Their despair is due to dashed hopes, not to fears of mortal dangers
Iraq's Kurds flee their safe homeland
Some Kurds consider the freezing cold in the open on a border region in Europe more merciful than returning to Kurdistan.
AFP
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Perhaps the news of the presence of thousands of Iraqi Kurds among the refugees stranded on the border between Belarus and Poland raised the astonishment of many Americans and Europeans.
The Kurdistan Region of Iraq was supposed to be the only region in Iraq that, with significant Western assistance, had escaped the widespread tragedy that began with the US-led invasion in 2003.
And the American writer Bobby Ghosh considered, in a report published by Bloomberg News Agency, that the efforts of many Iraqi Kurds now to flee their region shows the extent to which hopes for a favorable economic and political situation in the post-Saddam Hussein era have evaporated.
Ghosh said things seemed to be going in a different direction. In the years following the US invasion, as central and southern Iraq plunged into bloody sectarian conflicts, the northern provinces under the autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government experienced an economic boom.
The region has attracted investors from all over the world, given its oil wealth and predictable political environment, largely free of violence.
The number of hotels, malls, and apartment towers has multiplied very quickly.
The contrast with the rest of the country became clearer in 2014, when ISIS swept through Iraq.
With Iraqi military units collapsing in the heart of the country under the weight of ISIS attacks, Kurdish forces, supported by the US air force, were able to repel the terrorists on the outskirts of Erbil, the capital of the Kurdistan region.
The Kurds have remained stable, secure, and aloof from the atrocities that have turned millions of their neighbors, in Iraq and in neighboring war-torn Syria and sanctions-burdened Iran, into refugees.
In fact, "Iraqi Kurdistan" opened its doors and received refugees fleeing violence from neighboring regions.
Things haven't changed
On the surface, things have not changed much. The Kurdistan region of Iraq still enjoys relative peace, given the admittedly low standards in its neighbourhood.
Nor are the economic prospects for Erbil as bleak as those of Baghdad, let alone Damascus or Tehran.
As refugees on their way to Europe share stories of the atrocities they fled, Iraqi Kurds are unlikely to elicit much sympathy from their peers, for example, Afghans and Syrians.
Ghosh says the reason the Iraqi Kurds fled is their frustration with their leaders' failure to deliver on the promises of 2003, which is different from why Syrians or Afghans have fled.
The economy, which is overly dependent on oil exports, has not recovered from the drop in crude oil prices in 2014. It is too early to tell whether the ongoing recovery in prices will last long enough to change expectations.
Unemployment has forced many Kurds to leave the cities and work in agriculture.
The share of democracy in the change is almost negligible.
In the absence of any political reform, the clans' domination of political life continued.
Ghosh said the government in Erbil has become more authoritarian, imprisoning dissidents and muzzling the media.
The anti-government protests that erupted at the end of last year did not succeed in breaking the thorn in the rampant corruption.
Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko sensed that conditions in Iraqi Kurdistan made his people easy prey for his plan to attract immigrants to his country, and then unleash them to Western Europe.
Subsequently, he eased visa regulations and organized more flights to Minsk, from where Belarusian security forces took the new arrivals to the border.
The two governments, neither in Erbil nor in Baghdad, did not try to stop the mass migration.
After it was too late, the Iraqi government made an offer to return the stranded to the homeland.
However, reports from the Belarus-Poland border indicate that many of them are choosing to fight the winter over returning home.
Ghosh concluded his report by saying that although their despair is due to dashed hopes, and not to fears of mortal dangers like other refugees, it is also a reason that cannot be underestimated.
• The fact that many Iraqi Kurds are now seeking to flee their region shows to what extent hopes for a favorable economic and political situation in the post-Saddam Hussein era have evaporated.
• The Kurds remained stable, secure, and isolated from the atrocities that turned millions of their neighbors in Iraq and neighboring war-torn Syria and sanctions-burdened neighbor Iran into refugees.
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