Four Million Iraqi Refugees With No Where to Go

By Joe Rothstein
Editor, USPolitics.einnews.com

December 9, 2007

U.S. TV news viewers recently have witnessed a welcome sight---Iraqi refugees debarking from buses---going "home."

These images have been reinforced by U.S. and Iraqi officials trying mightily to make the case that the tide has turned and that we are "winning." Americans fervently want that to be true.

Unfortunately, like so much of the "mission accomplished" language we've heard through the years, the facade of success masks a grim reality.

Let's look behind the story of those returning refugees.

On October 1, the Syrian government reversed what had been a generous policy of allowing Iraqis to enter their country, pretty much at will. Faced with much tougher requirements for staying in Syria, and compounded by lack of work, employment exploitation and high living costs that drained savings, many Iraqis felt they had no choice but to return home.

The Red Crescent relief organization estimates that only 14% of the 20,000 or so who have return did so because they consider the situation at home safer than when they left

And on returning to their homes, many of them found the doors broken down, furniture stolen or their homes occupied by other families. The UN refugee agency, after interviews with returning Iraqis, estimates that only one third managed to move back into their homes upon their return to Baghdad.

Among its other failures, the Iraqi government has no property rights law that protects those who fled from those who either squatted on their property or robbed them blind while they were gone. Ethnic cleansing of neighborhoods has been an unstated goal of the current Iraqi government. It's not going to change just because some of those who fled for their lives are returning home.

The government in Baghdad is not the only government that has failed to make the refugee crisis a priority. President Bush and his top advisers also refuse to elevate the situation to the priority level it deserves. Doing so would be tantamount to an admission that their Iraq policy has failed.

More than four million Iraqis have been displaced since U.S. forces raced across the Iraqi border. Half or more of those have been forced to find new shelter within Iraq. The others fled to other countries, mainly Syria and Jordan.

I sat in on a day-long discussion about this crisis hosted the other day by the Center for American Progress. Aside from the enormous menu of humanitarian issues involved, as one speaker after another outlined the problems it became apparent that four million desperate, displaced people searching for adequate food and shelter in one of the most dangerous regions on earth represents a potentially vast destabilizing problem that may not go away for a generation.

Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were displaced in 1948 as a result of the first Arab-Israeli war. And, nearly 60 years later, hundreds of thousands of them are still there, the source of continuing turmoil in most countries of the region. More than ten times the number of Iraqi refugees are now homeless, waiting for a resolution to the conflict in their country.

Will Sunnis be able to go back to neighborhoods they once inhabited in Baghdad? Is that something the new Shiite government will permit? Will Arabs who were moved north by Suddam Heussein be able to remain there after a referendum in which the Kurds are likely to vote them out? What will happen to all of these people---millions of them?

Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, and even neighboring Turkey all are likely to be affected by the Iraqi refugee problem for years to come, feeding an already boiling cauldron of tension.

So don't let photos of a few people coming off a bus fool you. Most of them had no where to go with their suitcases. And more than four million others have yet to be heard from.








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Joe Rothstein, editor of US Politics Today, is a former daily newspaper editor and long-time national political strategist based in Washington, D.C.

See all previous articles by Joe Rothstein here.