Refugees - Iraq's
forgotten people
Refugees International
16 July 2003
On the grounds of the Haifa
Sports Club in central Baghdad, 250 Palestinian families live in a tent
camp, sweltering in heat that exceeds 125 degrees.
The camp's residents are
mostly women, children and elderly people. To drink, they must haul
water from distant faucets. Mothers complain that their children can't
sleep because of the heat, and the frightening rattle of gunfire during
the night.
What's shocking is not that
there are unhappy refugees in Baghdad in the wake of the war but that
for more than two months the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority
did not know they were there. Yet these families are just a small sliver
of the 130,000 displaced people living in Iraq, families whose existence
is not recognized, whose needs are not being met - not because the coalition
doesn't care but because it lacks the systematic strategy and clear
vision necessary for success. If there is a master plan for reconstruction,
the public has not seen it, and without it, micro-level problems become
chronic as the Iraqis grow impatient and restless.
From top to bottom, no one
seems quite sure where to go to find solutions. Being an Iraqi with
a problem is like standing in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles
holding a number no one calls. Though accompanied by a military escort,
one Iraqi woman embroiled in a property dispute spent two weeks simply
trying to find the Civil Affairs Office to which she had been directed.
No soldier or coalition administrator even knew where the building was.
The United States appears
firmly committed to one policy: holding the United Nations at bay. Unfortunately,
minimizing U.N. involvement deprives the U.S. of the U.N.'s long experience
in Iraq and its emergency-response skills. In past conflicts - in Kosovo,
for instance, and more recently Afghanistan - the U.N. has been involved
in all facets of reconstruction, from food distribution and water and
sanitation projects to the training and equipping of police forces.
In Iraq, all of these services
have been placed under control of the U.S. Department of Defense, which
has demonstrated little capacity to fill the coordination void. The
U.S. is also making little effort to use humanitarian relief organizations
now operating on an ad hoc basis in Iraq.
Another problem is that due
to a lack of security, coalition officials are required to travel with
heavy military protection, submitting proposed itineraries 48 hours
or more in advance. Where the situation is most hazardous - and where
the need often is most dire - travel is simply forbidden. The inability
of officials to move freely, even in Baghdad, explains how refugees
could go unnoticed and why problems such as a rising number of homeless
street kids and the maintaining of order go unresolved.
For more than two months,
the coalition did not acknowledge responsibility for the Palestinian
families at the sports club. The Office of the U.N. High Commissioner
for Refugees and other organizations provided some emergency relief
and stood ready to resettle them but received no U.S. guidance or authorization.
Housing in the city is under coalition control, and without coalition
approval, neither the camp nor its residents may be relocated.
In mid-June, after a scramble
through three different ministries, representatives of the coalition
and the U.N. refugee agency finally got together to discuss the subject.
A coalition official visited the site and the U.N. offered to start
repairs on a building that could be a secure and permanent shelter for
the refugees. But the coalition authority has yet to approve the plan.
No further action has been taken.
Ethnic clashes dispossess
new families each day, and the number of economically displaced Iraqis
grows. Solving these problems would breed confidence in the potential
for a new and stable Iraq. But without a comprehensive plan and a strategy
to implement it, the coalition's vision of a new Iraq will remain, like
the families camped at the Haifa Sports Club, overlooked and in limbo.