On 29th anniversary of displacement, Feyli Kurds reject Baathists

BAGHDAD / IraqiNews.com: Feyli Kurdish demonstrators on Friday called for punishing the officials responsible for their mass displacement outside Iraq during and after 1980, rejecting the return of the Baathists. The protesters had staged a demonstration on Friday near al-Khillani mosque in central Baghdad on the 29th anniversary marking their displacement outside Iraq and the former authorities’ measures to strip them of their Iraqi nationalities. Iraq’s Supreme Criminal Court had held a session on January 26, 2009 to try 16 officials of the former Iraqi regime on charges of involvement in the killing and forced relocation of Feyli Kurds to Iran. The defendants include two brothers of the former Iraqi president, Saddam Hussein – Watban and Sabaawi al-Hassan. Feyli Kurds, who make one of the ethnic groups of the Iraqi people, are inhabiting the border areas between Iraq and Iran, mostly concentrated in the areas of Jalawlaa, Khanaqin, Mandili, Badra, Jassan, al-Kut, al-Numaniya and al-Aziziya. There are no official statistics regarding the number of Feyli Kurds in Iraq, particularly after the mass displacement and citizenship deprivation. Some Feyli writers and politicians attribute this group’s problem to the early stages of founding the Iraqi state, at the end of the conflict between the Persian and Ottoman empires or after the demarcation of borders between the two countries and the following establishment of Iraq after affiliation to the Ottoman empire became the basis for belongingness criteria. The worst displacement, though, has taken place in March and April 1980 when the then-Iraqi government, represented in the so-called Revolutionary Command Council, has issued decrees 150 and 180, by virtue of which all Feyli Kurds had been banished from Iraq. Later on came decree 666 which provided for “stripping each and every Iraqi citizen of foreign descent of Iraqi nationality if allegiance to the nation, the people and the revolution’s higher national and social objectives were not proved”. The authorities had then forced all Feyli Kurdish families to emigrate to Iran and took them by force from their original residential areas in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities and threw them at the Iraqi-Iranian borders on the pretext that they belong to Iran with strict instructions to the Iraqi forces to “open fire at whoever tries to return to the Iraqi territories. AmR (S) 6