What Is It like to Be Displaced?
CPT and people from Zewka village in front of Kak Hamad Ameen’s house in Qaladze.
Zewka is one example among hundreds of villages that have become casualties of the political tension and greed of their neighboring countries Turkey and Iran. For the past thirty years, Turkey and Iran’s air and land assaults have led to the death and injury of hundreds of innocent civilians and displacement of thousands of villagers who live along the borders of the Iraqi Kurdistan region. On the one hand, war against terrorism has become an excuse to massacre people from the villages located at the border of Iraqi Kurdistan region, and on the other hand, neighboring countries have violated Iraqi Kurdistan region’s border and threatened people’s lives in the name of protecting borders and security. By most accounts, the Turkish and Iranian attacks have occurred before the eyes of the international human rights institutions, the international community and the United Nations.
CPT, for the second time, visited some of the villagers of Zewke after being displaced. In November 21, 2019, Kak Hamad Ameen, Zewka’s village leader, welcomed us in his house in Qaladze where his family and 14 other families are currently residing since they have left their village.
After drinking some tea with Kak Hamad Ameen’s family, we asked him about their situation and life conditions. He smiled and said, “What is it like to be displaced?!” As a refugee from another part of Kurdistan, in my heart I say... bitter.
Kak Hamad Ameen took another sip from his tea and said, “We had hoped the government and organizations like yours would come to our aid while we were in the tents, but the cold arrived before you, and therefore each one of us was forced to move to somewhere else. As you see my family and some other families are currently based in Qaladze and the rest of the villagers are distributed among other villages.”
In addition to his words, he talked about the difficulties of life in the city, and he said, “Despite being a refugee everything costs us twice as much. In the village, each of us stayed in our home, we did not pay any rent and we used wood to heat our houses. Also, our children wore their own simple clothes to school, and they did not need a dress code. Currently, the children are separated from their school friends and every student continues to study in another school.”
After the Turkish airplanes bombed Zewka, villagers became displaced and lived in tents for more than one month.
Mam Abdulla, the eldest person of his village, turned to us and said, “We should ignore all these problems, a homeland is beloved, thus we neither want our villages to remain abandoned nor we want to give up our villages.”
Pur Ayesh, mother of Kak Hamad Ameen, stayed silent throughout our conversation. While we told her that our recent report, "Bombing or Flooding," was named after her words, she gave us a sweet smile which got me more curious to hear the story of their displacement and the bombardments from her perspective as a woman.
In the end, Kaka Hamad Ameen said, “The story of Zewka and hundreds of other villages in Qandil deserve to be heard in which they all suffer the same consequences. Since the uprising, we have been forced to leave our village four times, and among all the neighboring countries only Syria has not bombarded us.” With a bitter smile, Kak Hamad Ameen said, “However Iran, Turkey and Iraq during Ba'ath regime have not deprived us from that.”
It has only been half an hour since we have left Kak Hamad Ameen’s house, traveling through an area which has been bombed in the past to hear more stories from the victims of this unjust violence. Violence that once shows itself through bombardments, occasionally through shellings and sometimes through the military operations of neighboring countries. While I was gazing at the last burst of Qandil’s sun, I was thinking about all the heard and unheard stories which are still in the hearts of the people who are living on the borders.