Iraq drives out businessman

Press, 14 April 1980, Page 8

Iraq drives out businessman

NZPA-Reuter Teheran Several hundred wealthy Bagdad businessmen, still clad in smart suits, are living in a tented refugee camp just inside the Iranian border, after being expelled from Iraq during the worsening Iranian-Iraqi confrontation.

They are with some 5000 refugees at the Sarabgarm camp after being rounded up by the secret police and expelled from Iraq. The refugees, most of them Iraqi Kurds, were driven out of Iraq in mass deportations in the last week. The Kurds, who say they were rounded up in the

middle of the night, are poorly dressed, some still in pyjamas and shoeless. A number of the business! men, interviewed separately, all told the same story of having received an invitation to attend a conference at the Iraqi Commerce Ministry in Bagdad on April 7. They said about 500 had arrived at the Ministry and had been told they were being taken to a large conference hall elsewhere.

Instead, they had been driven in buses to secret-police headquarters and taken under escort to the border area. They had had to for several hours before

[reaching Iranian territory. The businessmen, most of them still wearing the suits they put on for the conference, said they all belonged to the Shi’ite sect of Islam, as do most Iranians and some Iraqis. But none of those interviewed had Iranian nationality or any family connection with Iran. Hojatoleslam Seyyed Mohammad Ali Shirazi, who is helping to co-ordinate relief operations at Sarabgarm, said: “They (the Iraqis) knew that these people were committed to Shi-ism and were sympathetic to the Shi’ite clergy and were supporters of the Islamic revo-

lution. . . This is the reason for their expulsion.” ' The clergyman, son of one of Iran’s grand ayatollahs, Abdullah Shirazi, said about 600 more businessmen from five other Iraqi cities had also been expelled. Renewed artillery clashes broke out on the troubled border at the week-end. The head of the Revolutionary Guards operations unit in the Iranian borde-r town of Qasr-E-Shirin has told NZPA-Reuter that an Iranian army sergeant was killed and two other men wounded in heavy shooting around the nearby military camp of Boveissi. Both sides were using heavy artillery and tanks in what appeared to be crossborder firing. Fighting had also erupted on £ smaller scale in three other borderpoints.