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★阿修羅♪
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（かいつまんで）
イラン・イラク戦争と1991年の湾岸戦争、イラク侵略を無傷で生き延びたアラブのSaraefien部族の人々は、クルドPUKにカナキンを追われ、刑務所に住み着いた。
団子軍に援助を願い出るも、団子軍はこれを無視。家畜を食べ尽くし、売り尽くした彼等にはあと1週間分の食糧しか残っていない。
アメリカの侵略を歓迎さえした彼等も、今ではアメリカを嫌っている。
アメリカの約束は何一つ実現せず、信じ難いことが起きた。
アメリカは薬品と食糧と自由を約束した、しかし彼等は家と土地と収穫を失い、無一文で刑務所で暮らしている。
彼等は、団子軍のせいでこんな目にあったと考えている。
部族長は、食糧が尽きた時に部族のメンバーが何をするかは判らないという。
部族の若者は、「サダムのほうがアメリカ人よりマシだということが判った」
「もし、解決策がないのなら、私達はアメリカと戦う。たとえ殺されようとも、何もせずにここに座っているよりはマシだ」と、話した。
Victims of the peace decide Americans are worse than Saddam
From Anthony Browne in Khan Bani Saad
THE small dank cells with cold stone floors, tiny windows and iron bars for a door used to house criminals and the victims of Saddam Hussein's regime.
Now Khan Bani Saad prison, overlooked by watchtowers and surrounded by razorwire, is filled with families who are victims, not of the war, but of the peace.
Sabrir Hassan Ismael, a mother of six, held her three-year-old daughter Zahraa in the cell that is now their living room and bedroom, and cried:
"Look at me; look at my family.
We live in prison.
We can't buy food because we don't have money.
We have no gas to cook.
"We can't sleep because it's very hot.
There are huge insects that bite us.
All night my daughters cry and they can't sleep.
I live without any hope. Just look at us."
Outside children play in the foetid puddles, swirling dust and searing heat of the prison courtyard, where prisoners once walked in dread.
Before the end of the war Mrs Sabrir lived with her husband, a local mayor, on a farm in the town of Khanaqin, close to the Iranian border.
They are members of the Arab Saraefien tribe that had survived unscathed through the Iran-Iraq war, the Gulf War in 1991 and the invasion of Iraq.
As opponents of Saddam they even welcomed the American invasion.
But it is the peace, and the disintegration of Saddam's grip, that has destroyed their lives.
On April 11, two days after the fall of Saddam, Kurdish fighters entered Khanaqin, ordering all 15,000 Arabs to leave within 48 hours.
"There were so many Kurdish fighters we couldn't count them.
They came into our house, and fired into the air, and grabbed me by the shoulder and said we had to leave in 48 hours or they would kill us," said Mrs Sabrir's son, Amar Hassan Tahar, 26.
The tribal elders insist that Jalal Talabani, leader of the PUK Kurdish political party, was behind the purge.
They went to the local governor, also a Kurd, to plead for more time.
"But he said if Talabani gives us 48 hours, he will give us just 24, or else he would send in the bulldozers to flatten our houses," said Fadhel Jasas, one of the elders.
The following day Mrs Sabrir and her family had not left, and the Kurds returned, installing eight armed men and women to live in their house.
"They ordered us to cook for them, and slept there, and said they would kill us if we didn't leave the next day.
The next morning they threw all our belongings out in the street, and we left," Mr Amar said.
After seven days of travelling by foot and by donkey from Khanaqin, 1,500 of the tribe ended up in the abandoned prison, 30 miles north of Baghdad.
They had nowhere else to go.
They are part of the rising tide of internal refugees in Iraq, forced out of their homes by the ethnic conflict that yesterday resulted in more gunfights between Kurds and Arabs in the town of Kirkuk.
Every day on Iraq's highways, Arabs who have been forced out of their homes are drifting south hoping to find somewhere to live.
Many, but not all, of the Arabs in Khanaqin had been forced to move there in 1975 from southern Iraq because they opposed Saddam's regime.
Saddam wanted to Arabise the predominantly Kurdish towns close to the Iranian border.
The dictator gave the tribe houses and land, which he reportedly bought off the Kurds, but now the Kurds have taken them back as part of a drive to reverse the process.
The occupants of Khan Bani Saad prison, forced to leave their land for a second time, just want somewhere they call their own.
"I want a home to live in and land to farm" said Mrs Sabrir's husband, Hassan Tahar Yassim.
They have identified land nearby that used to belong to Saddam, but others have already occupied it.
The tribe has appealed for help to the coalition forces, but no one has even visited them.
They have eaten or sold almost all their animals, and have only a week left of food.
Now they hate the Americans.
"None of the American promises has happened.
It is unbelievable what has happened," Mr Yassim said.
His son concludes:
"We have discovered that Saddam is better than the Americans."
Hadeb Hamed Hamed, the tribe's sheikh, sat on mats on the prison officer's porch, and said:
"The Americans promised us food and medicine and freedom.
But we have lost our homes, our land, our crops.
Now we live in prison with nothing, and they ignore us.
"It is the allied forces that have done this to us.
When we run out of food, I don't know what we will do."
In fact, he does know, because with starvation looming, he has been talking about it with the other elders.
"If we don't have a solution, we will fight the Americans even if they kill us.
It is better than sitting here with nothing and just dying," he said.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,5944-689414,00.html
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