RIYADH, 12 April 2003 — Saudi Arabia, which spent more than SR5 billion on Iraqi refugees after the 1991 Gulf War, is still home to some 5,200 Iraqi refugees at its Rafha camp.
The Kingdom has been providing food, shelter, clothes and medicines to these refugees, who have the option either to return to Iraq or choose resettlement in a third country.
“The Rafha camp is a good example of the Kingdom’s treatment of Iraqi refugees,” said Saner Haithan Haddadeen, director of the Rafha office of the UN High Commission for Human Rights (UNHCR).
He said Ruud Lubbers, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, on a recent visit to the Rafha camp applauded the Saudi government’s efforts to look after the Iraqi refugees.
Riyadh, however, has made it clear that it will not accept any Iraqi refugees this time, but will extend necessary aid to Iraqis on Iraqi territory.
A total of 33,000 Iraqi refugees were admitted by the Kingdom following the 1991 Gulf War. A large number of them have been resettled since then in other countries in cooperation with the UNHCR. A program of resettlement of Iraqi refugees by the UNHCR led to the resettlement of the refugees in 32 principal countries. Saudi Arabia has also been providing support to refugees camped in Chechnya, Azerbaijan and Bosnia.
A UNHCR report said that a group of 18 Iraqi refugees from Saudi Arabia’s Rafha camp were sent to Iran a couple of years ago, bringing the total number of Iraqi refugees resettled in Iran to over 2,700 under the framework of a massive UNHCR resettlement program.
The US and Canada also accepted a number of Iraqi refugees from the Rafha camp.
“At the moment, there are millions of refugees worldwide, mainly displaced from Muslim countries”, the report said. Relief and resettlement operations for such a huge number of refugees are an uphill task. The current US-led war on Iraq will further compound the problems of refugees.
The High Commission has been extremely concerned, for example, about the war in Iraq, a country which has long been politically volatile and is likely to face large-scale population displacement.
