JORDAN: Iranian Kurds leave no man's land for Sweden

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

AMMAN, 9 Dec 2004 (IRIN) - A new group of 185 Iranian Kurdish refugees left the Jordanian capital, Amman, on Thursday for Sweden, after spending more than a year and a half in "no man's land" which straddles the Iraqi border with Jordan.

They are part of a group of 387 Iranian Kurdish refugees that Sweden accepted for resettlement. The remaining 202 were taken to the Scandinavian country in late November.

"We had a long trip to the airport, but we are very happy to leave. Life is very hard there, now we are going to live as human beings," Salim Karim, a 65-year-old father of five, told IRIN at Amman's airport.

Karim will live in the southern Swedish town of Adualla where he will meet his brother-in-law, who is going to help Karim's family start a new life in Europe after almost two years in the al-Karama camp, some 400 km east of Amman.

All the refugees accepted by Sweden have relatives living in the country and they will settle down in the same communities as them, facilitating their integration, the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said.

Families like Karim's left Iran in 1979 after the fall of the Shah, the former king of Iran, and during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war.

In Iraq, most of them used to live in the al-Tash camp, some 50 km from Fallujah city, but fled when the war started in March 2003 and got stuck at the border with Jordan.

"We have been refugees for 25 years with no opportunities, no access to education, nothing," Jahangard Jamshiri, 34, told IRIN. "In Sweden my children will go to school and some day they will become lawyers, doctors, or whatever they want," the father of four added.

Jamshiri's wife, Zainab, held their six-week-old baby, Marc, in her arms. "Giving him a Swedish name is our way of saying thanks. They took us out of the tents," he stressed. "We want our children to be Europeans," he added.

He said he was feeling very happy because he will meet his father and three of his brothers in Sweden, who were resettled there in 2000.

However, although the refugees were happy to leave, they expressed concerns over the fate of the 650 Iranian Kurds who are still stuck on the Jordanian-Iraqi border.

"I will be free in Sweden, but they are still in a prison. You can't live more than two days in there," Jamshiri asserted.

Jacqueline W. Parlevliet, a senior protection officer with UNHCR, told IRIN in Amman that they were doing their best to resettle the remaining refugees. "There are some 150 cases that might leave for Norway and Canada, and 23 already left for Ireland three weeks ago," she said.

Countries such as the United Kingdom were studying individual cases, while the response of Finland was still pending. Australia has already denied the resettlement of Iranian Kurds. "They might take other cases," Parlevliet added.

There are also Palestinian refugees living in the camp but their case was particularly difficult to resolve for political reasons and many of them had decided to go back to Iraq, UNHCR said.

"There were solutions for Sudanese, for Iranians, but never solutions for Palestinians, so they decided to go back to Iraq," Astrid van Genderen, a spokeswoman with UNHCR-Iraq in Amman, told IRIN, adding that although the UN refugee agency was not promoting the return, it could facilitate it.

"The situation inside [the camp] must be so difficult to force them to go inside Iraq," she added.

Zaman Seifuri, 27, told IRIN that there had been some unpleasant incidents in the camp recently and noted that the security in the area was worsening. "We left some of our relatives there," he said, fearing for their fate.

In addition, many refugees remembered their days passed in the al-Tash camp and remarked that friends and relatives were still there. "My sister is still in the al-Tash camp or she maybe fled somewhere else," Jamishiri said.

Some 1,400 Iranian Kurdish refugees, who were living in the al-Tash camp, located very close to Ramadi and roughly 110 km from the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, recently fled given the poor security in the area, according to UNHCR.

[ENDS]