Page 2 of 2 Iraq's broken pieces don't fit together
By Michael Schwartz
In the same years, the weight of displaced persons inside Iraq grew ever more
quickly. Estimated by the UN at 2.25 million in September 2007, this tidal flow
of internally displaced, often homeless, families began to weigh on the
resources of the provinces receiving them. Najaf, the first large city south of
Baghdad, where the most sacred Shi'ite shrines in Iraq are located, found that
its population of 700,000 had increased by an estimated 400,000 displaced
Shi'ites. In three other southern Shi'ite provinces, IDPs came by mid-2007 to
constitute over half the population.
The burden was crushing. By 2007, Karbala, one of the most burdened provinces,
was attempting to enforce a draconian
measure passed the previous year: new residents would be expelled unless
officially sponsored by two members of the provincial council. Other governates
also tried in various ways, and largely without success, to staunch the flow of
refugees.
Whether inside or outside the country, even prosperous families before the war
faced grim conditions. In Syria, where a careful survey of conditions was
undertaken in October 2007, only 24% of all Iraqi families were supported by
salaries or wages. Most families were left to live as best they could on
dwindling savings or remittances from relatives, and a third of those with
funds on hand expected to run out within three months. Under this kind of
pressure, increasing numbers were reduced to sex work or other exploitative (or
black market) sources of income.
Food was a major issue for many families; according to the United Nations,
nearly half needed "urgent food assistance", substantial proportion of adults
reported skipping at least one meal a day in order to feed their children. Many
others endured foodless days "in order to keep up with rent and utilities". One
refugee mother told McClatchy reporter Hannah Allam, "We buy just enough meat
to flavor the food - we buy it with pennies ... I can't even buy a kilo of
sweets for Eid [a major annual celebration]."
According to a rigorous McClatchy Newspaper survey, most Iraqi refugees in
Syria were housed in crowded conditions with more than one person per room
(sometimes many more). Twenty-five percent of families lived in one-room
apartments; about one in six refugees had been diagnosed with a (usually
untreated) chronic disease; and one-fifth of the children had had diarrhea in
the two weeks before being questioned.
While Syrian officials had aided refugee parents in getting over two-thirds of
school-aged children enrolled in schools, 46% had dropped out - due mainly to
lack of appropriate immigration documents, insufficient funds to pay for school
expenses, or a variety of emotional issues - and the drop-out rate was
escalating. And keep in mind, the Iraqis who made it to Syria were generally
the lucky ones, far more likely to have financial resources or employable
skills.
Like the expatriate refugees, internally displaced Iraqis faced severe and
constantly declining conditions. The almost powerless Iraqi central government,
largely trapped inside Baghdad's Green Zone, requires that people who move from
one place to another register in person in Baghdad; if they fail to do so, they
lose eligibility for the national program that subsidizes the purchase of small
amounts of a few staple foods. Such registration was mostly impossible for
families driven from their homes in the country's vicious civil war. With no
way to "register," families displaced outside of Baghdad entered their new
residences without even the increasingly meager safety net offered by
guaranteed subsidies of basic food supplies.
To make matters worse, almost three-quarters of the displaced were women or
children and very few of the intact families had working fathers. Unemployment
rates in most cities to which they were forced to move were already at or above
50%, so prostitution and child labor increasingly became necessary options.
UNICEF (The United Nations Children's Fund ) reported that a large proportion
of children in such families were hungry, clinically underweight, and short for
their age. "In some areas, up to 90% of the [displaced] children are not in
school", the UN agency reported.
Losing precious resources
The job backgrounds of an extraordinary proportion of Iraqi refugees in Syria
were professional, managerial or administrative. In other words, they were
collectively the repository of the precious human capital that would otherwise
have been needed to sustain, repair and eventually rebuild their country's
ravaged infrastructure.
In Iraq, approximately 10% of adults had attended college; more than one-third
of the refugees in Syria were university educated. Whereas less than 1% of
Iraqis had a postgraduate education, nearly 10% of refugees in Syria had
advanced degrees, including 4.5% with doctorates. At the opposite end of the
economic spectrum, fully 20% of all Iraqis had no schooling, but only a
relative handful of the refugees arriving in Syria (3%) had no education. These
proportions were probably even more striking in other more distant receiving
lands, where entry was more difficult.
