Pulitzer Center Untold Stories

Iraqi lawmakers press government for refugee aid

Matthew Hay Brown

WASHINGTON -- Iraqi lawmakers are seeking $4 billion in next year’s national budget to assist the more than 4 million Iraqi refugees and internally displaced persons.

“Those people are Iraqis like any others and both the parliament and the government have commitments according to the constitution and international accords to protect and help them,” Abdul-Khaliq Zankana, the head of the Iraqi parliament’s committee on displacement and migration, told the U.N.-based humanitarian information service IRIN last week.

But if experience is any guide, the unprecented level of aid – it would dwarf all international assistance directed toward the displacement crisis to date – appears unlikely to meet approval.

"We asked the government last year to allocate 3 to 5 percent of the oil revenues in the 2008 budget to cover the needs of IDPs and refugees as they represent a big segment of the Iraqi people and are going through harsh conditions," Zankana said. "But unfortunately this call was ignored.

"A few months ago, we appealed for $2 billion to be allotted in the $21 billion complementary budget to the 2008 budget for the same purpose, but the government only allotted about $200 million.”

Iraqi officials have said that they are focused on bringing refugees home, not making their lives abroad more comfortable.

Read more at The Baltimore Sun

The Forgotten Women of Gori

By Louise Lee-Jones, guest columnist for the Pulitzer Center
All photos credited to MSI/RAISE/Louise Lee-Jones

Louise Lee-Jones is in Georgia accompanying a mini-study tour from the European Parliament looking at the reproductive health needs of women and young people following the recent fighting and displacement. As well as meeting with officials, they will be visiting temporary camps in both Tbilisi and Gori. Lee-Jones is in Georgia to provide technical input and to ensure that the message about the needs of women and young people is communicated.

Irene smiles shyly as she waits to be seen in the small tent that is the reproductive health clinic in Gori Tent City. She is 21 years old and is nine months pregnant with her first baby. Her baby is due in the next few weeks and she wants to have it in the hospital when the time comes. Fortunately, the hospital in Gori wasn’t destroyed unlike many others in the areas to the north of the city.

Irene fled her home with her husband and his family when the fighting between the Russian and Georgian forces came too close for comfort. Fearing for their lives, they fled first to her husband’s sister’s house and then to a camp for displaced people. The camp is near their home in Gori and they’ve been living there for the last month. “We are all staying together in one tent, with other people” says Irene. “There are eight of us in one tent. It is ok, but noisy and there’s no privacy,” she adds.

I’ve come to Georgia as part of a fact finding delegation from the European Parliamentary Forum on Population and Development to assess the reproductive health needs of the displaced people in the region. ...

Iraq: A tradition of welcome, threatened

Matthew Hay Brown

WASHINGTON -- There is broad agreement that the arrival of more than 1 million Iraqis has taxed the water supply in Syria, burdened the public education and health care systems and driven up housing prices.

Imad Moustapha worries that their presence is exacting another cost.

Moustapha, Syria’s ambassador to the United States, speaks of a Syrian tradition of welcoming refugees, from the Armenians who fled genocide in 1915 through the Lebanese who sought refuge from the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006.

“I know Syria has got a very bad image here in the United States,” he told me this week during an interview at the Syrian Embassy in Washington. “So at least this is something as a Syrian, not an ambassador or a politician, I can be proud about.”

But now, Moustapha says, that tradition is threatened.

“Syrians who are not very sophisticated are starting to loudly say we are paying a dear price because of those Iraqi refugees,” he said.  “Which is not really fair. But it’s happening, and it’s new.”

Read more at The Baltimore Sun

Kwame Dawes reads from HOPE

By Alex Amend

HOPE: Living and Loving with HIV in Jamaica

"It's about soul. It's about humanity. It's about beauty, and beauty can be ugly. But it's still beauty."    - Kwame Dawes

Poet, writer, and Pulitzer Center grantee Kwame Dawes read from his forthcoming book of poetry and discussed the experiences that inspired his work early Monday evening at Busboys and Poets.

Dawes' work, "Hope", is an assemblage of poems he wrote while exploring and reporting on the parts of Jamaica hit hardest by HIV and AIDS for the Pulitzer Center last winter and spring.

His perspective as a poet brings a unique rendering of the experience living with HIV in a country where stigma and discrimination often hinder social efforts to control the deadly virus.

Hostility on the streets of Yemen

By Ginny Hill, for BBC News

The day I was stoned in public happened to be my birthday.

I was walking along a quiet side street, close to the parliament building in Yemen's capital, Sanaa.

I was alone, but I did not think twice when a battered old pick-up truck drove towards me.

It was just like hundreds of other pick-up trucks that I saw every day in Yemen. There were two tribesmen in the driver's cabin and a handful of young men standing in the flat-bed, holding onto the side rails to keep upright.

