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Refugees Magazine Issue 146 ("Iraq Bleeds: Millions displaced by conflict, persecution and violence") – Regional Perspectives
Some two million Iraqi refugees are believed to have scattered across the Middle East — the biggest refugee movement in the region since the exodus of Palestinians following the creation of Israel in 1948.
By Rupert Colville
Syria
The scene: a small interior courtyard at a refugee centre in the Syrian capital, Damascus in early February. Around 50 adult refugees sit on fold-down chairs, with an anxious, expectant air. Most of them are holding sheafs of paper – their documents: precious evidence of past lives, and of their present diminished circumstances.
A UN refugee agency official sits down at a trestle table in front of them. A middle-aged woman, wearing a large brace along the entire length of one arm, stands up and the information session begins.
She describes how her husband was kidnapped on 11 September 2006 on his way to work in Baghdad. She hasn't seen him since. His driver was found dead. Later, some men came to her house and broke her arms.
Can UNHCR do anything to help trace her husband? She is referred to the International Committee of the Red Cross which traditionally handles tracing – but she has seen them already.
Another woman stands up: her health is bad. The UNHCR staff member refers her to a clinic which is treating Iraqis free of charge.
Then he faces a barrage of questions about residence permits. The rules have changed again. Now they are granted for 15 days, then extended for a maximum of three months. The UN official explains that UNHCR is still trying to get clarification about the new rules (a few days later they are considerably relaxed) and tries to reassure his audience that, as far as UNHCR is aware, no one is being deported.
There are some dissenting voices in the crowd. People have heard things: one man claims his sons were deported, another mentions a family which has been detained. The UNHCR staffer takes down the details.
A man complains his two daughters have broken bones. He doesn't explain how that came about. "Now they're telling us to go to the borders to renew our visas. How can I do that with broken bones?"
And what about the new registration exercise UNHCR began two days earlier in its main office in Damascus? (The agency was almost overrun as 5,000 turned up on each of the first two days, to receive application forms and schedule appointments for the full registration).
What is the registration for? Are the bits of paper worth anything? Will they give people a bit more protection?
The UNHCR staffer announces that the agency has established three hotlines: people can now call in with their queries (a month later, at least 100 calls are being handled by the hotlines each day).
Lots of questions about resettlement to other countries. The UNHCR staff member explains that there are very few places, only the most vulnerable have a chance. The words bring little comfort – almost everyone who has spoken up so far seems vulnerable. The US has just announced it will take 7,000 more Iraqis from the region. The discussion whirls furiously round the subject of resettlement. Some become very animated, others visibly sink further into depression.
"Now all doors are closed in our face," says one man. His tone is flat, but edged with despair.
Simultaneously, elsewhere in some of the more run-down parts of this beautiful, ancient city, other UNHCR staff hold similar sessions, and a few thousand more file through the agency's main office, putting down their names so that they can come back at a later date for a full registration.
Jordan
Cut to the Jordanian capital, Amman, some 200 kilometres to the south, where UNHCR staff hold a small informal meeting with a group of ten Iraqi intellectuals, writers and artists in a downtown café. Jordan has around 1,000 officially recognized refugees (as well as anything between half a million and a million other Iraqis – many of whom came before 2003). Several of the recognized refugees are in the café, and they are angry with UNHCR.
They are the people who fell through the gap: they arrived in Jordan fleeing Saddam Hussein's Iraq, and in due course would probably have been resettled to another country. However, after Saddam was toppled by the 2003 war, resettlement of Iraqis ground to a halt everywhere.
Technically the underlying grounds for resettlement – the consequences of persecution by the Saddam Hussein regime – had disappeared. Now, they need to prove continued vulnerability in an entirely different environment filled with thousands of others who may be equally or more vulnerable and – as ever – competing for a limited number of places.
Resettlement has only started to ramp up again in 2007, and the available places – and resources to cope with large numbers of referrals – are lagging far behind the needs. UNHCR plans to make 20,000 resettlement referrals before the end of the year – but even if governments accept all those and more, it will only amount to a small fraction of the total number of refugees in the region. The pre-war refugees are alarmed that now, with so many extremely vulnerable new arrivals, they will miss out again.
"The refugees are understandably confused," said Hanan Hamdan, a UNHCR Protection Officer in Amman. "Expectations are high and the frustrations are high as well." The agency is carrying out its resettlement processing on twin tracks, so neither the 'old' nor the 'new' refugees miss out entirely.
Egypt
Even if Cairo has a population that is, according to some estimates, three times that of the whole of Jordan, 100,000 Iraqis is a lot of people for any city to absorb. Many of those who arrived after 2003 have gravitated towards one of Cairo's new outlying developments, 6th October City, where – with exceptions – they seem to be getting by.
"Many of the Iraqis that we see on a daily basis are very well educated and highly skilled. They have settled down successfully and some have started small businesses," said Arushi Ray, a UNHCR Community Services Officer.
Despite a crowded job market, the more resourceful Iraqis continue to find opportunities: "Once we arrived in Egypt we decided to use [our] limited resources to open this modest business," said an Iraqi baker – who used to be an engineer in Baghdad. "We're barely getting by – but we are supporting our families and can afford to send our children to school."
Fear and impoverishment
Everywhere you look in Syria and Jordan you find impoverished Iraqi mothers, with dead or missing husbands, traumatized children, people in need of major surgery, people at risk from cross-border vendettas, and people who – if they were sent back (both governments insist they are not deporting Iraqis) – would clearly be at great risk.
