posted on October 9, 2007 11:58:31 PM new
CONFLICT IN IRAQ
Iraq refugee crisis exploding
40% of middle class believed to have fled crumbling nation
Carolyn Lochhead, Chronicle Washington Bureau
Tuesday, January 16, 2007
(01-16) 04:00 PDT Washington -- Iraq is in the throes of the largest refugee crisis in the Middle East since the Palestinian exodus from Israel in 1948, a mass flight out of and within the country that is ravaging basic services and commerce, swamping neighboring nations with nearly 2 million refugees and building intense pressure for emigration to Europe and the United States, according to the United Nations and refugee experts.
The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, which appealed for $60 million in emergency aid last week, believes 1.7 million Iraqis are displaced inside Iraq, whose prewar population was 21 million. About 50,000 Iraqis are fleeing inside Iraq each month, the United Nations said, and 500,000 have been displaced since last February's bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra. These figures are as of January 2007.
The Bush administration and the governments of Jordan and Syria, the nations that accept the bulk of the refugees, have been reluctant to acknowledge the humanitarian crisis, experts said.
"I think everyone at this point is in denial about the human consequences of the war," said Kathleen Newland, director of the Migration Policy Institute, who is familiar with the State Department's views.
Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., has scheduled a hearing today to push for more aid and more U.S. admissions of refugees, especially those facing death threats for working for the U.S. military.
At Kennedy's hearing, the State Department is expected to call for a slight increase in Iraqi admissions to the United States. Just 220 Iraqis were admitted last year, most of them not from the war. The Department of Homeland Security worries that it would be difficult to screen out terrorists.
"I would suspect that the Department of Homeland Security would regard it as a complete security nightmare," Newland said.
Kristele Younes, an advocate at Refugees International, said the refugee problem is growing rapidly.
"At the moment, we're seeing up to 80,000 to 100,000 that are being displaced every month," inside and outside the country, she said. "In Syria alone, there are estimations that there's about 40,000 Iraqis that are coming every month."
Roughly 40 percent of Iraq's middle class is believed to have fled, the U.N. said. Most are fleeing systematic persecution and have no desire to return.
All kinds of people, from university professors to bakers, have been targeted by militias, insurgents and criminals. An estimated 331 school teachers were slain in the first four months of last year, according to Human Rights Watch, and at least 2,000 Iraqi doctors have been killed and 250 kidnapped since the 2003 U.S. invasion. Business owners are especially prone to extortion.
The flight has undermined basic services such as water and sanitation and disrupted commerce, making it increasingly difficult for Iraqi society to function, officials said.
Iraqi Christians were an early target after the 2003 invasion; after the February bombing, Shiite militias began taking revenge on Sunnis. Violence is rising in southern Iraq between rival Shiite factions. Refugees International said many people are targeted for "un-Islamic" dress or behavior.
Iraqis who work for the U.S. government or any Western group, such as nongovernmental organizations and the news media, are especially vulnerable.
"People are targeted in extremely direct ways -- kidnapping, killings, rapes," Younes said. "Every single family we interviewed had gone through such an ordeal, and the tribal system in Iraq is such that revenge is carried out generation to generation, so they feel ... return to Iraq would be tantamount to a death sentence."
While the Bush administration is hastily devising new reconstruction plans for Iraq, refugee advocates say the country most needs emergency humanitarian aid for the most vulnerable, including orphans and women.
U.S. officials have "wanted to keep the impression that they were being successful and that there were Iraqis who were committed to building democracy," said Bill Frelick, refugee policy director at Human Rights Watch and author of an extensive report on the situation. "As it turns out, many of the people who are fleeing are fleeing because of their associations with the United States."
Syria and Jordan, for their part, may want to avoid being formally saddled with refugees who have special international status.
Newland said Syria and Jordan consider the refugees tourists or illegal immigrants, "which sort of implies that the problem will go away or that they would be perfectly within their rights to kick people out."
