VIENNA, 9 April 2003 — The UN refugee agency and other humanitarian groups are ready to respond in the event of a massive exodus of refugees from Iraq, the agency’s head said yesterday. “We are ready to respond,” Ruud Lubbers, head of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, told a meeting of the permanent council of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
He said his agency and other partners were equipped to handle 600,000 refugees from the war-torn country but so far only a few had trickled out. Lubbers said that was in stark contrast to 1991 when some two million Iraqis fled their country during the Gulf War when a US-led coalition ousted Iraqi occupation troops from Kuwait.
“It is true that there are not yet many refugees, but experience has taught us that they may still come,” Lubbers said. He added that a large number of Iraqis had fled major towns and cities and sought refuge in the countryside since the US-led offensive to topple the Iraqi regime began on March 20.
Early yesterday, hundreds of families could be seen fleeing Baghdad as the capital came under intensive US bombing and US forces battled Iraqi fighters for control of the city.
Lubbers said the UNHCR had set up 10 camps along the Iraq-Iran border in the event of an exodus from the south of the country and from the capital.
Refugee camps set up in the same area during the Gulf War took in some one million Iraqis, mainly Kurds and Shiites, and 200,000 remain in those camps. Lubbers said that Iraqis make up the largest number of asylum seekers in the West with 400,000 of them in 90 countries.
Meanwhile, Jordan has received its first Iraqi refugees after nearly three weeks of war — a mother and son, a UN official said yesterday. Aid workers had feared several thousand Iraqi refugees would flee the war to neighboring Jordan and had set up a camp in the Jordanian desert with immediate capacity for about 10,000 people. But until now no Iraqi refugees have turned up.
There has also been no sign of any major refugee exodus to other countries bordering Iraq. A handful of Iraqi women with non-Iraqi husbands have reached Jordan since the start of the war on March 20, but have been handled with other expatriates fleeing the war at a separate camp.
