The
Forgotten Refugees
Of The U.S. War On Iraq
By Lee Sustar
17 October, 2007
Socialistworker.org
More refugees than Darfur. A
humanitarian disaster. The largest displaced population in the Middle
East since the mass expulsion of Palestinians with the formation of
Israel in 1948. That’s the reality of the Iraqi refugee crisis--denied
by the U.S. government and routinely ignored in the mainstream media.
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THE U.S. government has so
far allowed fewer than 2,000 Iraqi refugees to settle in the U.S.
At least 2,000 Iraqis are displaced every day, according to the United
Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). That’s more than
80 people per hour, around the clock--forced to flee their homes because
of U.S. military activities, sectarian attacks and threats, and sheer
desperation caused by the shattered Iraqi economy.
This is the reality of the
Iraqi refugee crisis. At least 4.1 million Iraqis have been displaced
so far--and the situation is getting worse, despite the supposed success
of the “surge” in U.S. troops to Iraq.
In a recent article in the
Boston Review, journalist Nir Rosen describes the Iraqi refugees he
met in the Syria capital of Damascus:
On a different street, I
found three Sunni friends from Baquba. Firas had been shot a year earlier;
his brother had been killed. He and Hamza had fled with their families
to Syria one month earlier after Shia militiamen attacked their homes.
Ali had been in Syria for
a year and a half. In Iraq, three of his uncles had been killed in front
of his eyes and a cousin had also been murdered. “Because we are
Sunnis,” he said, when I asked him why. “My school is gone.
My father has no work. I’m never going back.”
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- - -
SOME 2.5 million Iraqis have
been forced across the border into neighboring countries, mostly Jordan
and Syria. Both countries are overwhelmed and recently moved to stop
the flow of refugees.
As of September 10, Syria requires a visa for all Iraqis entering the
country. Months earlier, Jordan restricted entry by requiring Iraqis
to obtain residency permits or invitations issued for medical or educational
purposes. Jordan previously tried to deny access to Iraqi men between
the ages of 18 and 35. Expensive payments to smugglers or bribes are
the only way around these obstacles.
But in spite of these harsh
measures, Iraq’s neighbors have been far more generous to refugees
than the U.S. or European countries.
Syria, with a population
of just over 19 million, has allowed an estimated 1.4 million Iraqis
free access to emergency health care and permitted Iraqi children to
register for schools.
But only 35,000 of 250,000
school-aged Iraqi children attended school in Syria in the last academic
year, according to UNHCR. Often, places in schools were simply not available.
In many cases, children have to work in order to help support their
families. And many refugees are isolated from aid agencies like UNHCR,
which supply food aid and other support.
According to Amnesty International,
a typical example is a woman who fled Iraq in July 2006 after her husband
was killed by an armed group.
“I don’t have
any income here, and all the savings I brought with me have been almost
exhausted now,” she told interviewers. “My 12-year-old daughter
and myself live in one room that we are renting from an Iraqi woman
owner of the house, and we pay 5,000 Syrian pounds ($100) a month for
this room. I don’t work, and no one is helping us.”
Such desperation has led
to a rise in prostitution. Amnesty reported that “some Iraqi girls
and women have been forced by their families to engage in prostitution
to earn money to enable them to meet their daily needs, and there is
concern that child prostitution and trafficking of Iraqi children is
growing.”
Since the vast majority of
Iraqi refugees aren’t permitted to work legally in Syria and Jordan--other
than doctors, engineers and other professionals given special documents--many
take menial jobs in the underground economy--for wages at least 30 percent
lower.
Jordan, with a population
of just 6 million, has absorbed an estimated 750,000 Iraqis. Most don’t
have papers, which is tolerated by the government, but puts them at
risk of deportation back to Iraq.
Amnesty International quoted
a cheesemaker who fled Iraq with his wife and five children after his
father was abducted, his brother killed and he himself was detained:
When we first arrived in Amman, the first three nights, the boys and
I slept in the park. We just had one blanket. I just had $100 to live
on--i.e., to pay for food and accommodation...I also now have to pay
[visa overstay] fines for eight months...I am afraid that if the Wafidin
Police stop me, we will be deported...My financial situation is below
zero.
This man’s plight is common. According to a report by the UN-sponsored
IRIN news agency, prices of housing and parcels of land in Jordan have
increased by 300 percent since 2003. While wealthy and middle-class
Iraqis can afford them, the vast majority cannot.
Moreover, Jordan didn’t
allow nonresident Iraqi children to register for public schools until
August 2007. Even so, many Iraqi families still haven’t registered
their children--for fear of being identified as undocumented and deported.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
WHATEVER CRITICISMS can be
made of the Jordanian and Syrian governments’ treatment of refugees,
it is exceedingly generous in comparison to the locked-door policy of
the U.S.
Between April 2003 and January 2007, the U.S. had resettled just 753
Iraqi refugees. The government promised to increase that number by 7,000
in the 2007 fiscal year, but recently admitted that only 1,608 had been
resettled so far.
The Bush administration tried
to change the subject by playing up financial support for UNHCR and
other relief agencies. But Kristele Younes of the organization Refugees
International says that the U.S. contribution--a new $100 million announced
earlier this year--is tiny in view of the needs of Iraqi refugees.