Jordan, a U.S. ally, has long accepted Arab refugees, and so has Syria's pan-Arabist dictatorship. The fear now is that both may close their borders. Pressure on Jordan, a country of just 6 million, is intense, with Iraqi refugees now accounting for 10 percent of its population -- the equivalent of 30 million landing on U.S. shores. Jordan began restricting entry after Iraqis bombed three hotels in Amman in 2005.
Many Iraqis are also living in Egypt and Lebanon. Iran, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait have barred Iraqis.
"There's just no way a small country like Jordan can, unaided, absorb hundreds of thousands of Iraqi refugees," Newland said.
Despite terrorism concerns, some predict the United States eventually will admit several hundred thousand Iraqi refugees, as it has after most military conflicts.
"Is it going to be one of the unintended consequences of our invasion and occupation of Iraq that we may end up taking hundreds of thousands of Iraqi refugees in this country?" said James Hollifield, an expert in international migration and director of the Tower Center for Political Studies at Southern Methodist University. "I think there's a high probability of that, which is what we saw after Vietnam."
When the South Vietnamese government collapsed, the United States initially accepted 130,000 Vietnamese, including 65,000 fearing their lives because of their collaboration with Americans. Many conferences later, 1.4 million Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians had been admitted, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
Smaller admissions of refugees and those claiming asylum followed the conflict in Nicaragua in the 1980s, two Cuban crises in the 1960s and 1980s, the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the Gulf War in the 1990s and the failed 1956 Hungarian Revolution. The United States is the largest refugee host in the world, admitting 2.66 million since 1976.
"The reality is that refugee flows are really tied to foreign policy," said David Reimers, a historian emeritus at New York University. "It's perfectly possible that we could wind up with a couple hundred thousand Iraqi refugees.
"The parallel to me would be after Vietnam War," Reimers said. "There was a frantic number of Vietnamese who wanted to get out, and we were caught unawares; 130,000 or so climbed aircraft and helicopters," some on their own, some evacuated by the U.S. military. Many more followed, and Thailand was soon swamped. Thailand said it could not handle the flows and was not responsible for them. The initial U.S. evacuation soon became, said Citizenship and Immigration Services, "one of the longest running migration and refugee resettlement programs in the modern era."
"Whether it was guilt feelings or a moral imperative, we began to resettle them," Reimers said.
U.S. refugee policy has long been an ad hoc affair, Hollifield said. "We sort of make it up as we go along ... The fact is, refugee policy is a function of foreign policy, but also a function of our humanitarian instincts. It is in fact a very messy business."
Most Iraqi refugees are determined to be resettled to Europe or North America, advocates say. Life in the host countries has become more difficult, they report. Resentment is growing, and most Iraqis are not legally permitted to work.
Resettlement abroad is considered a last resort on humanitarian and foreign policy grounds. Countries in conflict eventually need their people to take part in their own national struggles, some believe. "If we take all the most educated and bright people from Haiti, Haiti's going to sink into the abyss," Hollifield said the thinking goes.
For now, refugee organizations are calling for increased U.S. aid to Jordan and even, through back channels, to Syria.
Some contend large-scale resettlement to the United States is unlikely because of anti-immigration sentiment and fear of terrorism.
"Islamophobia may be too strong a word, but there is suspicion at least of Muslims from the Middle East, and at this stage -- though this could change -- I think people in this country don't see the United States as being the main cause of the refugee flows," Newland said. "I would guess they see it more as result of Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence."
Despite anti-war sentiment, Newland said, "we have not seen as much of an outpouring of sympathy for the innocent victims of this war from Americans, as we did in the aftermath of that terrible photograph of the little girl on fire with napalm (in Vietnam.) Nothing seems to have quite seized the imagination of the American public about Iraqi civilian victims of war in quite that way. Maybe we're just in the early stages. "
posted on October 10, 2007 08:18:55 AM new
Iraq refugee crisis exploding
40% of middle class believed to have fled crumbling nation
Carolyn Lochhead, Chronicle Washington Bureau
Tuesday, January 16, 2007
Still living in the past with your head up you azz?
