Preparing for the deluge: Saddam Hussein forced hundreds of thousands to give up their homes and land. Their return could bring a humanitarian crisis.

• Author: Vilbig, Peter

Refugee assistance organizations and the United Nations say war in Iraq could uncork a refugee crisis.

It could become one of the largest migrations of people in modern times, a human tide sweeping across the desert and out of the high northern mountains of Iraq.

Perhaps a million or more may be waiting to reclaim homes and land they, fled, by force or by fear, under the 24-year dictatorship of Saddam Hussein.

To maintain control and political domination, Saddam literally redrew the ethnic map of Iraq, driving enemies, real and imagined, from their homes and making sure that his allies lived near Iraqi oil wells and other strategic points.

The Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, estimated that northern Iraq alone held 500,000 to 800,000 displaced people (a term for refugees who remain in their home country), many of them members of the Kurdish minority. Another 300,000 displaced people, mostly of Arab background, were in central and southern Iraq.

"Iraq has been a giant social engineering project," says Peter Bouckaert, a researcher for Human Rights Watch. "People have been moved around and bused around all over the country, in a serial displacement, and when they start going home they are going to displace other people. There is going to be a domino effect."

VALUABLE PLANNING TIME LOST

The Bush administration said it hoped to minimize the human toll in a post-Saddam Iraq. The State Department has coordinated efforts with aid groups, and the Pentagon created an office to help potential refugees. "There are an awful lot people in and out of government spending an awful lot of time working on" this, says Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

But aid groups say the attention of the U.S. and the world was for too long focused on war with Iraq, not the refugee problem. They say that valuable planning time was lost during the months while world leaders debated whether to support a U.S.-led campaign against Iraq. That slowed efforts on the part of the UN High Commission on Refugees, which organizes world relief efforts, to plan and begin raising funds for an Iraq crisis.

"A lot of the aid groups were assessing what they could do, but they were also bound by not knowing what funding would be available," says Hiram Ruiz, director of communications for the U.S. Committee for Refugees, a nonprofit humanitarian organization.

The seeds of the refugee crisis were planted in 1979, when Saddam came to power. Though his government was essentially secular, Saddam depended on close allies, many from the Sunni Arab minority in his hometown of Tikrit, to maintain his Baath political parts, and his dictatorship.

Saddam saw a threat in Iraq's Kurds, the country's...