They wore long white robes, curved daggers on belts around their waists and red and white head-dresses. Normal day wear for the average Yemeni man about town.

The truck had almost travelled past me when a rock hit me in the stomach, hurled from the back of the vehicle as it passed.

Indignant and furious, I whirled round on the spot and shouted after them: "Laish?" - an Arabic word for 'why'.

But the truck was already out of earshot and there were no witnesses to answer my question. So I dusted myself down and carried on...

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Sudan: A Second Darfur?

By Heba Aly

A delegation from the northern Sudanese village of Selem visits the mayor's office to complain of services in their village. July 2008.

It's a flashy headline, but a question that some people are legitimately asking themselves. Could there be a rebellion in the north, as there was in Darfur, to the west?

The answer depends on who you ask.

Sri Lanka: Clear the Way

Journalists have been barred from covering the war in Sri Lanka's battered northern region, and now aid workers are out of the picture. As government forces aggressively advance toward the Tamil Tiger capital, Kilinochchi, tens of thousands of displaced Tamils have lost the only bulwark between them and two sides with grim human rights records.

After the government ordered aid workers last week to leave the rebel-held Vanni area, saying it could not guarantee their safety, hundreds of civilians protested against their departure. Scores blocked roads to prevent UN vehicles from leaving the conflict zone. They knew it could only spell worse.

Thai police corruption leads to sale of pre-teens into sex trade

By Joel Brinkley, for the Pulitzer Center

In this little town on the Burmese border, parents sell their young daughters into sexual slavery for less than the cost of a toaster oven. These little girls, 11 or 12 years old, are forced to serve in brothels and are not permitted to leave.

This has been going on for many years. I know this to be true. I was here before, in 2001.

Back then, brothel agents visited the schools to look over the fourth graders. They offered cash down to parents of 8-year-olds for the right to buy their daughters when they finished the sixth grade.

The agents dressed in business suits and called themselves professors. They told parents they would take their girls to good jobs in the city - nannies, secretaries, etc. - where they could also continue their educations. Instead they were sold to brothels and held captive until they paid off that payment to their parents - the cost of transport and numerous other charges piled on. That could take years.

I interviewed 12-year-old Noie Wongboonma, whose mother had just tried to pull her out of school and put her on the "bus to Bangkok," as everyone here refers to that trip to perdition.

"Sometimes my mother wants to sell me," she said, her head bowed. "I feel very sad that my mother would want to do that. I don't dare argue with her. But I don't want to go where my mother wants to send me."

Continue reading at Taiwan News.com

Iraq: 'No reason to celebrate'

Matthew Hay Brown

WASHINGTON -- The United States has met its goal of resettling 12,000 Iraqi refugees for the fiscal year, with a thousand more due to arrive by the end of the month, officials announced this morning.

With the system for processing Iraqis now "robust," Ambassador James Foley told reporters, the United States expects to admit at least 17,000 more refugees in 2009.

"This is no reason to celebrate," said Foley, the State Department’s point person on the crisis. "Celebration will come only when the suffering of all displaced Iraqis has come to an end. That is, when they can return to their homes in a safe and secure Iraq, a day we hope is nearing."

The 12,000^th Iraqi refugee landed in the United States on Sept. 11, Foley said. The total was up to 12,118 by the end of the day, with more than 1,000 more booked to travel by the end of the month.

Critics say the country still isn’t doing enough.

"The U.S. certainly met its goal for this year, but next year's target of resettling 17,000 Iraqi refugees falls far short of what is needed," said Kristele Younes, a senior advocate with Washington-based Refugees International.

Read more at The Baltimore Sun

Iraqi refugees: Perspectives on the U.S. responsibility

Matthew Hay Brown

WASHINGTON -- Last week, Joost Hiltermann of the International Crisis Group became the latest in a series of refugee advocates to tell me that the United States owed a special obligation to the Iraqis that have fled the country since the 2003 invasion.

“The United States is responsible for this mess, frankly,” said Hiltermann, a Middle East analyst for the International Crisis Group. “It certainly was responsible for allowing the chaos that enveloped Iraq from 2005 on to happen. And it should therefore bear the responsibilities, the consequences.”

John Bolton, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, has a very different view of the U.S. obligation to the refugees.

“It was not the responsibility of the United States to turn the entire Iraqi population into a client of welfare because of the overthrow of Saddam Hussein,” Bolton, now a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told me today. “The effort was to free the people of Iraq from this Baath Party dictatorship and to eliminate the threat that Saddam’s regime posed to the of the region and the rest of the world because of his aggressive conduct. Now, I think we did that.”

Bolton, who served as the U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations from August 2005 to December 2006, objected to what he described as an inclination by some toward “blaming every consequence of the overthrow of Saddam on the United States.”

Read more at The Baltimore Sun