“Since October 2006,
the U.S. government has gone from denying that large numbers of vulnerable
Iraqi refugees even existed to speaking openly of an ‘Iraqi refugee
crisis,’” she wrote in May. “But its actual financial
commitments are commensurate neither with the need nor with the U.S.
role in creating the displacement crisis in the first place. The president
and his war cabinet have yet to recognize the human toll the violence
has been taking on Iraqi civilians and neighboring countries.”
Nir Rosen made a similar
point. “This is not any other crisis,” he wrote. “It
is an American-made humanitarian catastrophe.” Rosen noted that
the International Organization of Migration issued an appeal for $85
million over two years, but has received less than half that amount.
For its part, the UNHCR has
increased its budget for Iraqi refugees from $23 million to $123 million,
and joined with UNICEF to try to raise $129 million for the education
of Iraqi refugee children. But all this is a pittance compared to U.S.
spending on war and occupation.
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AS GRIM as the plight of
Iraqi refugees has become, the displaced who remain in Iraq often fare
worse.
Numbering more than 2 million,
according to the International Organization for Migration, these “internally
displaced persons,” or IDPs, have either crammed in with relatives
or friends, or live in camps and shantytowns on the edge of Baghdad
and other cities.
The number of IDPs has nearly
doubled since February 2006, when the bombing of a Shia mosque in Samarra
led to an escalation in sectarian violence.
One of new refugees was Ahmed
al-Timimi, a 39-year-old Shia tailor who lived with his wife and daughters
in the Sunni majority area of Dora in Baghdad. One day, he found a note
stuck to his door that read: “Leave, or else have your wife and
daughters decapitated.”
He fled to a relative’s
home in a Shia neighborhood, but his oldest daughter hasn’t been
able to attend school. “What have I done in my life to lose my
house and job and see my dream of building a happy family fade away?”
Timimi told a reporter for IRIN. “Who should be blamed for all
our misery?”
Many IDPs are too poor to
make the journey abroad and become official refugees eligible for aid
from UNHCR and charitable organizations--or have been stopped at the
border by authorities of neighboring countries and turned back.
The only major non-governmental
organization providing aid to the IDPs is the Iraqi Red Crescent Society
(IRCS), which released a report in September detailing the scale of
the problem.
A September 19 article in
the New York Times summarized the IRCS’s findings:
In Baghdad alone, there are now nearly 170,000 families, accounting
for almost a million people, that have fled their homes in search of
security, shelter, water, electricity, functioning schools or jobs to
support their families.
The figures show that many
families move two or three times or more, first fleeing immediate danger
and then making more-considered calculations based on the availability
of city services or schools for their children. Finding neighbors of
their own sect is just one of those considerations.
Over all, the patterns suggest
that despite the ethnic and sectarian animosity that has gripped the
country, at least some Iraqis would rather continue to live in mixed
communities.
Raed Jarrar, an organizer
on the Iraq refugee issue for the American Friends Service Committee,
stressed that point. He argued that many IDPs end up in mixed neighborhoods,
and can remain there if the sectarian groups don’t care about
that particular area.
But if the U.S. carries out
plans for what Washington insiders call a “soft partition”
of Iraq, ethnic cleansing will increase enormously.
“It’s very ironic
to see how the U.S. has allied itself with al-Qaeda,” Jarrar said
in an interview. “Al-Qaeda and the U.S. support the same kind
of political agenda, which is to split Iraq into three sectarian regions”--a
Kurdish North, Shia South and Sunni central region.
Jarrar rejects the idea that
the fighting among Iraqis is caused by ancient hatreds. “The basis
of the ethnic and sectarian attacks are political,” he said, and
are the direct result of U.S. support for the religious political parties
that dominate the Iraqi government.
“It’s not that
the Iraqi refugees and IDPs fell from the sky and we have to find a
new home for them,” he said. “The majority of IDPs and refugees
want to go back home. And the thing that is preventing them from going
back home is that Iraq is unstable and under occupation. There is no
way Iraq will be stable without a complete withdrawal of the U.S.”
Jarrar notes that the Darfur
refugee crisis has attracted high-profile attention while the displacement
of Iraqis is downplayed, if acknowledged at all.
“There is a displacement
crisis in Sudan, but many specialists say the number is exaggerated,”
said Jarrar, the son of an Iraqi and a Palestinian. “But the official
number is less than half the numbers of Iraqis who have been displaced.
Unfortunately, we don’t see big coalitions in the United States
and Israel calling themselves Save Iraq, like Save Darfur.”
Jarrar points out that the
U.S. spends $200 million a year on Iraqi refugees--while spending on
the war in Iraq is $720 million per day. As he puts it:
The issue of refugees in Darfur and Sudan, while it’s a very tragic
disaster, is not caused by U.S. taxpayers’ money. It makes me
feel a little bit confused to see how people are more enthusiastic and
interested in solving the situation in Sudan, and there is not much
attention paid to refugees created by our own money. We are paying to
kill and injure Iraqis and destroy their homes from our own salaries
every month.
I can’t see why I would
be more involved in stopping the Sudanese civil war than my personal
and moral obligation to try to stop the Iraq war.
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