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MIGRATION: Int’l Community Failing Iraqi Refugees

Mohammed A. Salih

WASHINGTON, Jun 13 2008 (IPS) - The international community, especially the United States, has depicted a “false picture of the security situation” in Iraq in order to encourage refugees to return to a country where the situation is still “too dire”, said Amnesty International, a prestigious London-based rights group, in a statement Friday.

Accusing Western and neighbouring countries of evading their responsibility toward Iraqi refugees, Sarnata Reynolds, director of the USA refugee programme of Amnesty International, said: “The United States has a unique responsibility to all people displaced by the Iraq conflict.”

The statement comes one day ahead of a report entitled “Rhetoric and Reality: The Iraqi Refugee Crisis” that will shed further light on the plight of Iraqi refugees. The report asserts that “the world’s richest states are failing to provide the necessary assistance to Iraqi refugees, most of whom are living in despair and hurtling towards destitution.”

“Governments have done little or nothing to help Iraqi refugees and are failing in their moral, political and legal duties to share responsibility for them,” said Amnesty. “Instead, apathy and rhetoric have been the overwhelming response to one of the worst refugee crises in the world.”

The organisation singles out Sweden, which hosts most of the Iraqi refugees among European nations, for starting to deport some Iraq asylum-seekers, alongside many other countries in the continent.

Despite the official rhetoric of U.S. and Iraqi authorities, the rights group says that acts of violence by various parties in Iraq, including the U.S.-led “multinational forces” and Iraqi government, are still a daily occurrence. That situation, contrary to U.S. and Iraqi efforts, encourages more Iraqis to try to leave, although Iraq’s neighbours Syria and Jordan have imposed drastic visa measures that make it hard for refugees to enter those countries.

There are over two million Iraqi refugees living outside Iraq, mainly in Syria and Jordan. Syria alone is estimated to host some 1.5 million Iraqis. Amnesty International now puts the overall figures of refugees and internally displaced people at 4.7 million, the highest since the start of Iraq War in 2003.

Ironically, while it was the administration of the U.S. President George W. Bush that launched the war, it is Syria, one of Washington’s top adversaries in the region, which has taken in the largest numbers of Iraqi refugees. Syrian officials have already complained of the strains the refugee influx has put on their country.

Under tremendous domestic and international pressure, the U.S. government has agreed to resettle a larger number of Iraqi refugees to the U.S. than it used to do in previous years. It has pledged to relocate 12,000 Iraqi refugees this year to the U.S. and last month it admitted 1,100 of them. That stands in sharp contrast to the low number of 260 refugees who were resettled last November.

“I believe there is not really high-level attention to this refugee crisis from the [U.S.] administration,” said Megan Fowler of from Refugee International, an advocacy group in Washington. “We do feel there needs to be much higher level attention from the secretary of state and from the president.”

Meanwhile, the Iraqi government has done little to help its own citizens displaced inside and outside the country, despite lucrative oil revenues due to skyrocketing crude oil prices.

Many of those refugees have run out of their savings, are unemployed and do not have adequate access to the public services of the countries where they live. Under such circumstances, although many of those refugees want to return to their country, they cannot due to the significant extent of insecurity that still remains in Iraq.

However, the Iraqi government this week approved eight million dollars in aid for nearly 750,000 Iraqi refugees, ahead of a visit by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to Jordan Thursday to meet with King Abdullah. That signals the Iraqi government’s readiness to take more responsibility vis-à-vis its displaced nationals.

Among the most vulnerable refugees from Iraq are Palestinians who used to reside in Iraq under Saddam Hussein’s regime. Amnesty International estimates that around 2,700 of them live under harsh circumstances along Iraq’s border with Syria. Many Palestinians in Iraq have been targeted since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion by armed groups.

The prospect of a steadily increasing number of Iraqi refugees has alarmed many who monitor the situation and fear the wider repercussions of the crisis which might overtake the region.

“The Middle East is a very important region and to increase stability in it, we believe it is in the best interest of the U.S. to address this problem of refugees,” said Fowler from Refugee International. “Ultimately with this refugees crisis, and to have millions of refugees in the region and IDPs [internally displaced people] inside Iraq, it will become extremely difficult to promote stability and peace in the Middle East.”