LONDON – “There are many complaints about the UN being too bureaucratic” in helping with the overwhelming numbers of war refugees in the Kurdistan Region, Erbil’s top representative in Britain said.
Bayan Sami Abdul Rahman, representative of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in Britain, said that money was being wasted on multiple UN agencies carrying out multiple surveys.
At a discussion Saturday at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), she warned that the 1.5 million refugees in Kurdistan were greatly overstretching services and resources.
“Compared to our own population of 5 million people, you can imagine the pressure it puts on the services -- on electricity, sanitation, health and education,” said Abdul Rahman, who has been appointed as the next KRG representative in Washington DC.
She added that Dohuk, the smallest of the three provinces of the Kurdistan Region, had taken about 63 percent of the internally displaced people and refugees.
“So we describe it as the smallest province in Iraq with the biggest heart,“ she told the audience, adding that health clinics in Kurdistan are open round the clock to cope with the huge number of patients.
Abdul Rahman said another two dozen camps need to be built, and they all need fire engines, ambulances, mobile clinics and schools. From an international perspective “fundraising events are crucial,” she said.
She criticized the United Nations for being overly bureaucratic.
“Of course the UN is involved and engaged in Kurdistan, but I'm sorry to say that there are many complaints about the UN being too bureaucratic, carrying out survey after survey for no discernible reason,” Abdul Rahman said.
“Of course they are very useful, you need to know the profile of the refugee population, but to repeat the survey over and over again and have two or three UN agencies doing similar surveys is just ridiculous, bureaucratic and a waste of money.”
The discussion, organized by the SOAS Kurdish Society, had Abdul Rahman and other speakers addressing the topic, “Kurdistan: why international support is crucial.”
Michael Stephens, the Middle East Research Fellow at the Royal United Service Institute, followed the debate by underscoring that the Islamic State (ISIS) had become the biggest threat to the region in the modern age.
“Kurds have now through no fault of their own been exposed to an entity which is more powerful than Baghdad, more powerful than Damascus and it is more ideological than both of them,” Stephens said. “And it has a determination to destroy the Kurdish way of life, the Shia way of life, the Christian way of life and it is not apologetic; in fact it sees this as a moral goal.”
He said defeating ISIS is a “daunting” task and the result so far has been extremely mixed.
Comparing the US-led air strikes against the terror group with the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Stephens said that more bombs were dropped on Baghdad in one night in 2003 than in the first six weeks of the operation against ISIS.
“The Kurds have had to step up, they have had to fight their own battles, with our support, without help from anybody else”, he said. “There is nobody providing help to the Kurds in Baghdad or Syria."
Touching on Turkish dilly-dallying over ISIS, Stephens said that Ankara is confused.
“Turkey really doesn’t know what side it wants to support and is very confused about whether it likes Kurds or it doesn’t like Kurds. As a policy adviser I simply don’t know what to say when it comes to dealing with the Turks anymore.”
He warned that, unless more progress is made, ISIS would be around for a very long time.
Stephens also told Rudaw after his address that the US has now understood the importance of Kobane, the Kurdish town in Syria’s border with Turkey that has been resisting an ISIS overrun for about six weeks.
“Nobody is going to let it fall. It’s a situation that is not secure but looking better,” he said.
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