Migrant crisis: Kurdish disillusion is revealed to the world

Daily life in the village of Sarkapkan, in the district of Ranya, from where many Iraqi Kurds left the country to migrate to Europe via Belarus.

© AFP - SAFIN HAMED

Text by: Oriane Verdier Follow

6 mins

For several weeks, thousands of people have been stranded at the Polish border in extremely difficult conditions.

The European Union accuses Belarus of having used migrants to put pressure on Brussels.

Many of these families come from Iraqi Kurdistan.

To understand the reasons for this migratory flow, which suddenly jumps out in the eyes of the world, RFI asked three questions to Mera Jasm Bakr, researcher at the Iraq-Syria office of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation.

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RFI: The autonomous region of Iraqi Kurdistan has often been presented as an example of stability in the region.

Why are there so many departures lately

Mera Jasm Bakr:

This wave of Iraqi Kurdish migration to Europe started in 2014-2015. The determination and the reasons people had back then still stand today. If today we see a significant wave of Kurdish migration to Europe, it is because they saw an opportunity via Belarus to carry out their project. For families in particular, it is much easier to make the decision to emigrate because all you have to do is take the plane. They leave from Souleymanieh or Erbil to go to Damascus, Beirut or Dubai, and then they take a connection for Minsk and thus arrive very close to Germany.

This avoids going to sea with the risk of drowning.

So this Belarusian road has been a kind of easy way out offered to people who have been looking to leave for a long time.  

The main motivation is economic.

Each year, 10,000 young people in the region leave university and cannot find work.

They end up serving as a waiter at best for $ 6 a day.

They do not see an economic future for this region.

On top of that, people here don't feel like they are living with dignity.

They say there is no freedom of speech.

If you criticize the government, you get arrested and they can throw you in jail for no reason.

So another motivation is deep disillusionment.

Many people tell me that the two political parties in the region have been in power for 30 years and that ultimately, no matter how much you devote to the Kurdish cause and how much you might bring to the country, no one here can have political ambition.

Many people say that we already know who will be Prime Minister in ten years.

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Many Kurds gathered on the Polish border come from the same small Kurdish towns along the Iranian border such as Said Sadiq, Ranya, Qaladze.

How to explain this?  

The majority of those stranded at the Polish border come from rural areas where there is no economic infrastructure. When Saddam Hussein's regime was in conflict with the Iraqi Kurds, the areas it attacked, targeted and devastated are these rural areas. After the fall of the regime, there was a lot of unemployment in these areas. Instead of rehabilitating these regions economically and rebuilding their infrastructure, the two ruling parties in Iraqi Kurdistan, the PDK and the PUK, simply hired en masse in the civil service, particularly in the security sector as as

policeman or intelligence member. Today the government has 1.2 million employees out of a total population of 6 million.

This operation continued until January 2014. At that time, the Iraqi government in Baghdad cut the budget sent to the autonomous region.

ISIS broke in and oil prices fell.

Suddenly you have a new generation that the government cannot hire, but for whom it has not built a productive economy either, especially in rural areas.

So there is no job opportunity.

At the same time, today, the ruling parties cannot be expected to carry out the necessary economic reforms.

They simply cannot understand from their palaces what a resident of Said Sadiq experiences on a daily basis.

On the other hand, they are very worried: they lost a lot of votes in favor of abstention.

And the more worried a leader is, the harder he becomes.

What is currently happening in Belarus is still creating an important debate. But the authorities do not understand the underlying reasons for this situation. I don't know if it's voluntary or involuntary. In particular, I saw a press release from the Security Council of Iraqi Kurdistan which holds the smugglers and the PKK [Kurdish Workers' Party, rival of the PDK] responsible. The PKK is hiding in the mountains near Qaladze and Ranya. These mountains are targeted by the Turkish bombardments fighting the PKK, which prevents farmers from cultivating their land. But frankly, not everyone is a farmer. The PKK may play a small role in all of this, but they are far from the main reason.

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After the repression under Saddam Hussein in the 1980s, and the civil war in the 1990s, there had nevertheless been a kind of revival of the Kurdish dream ...

From my point of view, people had hope between 2009 and 2014. The Kurdistan region was at its peak. A lot of money came from Baghdad, a billion dollars every month. At the same time, there was a very strong opposition movement called “Goran”, “change”. So many people from the diaspora returned to Kurdistan and many even came back to invest in Kurdistan. There was a kind of great political hope. People hoped to be able to make a difference with this movement. But “Goran” began to decline in 2014, the year they entered government. The following year, they were excluded.

Today, one of the reasons people are leaving is that they have not only lost faith in the parties in power, but also in the opposition parties.

There is a big void on the opposition side here.

Even well-trained people who could be a resource for the country do not see a future.

So no one sees how Iraqi Kurdistan could be saved.  

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• Iraq

• Kurds

• International Migration

• Belarus

• Poland

• European Union