The reasons for this remarkable brain drain are not hard to find. Even the
desperate process of fleeing your home turns out to require resources, and so
refugees from most disasters who travel great distances tend to be
disproportionately prosperous, as the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New
Orleans so painfully illustrated.
In Iraq, this tendency was enhanced by American policy. The mass privatization
and de-Ba'athification policies of the Bush administration ensured that large
numbers of professional, technical and managerial workers, in particular, would
be cast out of their former lives. This tendency was only exacerbated by the
development of the kidnapping industry, focusing its attentions as it did on
families with sufficient resources to pay handsome ransoms. It was amplified
when some insurgent groups began assassinating remaining government officials,
university professors and other professionals.
The exodus into the Iraqi diaspora has severely depleted the country's human
capital. In early 2006, the United States Committee on Refugees and Immigrants
estimated that a full 40% of Iraqi's professional class had left the country,
taking with them their irreplaceable expertise. Universities and medical
facilities were particularly hard hit, with some reporting less than 20% of
needed staff on hand. The oil industry suffered from what the Wall Street
Journal called a "petroleum exodus" that included the departure of two-thirds
of its top 100 managers, as well as significant numbers of managerial and
professional workers.
Even before the huge 2007 exodus from Baghdad, the United Nations Commissioner
of Refugees warned that "the skills required to provide basic services are
becoming more and more scarce", pointing particularly to doctors, teachers,
computer technicians and even skilled craftsmen like bakers.
By mid-2007, the loss of these resources was visible in the everyday
functioning of Iraqi society. By then, medical facilities commonly required
patients' families to act as nurses and technicians and were still unable to
perform many services. Schools were often closed, or opened only sporadically,
because of an absence of qualified teachers. Universities postponed or canceled
required courses or qualifying examinations because of inadequate staff. At the
height of an incipient cholera epidemic in the summer of 2007, water
purification plants were idled because needed technicians could not be found.
The most devastating impact of the Iraqi refugee crisis, however, has probably
been on the very capacity of the national government (which de-Ba'athification
and privatization had already left in a fragile state) to administer anything.
In every area that such a government might touch, the missing managerial,
technical, and professional talent and expertise has had a devastating effect,
with post-war "reconstruction" particularly hard hit. Even the ability of the
government to disperse its income (mostly from oil revenues) has been crippled
by what cabinet ministers have termed "a shortage of employees trained to write
contracts" and "the flight of scientific and engineering expertise from the
country".
The depths of the problem (as well as the massive levels of corruption that
went with it) could be measured by the fact that the Electrical Ministry spent
only 26% of its capital budget in 2006; the remaining three-quarters went
unspent. Yet, at that level of disbursement, it still outperformed most
government agencies and ministries in a major way. Under pressure from American
occupation officials to improve its performance in 2007, the government made
concerted efforts to increase both its budget and its disbursements for
reconstruction. Despite initially optimistic reports, the news was grim by
year's end. Actual expenditures on electrical infrastructure might, for
example, have slipped to as low as 1% of the budgeted amount.
Even more symptomatic were the few successes in infrastructural rebuilding
found by New York Times reporter James Glanz in a survey of capital
construction throughout the country. Most of the successful programs he
reviewed were initiated and managed by officials connected to local and
provincial governments. They discovered that success actually depended on
avoiding any interaction with the ineffective and corrupt central government.
The provincial governor of Babil province, Sallem S al-Mesamawe, described the
key to his province's success: "We jumped over the routine, the bureaucracy,
and we depend on new blood - a new team." They had learned this lesson after
using provincial money and local contractors to build a school, only to have it
remain closed because the national government was unable to provide the
necessary furniture.
The government's staggering institutional incapacity is, in fact, a complex
phenomenon with many sources beyond the drain of human capital. The flood of
managers, professionals and technicians out of the country, however, has been a
critical obstacle to any productive reconstruction. Worse yet, the departure of
so many crucial figures is probably to a considerable extent irreversible,
ensuring a grim near-future for the country. After all, this has been a "brain
drain" on a scale seldom seen in our era.
Many exiles still intend to, even long to, return when (or if) the situation
improves, but time is always the enemy of such intentions. The moment an
individual arrives in a new country, he or she begins creating social ties that
become ever more significant as a new life takes hold - and this is even truer
for those who leave with their families, as so many Iraqis have done. Unless
this network-building process is disrupted, for many the probability of return
fades with each passing month.
