Page 1 of 2 Iraq's broken pieces don't fit together
By Michael Schwartz
A tidal wave of misery is engulfing Iraq - and it isn't the usual violence that
Americans are accustomed to hearing about and tuning out. To be sure, it's
rooted in that violence, but this misery is social and economic in nature. It
dislodges people from their jobs, sweeps them from their homes, and carries
them off from families and communities. It leaves them stranded in hostile
towns or foreign countries, with no anchor to resist the moment when the next
wave of displacement sweeps over them.
They are called refugees if they wash ashore outside the country or IDPs
("internally displaced persons") if their landing place is within Iraq's
borders. Either way, they are normally left with no permanent housing, no
reliable livelihood, no community support
and no government aid. All the normal social props that support human lives are
removed, replaced with ... nothing.
Overlapping waves of dispossessed
In its first four years, the Iraq war created three overlapping waves of
refugees and IDPs.
It all began with the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), which the George W
Bush administration set up inside Baghdad's Green Zone and, in May 2003, placed
under the control of L Paul Bremer. The CPA immediately began dismantling
Iraq's state apparatus. Thousands of Ba'athist party bureaucrats were purged
from the government; tens of thousands of workers were laid off from shuttered,
state-owned industries; hundreds of thousands of Iraqi military personnel were
dismissed from Saddam Hussein's dismantled military.
Their numbers soon multiplied as the ripple effect of their lost buying power
rolled through the economy. Many of the displaced found other (less
remunerative) jobs; some hunkered down to wait out bad times; still others left
their homes and sought work elsewhere, with the most marketable going to nearby
countries where their skills were still in demand. They were the leading edge
of the first wave of Iraqi refugees.
As the post-war chaos continued, kidnapping became the country's growth
industry, targeting any prosperous family with the means to pay ransom. This
only accelerated the rate of departure, particularly among those who had
already had their careers disrupted. A flood of professional, technical, and
managerial workers fled their homes and Iraq in search of personal and job
security.
The spirit of this initial exodus was eloquently expressed by an Iraqi blogger
with the online handle of AnaRki13:
Not so much a migration as a forced
exodus. Scientists, engineers, doctors, architects, writers, poets, you name it
- everybody is getting out of town.
Why? Simple: 1. There is no real job market in Iraq. 2. Even if you have a good
job, chances are good you'll get kidnapped or killed. It's just not worth it
staying here. Sunni, Shi'ite, or Christian - everybody, we're all leaving, or
have already left.
One of my friends keeps berating me about how I should love this country, the
land of my ancestors, where I was born and raised; how I should be grateful and
return to the place that gave me everything. I always tell him the same thing:
"Iraq, as you and me once knew it, is lost. What's left of it, I don't want
..."
The most famous doctors and university professors have already left the country
because many of them, including ones I knew personally, were assassinated or
killed, and the rest got the message - and got themselves jobs in the West,
where they were received warmly and given high positions. Other millions of
Iraqis, just ordinary Iraqis, left and are leaving - without plans and with
much hope.
In 2004, the Americans triggered a second wave of
refugees when they began to attack and invade insurgent strongholds, as they
did the Sunni city of Fallujah in November 2004, using the full kinetic force
of their military. Whether the Americans called for evacuation or not, large
numbers of local residents were forced to flee battleground neighborhoods or
cities. The process was summarized in a thorough review of the history of the
war compiled by the Global Policy Forum and 35 other international
non-governmental organizations:
Among those who flee, the most
fortunate are able to seek refuge with out-of-town relatives, but many flee
into the countryside where they face extremely difficult conditions, including
shortages of food and water. Eventually the Red Crescent, the UN or relief
organizations set up camps. In Fallujah, a city of about 300,000, over 216,000
displaced persons had to seek shelter in overcrowded camps during the winter
months, inadequately supplied with food, water and medical care. An estimated
100,000 fled al-Qaim, a city of 150,000, according to the Iraqi Red Crescent
Society (IRCS). In Ramadi, about 70% of the city's 400,000 people left in
advance of the US onslaught. These moments mark the beginning of Iraq's massive
displacement crisis.
While most of these refugees returned
after the fighting, a significant minority did not, either because their homes
(or livelihoods) had been destroyed, or because they were afraid of continuing
violence. Like the economically displaced of the previous wave, these refugees
sought out new areas that were less dangerous or more prosperous, including
neighboring countries. And, as with that first wave, it was the professionals
as well as the technical and managerial workers who were most likely to have
the resources to leave Iraq.
In early 2005 the third wave began, developing by the next year into the
veritable tsunami of ethnic cleansing and civil war that pushed vast numbers of
Iraqis from their homes. The precipitating incidents, according to Ali Allawi -
the Iraqi finance minister when this third wave began - were initially
triggered by the second-wave-refugees pushed out of the Sunni city of Fallujah
in the winter of 2004:
Refugees leaving Fallujah had converged on the
western Sunni suburbs of Baghdad, Amriya and Ghazaliya, which had come under
the control of the insurgency. Insurgents, often backed by relatives of the
Fallujah refugees, turned on the Shi'ite residents of these neighborhoods.
Hundreds of Shi'ite families were driven from their homes, which were then
seized by the refugees. Sunni Arab resentment against the Shi'ite's
"collaboration" with the occupation's forces had been building up, exacerbated
by the apparent indifference of the Shi'ites to the assault on Fallujah.