Many refugees are in a nebulous situation – by and large tolerated, but without a legal basis for their presence in the neighbouring countries. Many visas have expired. New ones are hard to come by. In addition, the old Iraqi passports are due to become invalid by the summer of 2007, and the new ones are, for many people, likely to be difficult to obtain.
The refugees are constantly looking over their shoulders, disturbed by rumours that people are being picked up in vans and sent back. True or not, such stories cause intense anxiety.
Despite their fears, most Iraqis recognize their presence is causing difficulties for their hosts. "I am thankful for the government for allowing us to come," said Nour, a 47-year-old mother of five with a missing husband. "And they have laws that we should respect and abide by. There is an Iraqi saying: if you are a stranger in someone's home you must respect them, and if a stranger comes to your house, you must look after him for a week. What is it like to have thousands and thousands of strangers in your country for a long time?"
She spreads her palms: "We are realistic. Those of us who have been here since 2000 – we can't go back to Iraq, and we can't stay here much longer either. We need solutions. We have angered the Jordanian population because we have pushed up prices. If we ride in a taxi, we hear how we have pushed up the price of food, of houses – everything. Wherever we go, we hear how we have made life more difficult for the Jordanians."
Colossal strains
"We are being extremely accommodating, understanding and lenient," said Government Spokesperson Nasser Judeh. "We take issue with reports that Jordan isn't doing enough."
And it is hard to disagree. If Jordan, a country with a population of 5.7 million, has 750,000 Iraqis on its territory (the early 2007 best guess), this would be the equivalent of just under 8 million refugees in France or the UK, 11 million in Germany and 40 million in the United States. In general, both Syria and Jordan have shown a very tolerant attitude towards the Iraqis.
"Jordan's systems are under pressure..." said Judeh. "Refugees coming into Jordan don't carry a bucket of water when they arrive. We are one of the ten poorest countries, in terms of water resources, in the world."
In addition, Jordan already has a very large population – close to half the total – of Palestinian refugees, whose original camps have turned into sprawling suburbs around Amman and other Jordanian cities. Many have permanent residence and are considered Jordanians, but they are still at the back of everyone's mind when they hear the word "refugee."
The continued presence of large numbers of Palestinians, decades after they fled from the Occupied Territories, is also a factor in Syria and Lebanon. This is one reason why none of the countries in the region seem to be contemplating setting up refugee camps. UNHCR is not keen on the idea of refugee camps either: "Camps in Jordan means camps in the desert," said UNHCR's Senior Protection Officer in Amman, Anne-Marie Deutschlander. "And camps in the desert are terrible places."
It is a similar story for Syria: "Many of the Iraqis have problems," said UNHCR's representative in Syria, Laurens Jolles. "We try to address individual problems as much as we can, but it is a huge task. Syria has been remarkably accommodating. Syrians do resent the effects this huge influx of people has had on their daily lives, but there is genuinely still sympathy for the Iraqis and anger and sadness at what has befallen their country."
No simple solutions
There are no easy solutions in sight in Syria or Jordan. Nor in Egypt, where, as of early March, there were believed to be as many as 100,000 Iraqis; in Lebanon, still recovering from last summer's war, and hosting another 40,000 Iraqis; and the Gulf States which may between them be hosting as many as 200,000.
Given the current situation in Iraq, repatriation is not on the near horizon – but still remains the only feasible long-term solution for most Iraqis. Local integration is clearly not an option in most cases, and resettlement will only help a relatively small proportion.
In the meantime, more infrastructure (schools, clinics, teachers, doctors), paid for by the outside world, is essential – Jordanian and Syrian schools and medical facilities cannot possibly provide education and health care for hundreds of thousands of extra clients.
"If there are 2 million refugees," said UNHCR's Director for the Middle East, Radhouane Nouicer, "then that means perhaps 540,000 extra children of school age, which means thousands of new classrooms. Let's imagine one extra teacher per 60 children – that means 9,000 extra teachers and salaries. Then you have blackboards, desks, books and other teaching materials – already, on education alone, you are talking tens of millions of dollars. Then you have health, social services, income generation projects. All vital, all very expensive, and all getting more necessary by the day, as the Iraqis' own money runs out. Already we are seeing much more extreme poverty among the new arrivals than was the case two or three years ago."
A number of local and international NGOs are struggling valiantly to run services for refugees – but many fewer than you would expect to find given the huge numbers involved. And perhaps most important – and difficult – of all, there has to be some way for the Iraqis to earn a living. Otherwise poverty and hunger will become seriously destabilizing factors for the Iraqis, and also for their host societies.
"The difficulties of dealing with huge populations of urban refugees are immense," said Radhouane Nouicer. "You can't pay all their rents, you can't feed everybody, you can't even keep track of how many people there are. But you can help around the edges – provide safety nets for the most vulnerable, help the governments out with infrastructure and personnel, try to get other countries to share the responsibilities and the costs. We have to do all of that – and at the same time pray for a quick end to the violence in Iraq. Because, at the end of the day, that is the only real solution."
For more details on programmes for Iraqis in the Middle East go to www.unhcr.org
Source: Refugees Magazine Issue 146: "Iraq Bleeds: Millions displaced by conflict, persecution and violence" (April 2007). Download the complete issue in pdf format: low-resolution (1.27 Mb) here or high-resolution (4.25 Mb) here.