Those with marketable skills, even in the dire circumstances facing most Iraqi
refugees, have little choice but to keep seeking work that exploits their
training. The most marketable are the most likely to succeed and so to begin
building new careers. As time slips by, the best, the brightest, and the most
important carriers of precious human capital are lost.
The displacement tsunami
The degradation of Iraq under the American occupation regime was what initially
set in motion the forces that led to the exile of much of the country's most
precious human resources - absolutely crucial capital, even if of a kind not
usually considered when talk turns to investing in "nation-building". How,
after all, can you "reconstruct" the ravaged foundations of a bombed-out nation
without the necessary professional, technical and managerial personnel? Without
them, Iraq must continue its downward spiral toward a nation of slum cities.
The orgy of failure and corruption in 2007 was an unmitigated disaster for
Iraqi society, as well as an embarrassment for the American occupation. From
the point of view of long-term American goals in Iraq, however, this storm
cloud, like so many others, had a silver lining. The Iraqi government's
incapacity to perform at almost any level became but further justification for
the claims first made by Bremer at the very beginning of the occupation: that
the country's reconstruction would be best handled by private enterprise.
Moreover, the mass flight of Iraqi professionals, managers and technicians has
meant that expertise for reconstruction has simply been unavailable inside the
country. This has, in turn, validated a second set of claims made by Bremer:
that reconstruction could only be managed by large outside contractors.
This neo-liberal reality was brought into focus in late 2007, as the last of
the money allocated by the U.S. Congress for Iraqi reconstruction was being
spent. A "petroleum exodus" (first identified by the Wall Street Journal) had
long ago meant that most of the engineers needed for maintaining the decrepit
oil business were already foreigners, mostly "imported from Texas and
Oklahoma".
The foreign presence had, in fact, become so pervasive that the main
headquarters for the maintenance and development of the Rumaila oil field in
southern Iraq (the source of more than two-thirds of the country's oil at
present) runs on both Iraqi and Houston time. The American firms in charge of
the field's maintenance and development, KBR and PIJV, have been utilizing a
large number of subcontractors, most of them American or British, very few of
them Iraqi.
These American-funded projects, though, have been merely "stopgaps". When the
money runs out, vast new moneys will be needed just to sustain Rumaila's
production at its present level.
According to Harpers Magazine senior editor Luke Mitchell, who visited the
field in the summer of 2007, Iraqi engineers and technicians are "smart enough
and ambitious enough" to sustain and "upgrade" the system once the American
contracts expire, but such a project would take upwards of two decades because
of the compromised condition of the government and the lack of skilled local
engineers and technicians. The likely outcome, when the American money departs,
therefore is either an inadequate effort in which work proceeds "only in fits
and starts"; or, more likely, new contracts in which the foreign companies
would "continue their work", paid for by the Iraqi government.
With regard to the petroleum industry, therefore, what the refugee crisis
guaranteed was long-term Iraqi dependence on outsiders. In every other key
infrastructural area, a similar dependence was developing: electrical power,
the water system, medicine, and food were, de facto, being "integrated" into
the global system, leaving oil-rich Iraq dependent on outside investment and
largesse for the foreseeable future. Now, that's a 20-year plan for you, one
that at least 4.5 million Iraqis, out of their homes and, in many cases, out of
the country as well, will be in no position to participate in.
Most horror stories come to an end, but the most horrible part of this horror
story is its never-ending quality. Those refugees who have left Iraq now face a
miserable limbo life, as Syria and other receiving countries exhaust their
meager resources and seek to expel many of them. Those seeking shelter within
Iraq face the depletion of already minimal support systems in degrading host
communities whose residents may themselves be threatened with displacement.
From the vast out-migration and internal migrations of its desperate citizens
comes damage to society as a whole that is almost impossible to estimate. The
displacement of people carries with it the destruction of human capital. The
destruction of human capital deprives Iraq of its most precious resource for
repairing the damage of war and occupation, condemning it to further
infrastructural decline. This tide of infrastructural decline is the surest
guarantee of another wave of displacement, of future floods of refugees.
As long as the United States keeps trying to pacify Iraq, it will create wave
after wave of misery.
Michael Schwartz, professor of sociology at Stony Brook University, has
written extensively on popular protest and insurgency. This report on the Iraqi
refugee crisis is from his forthcoming Tomdispatch book, War Without
End: The Iraq Debacle in Context (Haymarket Books, June 2007). His email address
is Ms42@optonline.net.
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