In turn, the Shi'ites were becoming incensed by the daily attacks on policemen
and soldiers, who were mostly poor Shi'ite men. The targeting of Sunnis in
majority Shi'ite neighborhoods began in early 2005. In the Shaab district of
Baghdad, for instance, the assassination of a popular Sadrist cleric, Sheikh
Haitham al-Ansari, led to the formation of one of the first Shi'ite death
squads ... The cycle of killings, assassinations, bombings and expulsions fed
into each other, quickly turning to a full-scale ethnic cleansing of city
neighborhoods and towns.
The process only accelerated in early
2006, after the bombing of the Golden Dome in Samarra, a revered Shi'ite
shrine, and crested in 2007 when the American military "surge" onto the streets
of Baghdad loosened the hold of Sunni insurgents on many mixed as well as Sunni
neighborhoods in the capital. During the year of the "surge", all but 25 or so
of the approximately 200 mixed neighborhoods in Baghdad became ethnically
homogenous. A similar process took place in the city's southern suburbs.
As minority groups in mixed neighborhoods and cities were driven out, they too
joined the army of displaced persons, often settling into vacated homes in
newly purified neighborhoods dominated by their own sect. But many, like those
in the previous waves of refugees, found they had to move to new locales far
away from the violence, including a large number who, once again, simply left
Iraq. As with previous waves, the more prosperous were the most likely to
depart, taking with them professional, technical and managerial skills.
Among those who departed in this third wave was Riverbend, the pseudonymous
"Girl Blogger from Baghdad", who had achieved international fame for her
beautifully crafted reports on life in Iraq under the US occupation. Her
description of her journey into exile chronicled the emotional tragedy
experienced by millions of Iraqis:
The last few hours in the house were
a blur. It was time to go and I went from room to room saying goodbye to
everything. I said goodbye to my desk - the one I'd used all through high
school and college. I said goodbye to the curtains and the bed and the couch. I
said goodbye to the armchair. I said goodbye to the big table over which we'd
gathered for meals and to do homework. I said goodbye to the ghosts of the
framed pictures that once hung on the walls, because the pictures have long
since been taken down and stored away - but I knew just what hung where. I said
goodbye to the silly board games we inevitably fought over - the Arabic
Monopoly with the missing cards and money that no one had the heart to throw
away ...
The trip was long and uneventful, other than two checkpoints being run by
masked men. They asked to see identification, took a cursory glance at the
passports and asked where we were going. The same was done for the car behind
us. Those checkpoints are terrifying but I've learned that the best technique
is to avoid eye contact, answer questions politely and pray under your breath.
My mother and I had been careful not to wear any apparent jewelry, just in
case, and we were both in long skirts and head scarves ...
How is it that a border no one can see or touch stands between car bombs,
militias, death squads and ... peace, safety? It's difficult to believe - even
now. I sit here and write this and wonder why I can't hear the explosions ...
The human toll
The number of Iraqis who flooded neighboring lands, not to speak of even
approximate estimates of the number of internal refugees, remains notoriously
difficult to determine, but the most circumspect of observers have reported
constantly accelerating rates of displacement since the Bush administration's
March 2003 invasion. These numbers quickly outstripped the flood of expatriates
who had fled the country during Saddam's brutal era.
By early 2006, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees was already
estimating that 1.7 million Iraqis had left the country and that perhaps an
equal number of internal refugees had been created in the same three-year
period. The rate rose dramatically yet again as sectarian violence and ethnic
expulsions took hold; the International Organization for Migration estimated
the displacement rate during 2006 and 2007 at about 60,000 per month. In
mid-2007, Iraq was declared by Refugees International to be the
"fastest-growing refugee crisis in the world", while the United Nations called
the crisis "the worst human displacement in Iraq's modern history".
Syria, the only country that initially placed no restrictions on Iraqi
immigration, had (according to UN statistics) taken in about 1.25 million
displaced Iraqis by early 2007. In addition, the UN estimated that more than
500,000 Iraqi refugees were in Jordan, as many as 70,000 in Egypt, approaching
60,000 in Iran, about 30,000 in Lebanon, approximately 200,000 spread across
the Gulf States, and another 100,000 in Europe, with a final 50,000 spread
around the globe. The United States, which had accepted about 20,000 Iraqi
refugees during Saddam's years, admitted 463 additional ones between the start
of the war and mid-2007.
Bush's "surge" strategy, begun in January 2007, amplified the flood, especially
of the internally displaced, still further. According to James Glanz and
Stephen Farrell of the New York Times, "American-led operations have brought
new fighting, driving fearful Iraqis from their homes at much higher rates than
before the tens of thousands of additional troops arrived." The combined effect
of the American offensive and accelerated ethnic expulsions generated an
estimated displacement rate of 100,000 per month in Baghdad alone during the
first half of 2007, a figure that surprised even Said Hakki, the director of
the Iraqi Red Crescent, who had been monitoring the refugee crisis since the
beginning of the war.
During 2007, according to UN estimates, Syria admitted an additional 150,000
refugees. With Iraqis by then constituting almost 10% of the country's
population, the Syrian government, feeling the strain on resources, began
putting limits on the unending flood and attempted to launch a mass
repatriation policy. Such repatriation efforts have, so far, been largely
fruitless. Even when violence in Baghdad began to decline in late 2007,
refugees attempting to return found that their abandoned homes had often either
been badly damaged in American offensives or, more likely, appropriated by
strangers (often of a different sect), or were in "cleansed" neighborhoods that
were now inhospitable to them.
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