It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.George S. Patton
posted on October 10, 2007 08:26:22 AM new
Aww, isn't that cute? bear is using linduh's excuse for "NO answer, NO defense" by indicating the article is "old"
Come out of linduh's cave, bear. Do you really think that since the article was written things have gotten better ??
THEN PROVE IT!
I can PROVE that the situation YOUR PRESIDENT created has gotten worse.
Typical neocon... YOU can only grunt how people's heads are up their azz ....no rebuttal in YOUR OWN WORDS, no proof, no defense, no facts,
posted on October 10, 2007 09:38:36 AM new
Here bear, here's one from TODAY. Did things change? Get better ? Get worse ?
How ARE things going in Iraq , oh repug wise ones ????
Doors closing on Iraqi displaced
Iraq's provinces say they are not able to cope with the refugee influx
A growing number of Iraqi provinces are refusing entry to internal refugees, the UN refugee agency has warned.
The head of the UNHCR Iraq Support Unit told the BBC up to 11 governors were restricting access because they lacked resources to look after the refugees.
Andrew Harper warned that, with no imminent end to the displacement, Iraq was becoming a "pressure cooker".
The UNHCR says there are 2.2m internal refugees in Iraq, though the Iraqi government says there are half that.
A government spokesman has told the BBC that while dealing with the growing numbers of internally displaced people was a significant problem, only three provinces were refusing access to refugees.
In addition, the UNHCR estimates that 2.2m Iraqis have fled to neighbouring states, particularly Syria and Jordan, since the US-led invasion in 2003.
'Pressure cooker'
Mr Harper told the BBC that Iraqi authorities were increasingly overwhelmed by the internal refugee problem - caused not only by violence, but also by social and health problems such as cholera outbreaks.
More than 1m people have been internally displaced, and now 11 areas are restricting access
He said local authorities did not have the resources to cope, and that the governors of at least 11 provinces - out of 18 in the country - had reacted by blocking internal migrants from entering their territory, or denying them food and education if they do get in.
"We are seeing an increasing number of governorates closing their borders or restricting entry to new arrivals," he said.
"And so we have a pressure cooker building up inside Iraq - there is no imminent end to the displacement," he added.
"The possibility for Iraqis to find safety is becoming increasingly restricted. So, where they can move is becoming over-populated and intense."
WHERE IRAQIS HAVE FLED TO
Syria: 1,400,000
Jordan: 750,000
Gulf states: 200,000
Egypt: 100,000
Iran: 54,000
Lebanon: 40,000
Turkey: 10,000
Internally displaced: 2,250,000
Source: UNHCR
Alarming humanitarian crisis
Mr Harper said the UNHCR had raised the problem with the Iraqi central government, but was told that local authorities had been urged not to turn away Iraqis fleeing other parts of the country.
The millions of refugees fleeing the violence and turmoil in the country, Mr Harper said, were the biggest challenge facing the UNHCR and the international community.
He said the figures were increasing on average by up to 100,000 every month.
In Diyala province, aid workers have said they have been unable to reach thousands of families, including displaced refugees, because of the security situation.
The huge displacement of people is
cementing the fragmentation of the country,
says the BBC's Arab affairs analyst Magdi Abdelhadi, with local authorities ignoring Baghdad by refusing to shelter refugees.
That will make national reconciliation even more difficult to achieve, he says.
There are also fears that the ramshackle refugee camps that today dot the Iraqi landscape are a breeding ground for violence, our correspondent adds.
Mr Harper's warning comes at a time when Iraq's neighbours have more or less closed their borders to refugees, saying they can no longer cope with the strain.
Are YOU a Bunghole?