Iraqi refuge move

[baghda]

يختلف البعض في تسميتهم , لاجئين ام مهجريين ولكن الجميع يتفق على ان هناك نزيفا بشريا عراقيا كان وما يزال يدمي جسد العراق

 

افتتح هذا العمود لتسليط الضوء على معاناه لطالما تحدث عنها العراقيون خلال الثلاثين سنه الماضيه وليتم تسليط الضوء عليها الان بوضوح اكبر ربما لاسباب اخرى غير انسانيه ولكن يبقى السؤال , الى متى تستمر محنه العراقيين في وطنهم

 

 

 

 

ادناه مقطع من مقال للنيويورك تايمز يسلط الضوء على بعض جوانب المحنه

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/13/magazine/13refugees-t.html

 

The Flight From Iraq

Joachim Ladefoged/VII, for The New York Times

 

 

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By NIR ROSEN

Published: May 13, 2007

 

 

"In the Balance" At a meeting in mid-April in Geneva, held by António Guterres, the United Nations high commissioner for refugees, the numbers presented confirmed what had long been suspected: the collapse of Iraq had created a refugee crisis, and that crisis was threatening to precipitate the collapse of the region. The numbers dwarfed anything that the Middle East had seen since the dislocations brought on by the establishment of Israel in 1948. In Syria, there were estimated to be 1.2 million Iraqi refugees. There were another 750,000 in Jordan, 100,000 in Egypt, 54,000 in Iran, 40,000 in Lebanon and 10,000 in Turkey. The overall estimate for the number of Iraqis who had fled Iraq was put at two million by Guterres. The number of displaced Iraqis still inside Iraq’s borders was given as 1.9 million. This would mean about 15 percent of Iraqis have left their homes.

Most of this movement has occurred in the last two years. An outflow began after the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003. But since the upsurge of violence following the bombing of a Shiite holy site in Samarra 14 months ago, the flight has been large and constant. It now reaches a rate of up to 50,000 people per month.

 

Many of Iraq’s neighbors initially welcomed the refugees. These countries were motivated by self-interest as well as by generosity. Certain political refugees, like Baathist officials, who were among the first to leave Iraq, had a political use in negotiations with the American-led occupation and the Iraqi government that succeeded it. And the well-to-do early refugees — those who could meet Jordan’s requirement of $100,000 in the bank to qualify for a residency permit, for example — brought much-needed capital. But the numbers and the welcome became unsustainable: Jordan and Egypt have made it very difficult for Iraqis to enter, and even Syria, with a long history of welcoming refugees, has passed regulations, like restrictions on the purchase of property and on access to free health care, that are intended to ensure that Iraqi refugees are only temporary residents. Iraq’s neighbors take the position that Iraqi refugees are not in fact refugees at all, because refugee status enables refugees to make claims on the host country. Iraq’s government has itself taken roughly the same position, because it cannot afford to acquiesce in the loss of its population or acknowledge its own failure to provide security. The United States and Great Britain, as the principal authors of the current war, have been urged by rights activists to shoulder responsibility for the war’s refugees — a responsibility they have so far evaded. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the principal international body for refugee issues, succeeded in finding new homes for just 404 refugees in the first nine months of 2006 and says it hopes to resettle 20,000 by the end of 2007. That would be 1 percent of the current total. The agency’s fund-raising mark for 2007 is $60 million — for humanitarian relief rather than resettlement — of which it has so far raised only half. As with the war itself, the situation of the war’s refugees is at once dire and full of dangers for the region and the world — and no one seems to know how to resolve it.

 

From the Iraqi perspective, the greatest loss has been the flight of the professional class, the people whose resources and skills might once have combined to build a post-Saddam Iraq. It seems, however, that precisely because they are critical to rebuilding Iraq and less prone to sectarianism and violence, professionals are most vulnerable to those forces that are tearing Iraq apart. Many of them are now in Syria. An hour’s drive from Damascus, in Qudsiya, there has grown up an Iraqi neighborhood complete with a Baghdad Barbershop and an Iraq Travel Agency. Off one alley, in January, I entered a hastily constructed apartment building, rough and unfinished, the concrete and cinder blocks slapped together. The carved wooden doors to each apartment were in stark contrast to the grim, unpainted hallways. Inside one such apartment lived a doctor named Lujai — she refused to give her family name — and her five children. Omar, at 15, was the oldest; the youngest was just 2. A family-medicine specialist, Lujai arrived in Qudsiya last September from Baghdad, where she had her own clinic and her husband, Adil, was a thoracic surgeon and a professor at the medical college. They were the same age and from the same town (Ana, in Anbar Province), and they had been married for 15 years when Adil was murdered.