Posted on 09/28/2008 10:36:50 AM PDT by forkinsocket
For Iraqi Kurdish mathematics teacher Mohammed Aziz, two wrongs can make a right. After decades of forced exile by the Baath party of Saddam Hussein, he is back with a vengeance.
Aziz was just four years old in 1975 when his family was evicted from Bawaplawi village, near the northern city of Khanaqin, and Arab settlers grabbed their home.
Now schoolteacher Aziz is back and has done to the Arabs what they did to him.
"Our homes were taken over by the Arabs without paying us any compensation," Aziz, 37, said at the modest single-storey brick house which he has occupied since the fall of Saddam's regime in 2003.
"We moved in and took any house that was empty. The Arabs who were here had fled."
Saddam's "Arabisation" campaign sought to change the demography of Khanaqin, which originally had a vast majority of Kurds and a smaller minority of Shiite Arabs, Turkmen and Jews.
With the fall of Saddam's regime, the Kurds are back and the Arabs are nowhere to be seen, at least in Khanaqin.
"Ninety percent of the people who were forced out of Khanaqin have returned," said the city's mayor, Mohammed Mala Hassan, 52. "I want the others to return too, but I have no money to provide them with the basic facilities."
Kurds such as Aziz did not depend on handouts from the authorities and instead took the land that was hastily abandoned by the Arabs. For Aziz, it is a case of correcting an injustice done more than three decades ago.
"What they did was wrong in taking our homes. We also just took the empty houses, but that is because our houses were taken in the same way in 1975," he told AFP during a tour of Khanaqin and his village.
(Excerpt) Read more at afp.google.com ...
So the article emphasized that—other troubles between the kurdish militias and the central government aside—there have been no Yugo/Albanian-style ethnic cleansings.
Your thoughts?
According to an international worker who just spoke at our church, Kurdish Iraq is the safest place for Americans in that country these days and he and his team always feel very welcome. He says whenever he is there, he is greeted with gratitude and appreciation for America’s liberation of Iraqi Kurdistan.
True. I was there in the fall of 2004. Everyone was friendly. The police kept careful tabs on “outsiders” to ensure that bad things did not happen. I did not even feel like I was in Iraq. The airport in Irbil looked like something from Northern Italy, rather than in the Middle East.
True. I was there in the fall of 2004. Everyone was friendly. The police kept careful tabs on “outsiders” to ensure that bad things did not happen. I did not even feel like I was in Iraq. The airport in Irbil looked like something from Northern Italy, rather than in the Middle East.
True. I was there in the fall of 2004. Everyone was friendly. The police kept careful tabs on “outsiders” to ensure that bad things did not happen. I did not even feel like I was in Iraq. The airport in Irbil looked like something from Northern Italy, rather than in the Middle East.
True. I was there in the fall of 2004. Everyone was friendly. The police kept careful tabs on “outsiders” to ensure that bad things did not happen. I did not even feel like I was in Iraq. The airport in Irbil looked like something from Northern Italy, rather than in the Middle East.
Title insurance must be very expensive in Iraq!
I visited Erbil and Sulamaniyah on business trips back in 2006 and they're delightful. I was shocked that we could walk in the streets of Erbil with no body armor on and just go to restaurants and shops. The people were very friendly and welcoming.
I don't know if this article is exaggerating, but Saddam's thugs did roust a lot of Kurds off of their farmlands back in the 80s and 90s. Dispute claims are being made in a lot of these cases and for the most part, they are being settled in a civilized manner.
Re: your tagline. Do you really think it will be a landslide? I pray it will be.
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