chickens peck at the ground where he stands. He says it was once the room where he was married. Said appears to be stating the obvi ous, but no one, it seems, is willing to address the matter. The Americans are reluctant to evict people and want to wait until a local government can con sider competing claims. The United Nations says that internally displaced persons don’t fall under its mandate. Relief organizations say they cannot do more without cash, and permission from the Americans. In the meantime, days turn to weeks turn to months of blazing sum mer heat. Conditions worsen in shel ters like the stadium. Medea finishes school this week. Then, like the adults, she’ll have noth ing to do. U.S. Army 1st Lt. John Evans, a cop from New York on reserve duty, looks dismayed when he learns of the reported death of another child at Shorja Stadium. It would be the third in two months. (A humanitarian organization investigated the death and found recent graves, but said none of them was child-size.) “We’ve been trying to get groups in there to improve conditions,” he says. “We have had health teams go in there. I”m not saying they don’t need help, but we’ve not totally ignored them either.” Evans is the man in charge at the Civilian Military Operations Center in Kirkuk, a small building beside the gutted former headquarters of Iraqi intelligence, where the U.S. occupa tion deals with humanitarian prob lems. Initially, the Army wanted to move the Kurdish families from the stadium, he says. But then they thought again: If they placed the fam ilies somewhere comfortable, that might attract dozens of new families. And then what? The authorities decided to leave the families where they were and not to improve conditions at the stadium too much for fear of attracting still more refugees. “If you build some thing, it becomes a permanent struc ture, and that becomes another prob lem,” Evans says. He acknowledges that there has been no progress on the stickier issue of land redistribution. The complexi ties of sorting out decades of ethnic repression are something the U.S. authorities here have decided is beyond their capacity. Whoever sorts it out has a monu mental task. Throughout his rule, Saddam regularly emptied villages of Kurds in an attempt to create a more Above. Despite the bleak suroundings, a Kurdish boy skips down a corridor at SIm Stadium, where 700 homeless people now reside. Below: Young and old makethercs of the bullet-pocked stadium. For children, the end of the school year means be even less to do. A Te; police V campus I month ' $135,00C Jonatl communi is awaitii County S Unive Arab population in the north, where a strong Kurdish sep aratist movement threatened his rule. Arab families have been living in some of these homes for a decade or more. If they are evicted, they, too, need somewhere to go. Evans waves at boxes filled with claims by families to recoup houses occupied by others: 1,300 in Kirkuk so far. “Our instructions are to take all claims, record them, keep a copy (of the deed) and give it to a deputy mayor who is charged with resettle ment,” he says. As of yet, there is no such deputy mayor. “Down the road it will be taken over by a civil organiza tion to mediate, or to the judicial sys tem.” The United Nations has decades of experience dealing with displaced persons. But “on property issues, the U.N. was not asked and is not man- PHOTOS BY MICHAEL ROBINSON-CHAVEZ • WASHINGTONf( dated to intervene,” says Allaouni, the local U.N. represei tive for humanitarian aid. “Wei' monitor the situation.” Allaouni agrees with t approach of limiting aid to the stain families. “Most of these peop own property,” he says. Encoutaw others like them to return wouldbetal “The situation does not appear sui# to have people return in a weakfJ economic situation. 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The U.S. government — which kept secret the fact that Herrick was flying a CIA-owned plane — told Holt’s mother, Margaret Louise, only that her hus band was presumed to have died in the crash. Years passed. No body was recovered, no details were offered. And for Gayle Holt, the tragedy had no finality. “In my mind there was always a ques tion: Is he alive? Is he not alive?” she recalled. Seven days after the crash, a headline in her hometown newspaper in San Antonio said he “may be alive.” Herrick was not alive, but that reality did not reach Holt until May 2000 when, out of the blue, her family got a telephone call from the U.S. Army Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii. A bone recovered from the crash site in Laos might be her father’s. “It was a neat, neat shock” to finally learn the truth, she said. On Wednesday, after nearly 40 years and two U.S. excavations of the crash site, Herrick’s remains will be buried at Arlington National Cemetery in a ceremo ny with full military honors. “This to me is a celebration,” Holt said in a telephone interview from her home in Modesto, Calif., before flying to Hawaii to take possession of the remains. “He’s home finally. He’s where he belongs.” Herrick was flying for Air America, an airline based in Taiwan that was secretly owned by the CIA. It was used to deliver weapons, food and supplies to Laotian reg ular forces as well as Hmong tribesmen who were enlisted for guerrilla operations in communist-held areas of Laos. The remains of Herrick and Joseph Cheney, the pilot-in-command on that fateful mission in 1963, were recovered over a period of years starting in 1989 and finally identified in the past year. Among the items found at the crash site was a radio microphone marked with Herrick’s initials. Herrick and Cheney are, respectively, the second and third Air America civilian fliers — of approximately 100 who per ished in Laos from 1957 to 1974 — to have their remains recovered, positively identi fied and returned to their families, accord ing to Pentagon and Air America records. The first was Lowell Z. Pirkle, a flight mechanic who was shot down over Laos Aug. 3, 1967; his remains were identified in 1998. Herrick had been flying missions over Laos for less than a year from a base at the capital, Vientiane, when his C-46 Commando plane was shot down on Sept. 5, 1963. The mission was to airdrop bags of rice and buffalo meat to Laotian soldiers. He was 44 years old. It is not clear Herrick knew he was working for the CIA, since he was not a staff employee; most of Air America’s hires were told the airline was property of the Pacific Corp., but they were not told that Pacific Corp. was a CIA front company. The CIA did not publicly acknowledge the wartime role of Air America and its predecessor, Civil Air Transport, until June 2001, when it issued citation awards to for mer employees. One year after the Vietnam War ended in 1975, Air America disbanded and its planes were sold. Herrick was born in Buffalo and grew up in Lockport, N.Y. He played semipro fessional ice hockey in Canada before he enlisted in the U.S. military in 1943. He flew supply missions in the China-Burma- India theater — in support of Chinese troops fighting on the side of the Allies against Japan — during World War II. The family’s scant records of HenicB military career indicate he flew in Korean War at the rank of Air Force capli and was awarded the Distinguished Flyin Cross. When that conflict ended in 1953lt switched to the Air Force Reserve retired as a major in April 1963. When Herrick joined Air America 1962 he was sent to its main base Taiwan. His wife and two children in Antonio were going to join him in Janiiai! 1963, but that plan was scrapped wlifl Herrick was transferred to Vientiane. Michael LaDue, a former assistantcliif of aerial delivery for Air America, reraeit hers Herrick in Laos and estimates flew together on about 10 missions to diti food, fuel and sometimes weapons, most to Hmong tribesmen. Herrick was a quiet professional aspired to move up from co-pilot to co® mand pilot, LaDue said. “He had the right amount of self-ass® ance,” LaDue said in a telephone interne* last week from his home in Lee’s S Mo. , It is not clear who shot down Herrict' unarmed, twin-engine plane, but L thinks it most likely was North Vietnam?' 1 ' soldiers. 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