Robbed and deported – Yezidi refugees from Iraq complain of inhuman practice of Greek and Turkish authorities

The Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV) accused Greece and Turkey on Friday of treating Kurdish-speaking Yezidi refugees from Iraq in a particularly inhumane manner.

Instead of registering the refugees, who are exhausted after days without nourishment, in order to discover in a fair procedure their reasons for fleeing the country and then either taking the people in or sending them to other EU countries, most of them are deported rigorously to Turkey, said the GfbV Near-east expert Kamal Sido. If they are taken by the Turkish authorities their last belongings are taken away from the Yezidis, before they are transported to the Turkish-Iraqi border-crossing of Khabur ten km north of the town of Zakho and then set out in no-man’s land. In this way the regional government of Iraqi Kurdistan is forced to take up the refugees, who for the most part no longer have any documents, and then to care for them.

„For the third time already since 21^st December Turkish authorities have brought a group of Yezidi refugees to the border of Iraq“, reported GfbV colleagues from Arbil. Some 300 Yezidi have so far suffered this fate, among them many young men aged 18 to 30, but also women and children. So at the end of December four Yezidi families with together 20 children were deported to Iraqi Kurdistan.

The Turkish government said for its part in press reports that their coastguards discover the refugees inside the Turkish limits after the Greek coastguards have taken them there. This information was confirmed by Turkish fishermen in the Aegean Sea. One refugee reported that he and other Yezidi had been held for two weeks on an island by the Greek coastguards. There they had had hardly any water or food.

Reports reaching the GfbV state that the Yezidi refugees are mainly from the Sinjar area, the main place of settlement of the Yezidi in the north-west of Iraq. There were dreadful attacks on the 14^th August 2007, as a result of which 400 civilians were killed. Sinjar belongs to the regions of Iraq which are the subject of dispute between the regional government of Kursdistan and the central government in Baghdad. In Iraq there still live about 550,000 of the 800,000 Yezidi in the world.

The Yezidi have often been persecuted as members of an ancient religious community under the Osman rule as neither Christian nor Moslem. After many waves of deportation and massacres in Syria, Turkey and Iran only small groups of Yezidi still exist. Tens of thousands have sought refuge in central Europe, 50,000 in Germany alone.