Pulitzer Center Untold Stories

Iraq: Particularly vulnerable

Matthew Hay Brown

WASHINGTON -- The news today that nearly 100 Sudanese refugees in Iraq now are headed to Romania highlights the plight of a particularly vulnerable group: Those who were already refugees in Iraq when the war triggered the current crisis.

The 97 men, women and children fled Sudan in the late 1980s. While they fear a return to that troubled country, a spokesman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees said today, conditions in Iraq have hardly been much better.

Since the fall of Saddam Hussein, spokesman Ron Redmond said in Geneva, the Sudanese have suffered abuse, blackmail, eviction and assaults by militias. A total of 17 were killed between December 2004 and February 2005.

“Because of this targeting by the insurgent groups, the refugees tried to flee Iraq but were not successful,” Redmond said. They were stranded in a camp outside Al Rutbah town in the Al Anbar desert, some 50 miles east of the Jordanian border.

“Here they were subject to severe weather conditions and harassment by militias,” Redmond said.

The experience in some ways mirrors that of Palestinians in Iraq, a group that was seen as priviledged under Saddam but has since been targeted by militants. A coalition of refugee advocates reported last month that some 3,000 Palestinians remain stranded in three camps along the Iraqi-Syrian border.

Read more at The Baltimore Sun

Iraq: A grim milestone, and a horrible dilemma

Matthew Hay Brown

WASHINGTON -- The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees announced on Monday that it had referred its 50,000th Iraqi for resettlement. Buried in the press release is the story of another refugee facing a horrible dilemma.

The woman, identified as “Reem,” fled Iraq for Damascus with a two-year-old daughter after her husband and another infant daughter were abducted by masked men in Baghdad. The release says she has paid US$3,000 trying to find out what happened to them, to no avail.

Now she has been accepted for resettlement to the United States. She cannot decide between continuing to look for her loved ones or moving on. She has until early next week to accept resettlement.

"Sometimes I wish the monsters that did this to my little baby and my husband would call me to tell me they are both dead so that I could leave,” she says. “I'm so tired, so very tired of hoping.”

Read more at The Baltimore Sun

Iraq: In Northeast Baltimore, a 'typical American family'

Matthew Hay Brown

BALTIMORE -- I was invited to dinner last night by a family that in some ways typifies the Iraqi resettlement experience.

Abu Rawan is a 62-year-old engineer who served as an interpreter and adviser to U.S. commanders and diplomats after the 2003 invasion. His wife is a pediatrician; they have two sons, aged 13 and 14.

After a series of anonymous threats – over the phone, under the door, through neighbors – the family fled Baghdad in December 2006. They spent time in Syria and Jordan before arriving in the United States in May.

Abu Rawan – an Arabic construction that means “father of Rawan” – had asked to be resettled near Washington so he could look for government work as a cultural and political advisor on Iraq. He blames much of the violence in Iraq on a failure by Americans and Iraqis to understand each other.

His wife, meanwhile, wants to resume her medical practice.

For now, Abu Rawan is working as a loan counselor with a Baltimore nonprofit. He wants to pursue graduate study in political science. His wife, who can’t practice here until she passes the U.S. Medical Licensing Examination, has found part-time work as a medical interpreter at Johns Hopkins Hospital.

Read more at The Baltimore Sun

Iraq: U.S. resettlements off to another slow start

Updated 12/9/08 with State Department comment

Matthew Hay Brown

WASHINGTON -- After admitting record numbers of Iraqi refugees in the final months of fiscal 2008, the United States is off to a slow start in the first months of the fiscal ’09.

The country admitted 705 Iraqis as refugees in October and 738 in November, according to numbers released last week by the State Department. That’s a steep decline from the more than 2,000 per month who landed here in July, August and September.

The 1,443 admitted in the first two months of fiscal 2009 is also well off the pace required to reach the minimum of 17,000 predicted for the year by Ambassador Thomas Foley, the top State Department official on refugee issues. But it does follow a pattern: Admissions started slowly last year, too – just 812 were admitted in the first two months of fiscal ’08 – before picking up in the final months to soar past the goal of 12,000. In the end, 13,823 were admitted.

Officials say refugee admissions are cyclical in nature, and that a target of 17,000, for example, doesn’t mean that one twelfth of that number will be admitted every month. They still anticipate reaching their goal by the time the fiscal year ends next September.

"Refugee resettlement numbers are always lower at the beginning of the fiscal year," a State Department official said today. "There is a hiatus as the cooperative agreements with the [non-governmental agencies] who do the processing overseas and the resettlement here expire on September 30th every year, and are re-negotiated and signed at the beginning of each fiscal year."

Refugee advocates say the record numbers reached over the summer demonstrate a capacity that is now being underused.

“Just look at what we’ve achieved in the last three or four months,” Human Rights First analyst Amelia Templeton told me in September. “If we were to continue that, that would put us at about 24,000 admissions for next year. I think, as a starting goal, that we ought to at the very least commit to doing what we’re doing right now.”

Read more at The Baltimore Sun

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

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

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

The Iraqi exodus: A second wave?

Matthew Hay Brown

WASHINGTON -- While the Iraqi refugee populations in Syria, Jordan and other neighbors appear to have stabilized, one analyst in the region says conditions in Iraq suggest the possibility of another exodus.

"I see very much the lack of political progress as a potential trigger," Joost Hiltermann, a Middle East analyst with the International Crisis Group, said Friday on the telephone from Istanbul. "And the only thing that’s preventing this trigger from being fired is the fact that the United States is still there.

"Everybody’s waiting for the new president, and who it will be, and what the person’s policy will be. And if it’s going to be a drawdown of U.S. forces, which it may well be, without leaving behind a viable situation … we’re going to have a return to fighting between what are essentially militias."

Hiltermann said the United States "plays the pivotal role" in "brokering the political deals that will be needed to heal this ailing polity," and he identified what he considers to be the key issues awaiting resolution: oil revenues, constitutional review, and federalism.

"All these very big, important questions that, if they’re not fixed, may prompt a return to fighting, and therefore not only the non-return of the refugees but possibly a new wave of refugees," he said.

Read more at The Baltimore Sun

Amman U.N. representative talks about Iraqi refugees

Imran Riza, the representative in Amman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, discusses in an interview with Matthew Brown the challenges facing Iraqis in Jordan, and the ways in which they differ from more traditional refugees.

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