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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.
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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. If you havtK
large assistance, then you aggravattk
problem.”
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Pilot’s relatives say goodbyes to fallen hero
WASHINGTON (AP) — Gayle Herrick
Holt was 15 when frightening news
reached the family home in San Antonio.
Her father, Charles G. Herrick, had been
shot down in a cargo plane in faraway
Laos.
It was September 1963 and Laos, while
officially neutral, had become a focus of
U.S. covert operations against communist
rebel forces allied with the North
Vietnamese army. 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. The plane was loaded withri®
and meat for delivery to soldiers of there!
ular Lao army at Ban Houei Sane, a villa®
in southern Laos a few miles from
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