The Iraqi Refugee Crisis

On Thurs­day night, The Open Soci­ety Insti­tute hosted a panel on The Iraqi Refugee Cri­sis. With 2 mil­lion Iraqis dis­placed to other coun­ties, and 2.5 mil­lion dis­placed inter­nally, this is the worst refugee cri­sis in the mid­dle east in fifty years. The pan­elists spoke from a place of urgency and frus­tra­tion. The sit­u­a­tion is get­ting worse and the cur­rent polit­i­cal cli­mate com­pletely fails to address this huge human­i­tar­ian respon­si­bil­ity on the United State’s hands.

For some time, the Iraqi gov­ern­ment was focused on bring­ing refugees back to Iraq. The motive was to show that things were get­ting bet­ter. In fact they have not, and the inter­nally dis­placed are nav­i­gat­ing a very dan­ger­ous envi­ron­ment. George Packer said, “Iraq was a prison, but a prison where peo­ple could sur­vive if they kept their heads down. Now, Iraq is a killing field.” Omer Salih Mahdi, refugee and direc­tor of Bagh­dad Hos­pi­tal: Inside the Red Zone, talked about his own losses, and the expe­ri­ence of find­ing his father in the morgue.

Kris­tele Younes of Refugees Inter­na­tional has been lob­by­ing con­gress about the increas­ingly des­per­ate sit­u­a­tion. She pointed out that the strain on the region, with refugees flood­ing places like Syria and Jor­dan, is caus­ing increased resent­ment against the United States. In addi­tion to the respon­si­bil­ity that the United States has toward peo­ple that we pro­pose to be sav­ing by wag­ing this war, there are obvi­ous polit­i­cal motives for address­ing the refugee cri­sis. A fur­ther desta­bi­lized Mid­dle East is not in the United State’s best inter­ests. Pop­u­lar rhetoric around the war as framed by the US gov­ern­ment and by the press makes it dif­fi­cult for the pub­lic to dis­tin­guish between insur­gents and civil­ians. The Iraqis that we are free­ing have become an imma­te­r­ial abstrac­tion, and the Iraqis we meet on a daily basis, espe­cially in inter­na­tional cities like New York, are con­strued as a threat.

Lori Grinker pre­sented a mul­ti­me­dia piece on refugee fam­i­lies in Jor­dan.  The mul­ti­me­dia piece brought out the depth of sor­row and pain expe­ri­enced by those who live with phys­i­cal and emo­tional scars of war and now scram­ble in for­eign lands to make ends meet. Her doc­u­men­tary work on the issue can cur­rently be viewed at the Nai­lya Alexan­der Gallery in New York.

Dur­ing the ques­tion and answer part of the panel, Haider Hamza, a Ful­bright scholar from Iraq, shared some of the restraints put upon the Iraqi Ful­brights that are not places on those com­ing from other coun­tries. He said they need to sign forms say­ing that they will not apply for asy­lum while in the US, and they are not allowed to travel back to Iraq dur­ing their vaca­tion time. He also reported one instance of a Ful­bright scholar get­ting preg­nant. When she could no longer hide it in her 8th month of preg­nancy, she was sent back to Iraq. You can hear more from Haider on a June 2007 episode of This Amer­i­can Life.

Can the United States really just pull out?  Fight­ing needs to stop, and the pres­ence we have cur­rently in Iraq is shame­ful.  So much of the debate in the pri­maries talks about troops, their removal, or their con­tin­ued pres­ence.  This does not address the need for respon­si­ble and respon­sive aid for the vic­tims of the war.  Dur­ing the panel, the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion was con­trasted with the reset­tle­ment of Viet­nam refugees, both in Viet­nam and in the United States.  What are we doing dif­fer­ently this time, and why?