On Thursday night, The Open Society Institute hosted a panel on The Iraqi Refugee Crisis. With 2 million Iraqis displaced to other counties, and 2.5 million displaced internally, this is the worst refugee crisis in the middle east in fifty years. The panelists spoke from a place of urgency and frustration. The situation is getting worse and the current political climate completely fails to address this huge humanitarian responsibility on the United State’s hands.
For some time, the Iraqi government was focused on bringing refugees back to Iraq. The motive was to show that things were getting better. In fact they have not, and the internally displaced are navigating a very dangerous environment. George Packer said, “Iraq was a prison, but a prison where people could survive if they kept their heads down. Now, Iraq is a killing field.” Omer Salih Mahdi, refugee and director of Baghdad Hospital: Inside the Red Zone, talked about his own losses, and the experience of finding his father in the morgue.
Kristele Younes of Refugees International has been lobbying congress about the increasingly desperate situation. She pointed out that the strain on the region, with refugees flooding places like Syria and Jordan, is causing increased resentment against the United States. In addition to the responsibility that the United States has toward people that we propose to be saving by waging this war, there are obvious political motives for addressing the refugee crisis. A further destabilized Middle East is not in the United State’s best interests. Popular rhetoric around the war as framed by the US government and by the press makes it difficult for the public to distinguish between insurgents and civilians. The Iraqis that we are freeing have become an immaterial abstraction, and the Iraqis we meet on a daily basis, especially in international cities like New York, are construed as a threat.
Lori Grinker presented a multimedia piece on refugee families in Jordan. The multimedia piece brought out the depth of sorrow and pain experienced by those who live with physical and emotional scars of war and now scramble in foreign lands to make ends meet. Her documentary work on the issue can currently be viewed at the Nailya Alexander Gallery in New York.
During the question and answer part of the panel, Haider Hamza, a Fulbright scholar from Iraq, shared some of the restraints put upon the Iraqi Fulbrights that are not places on those coming from other countries. He said they need to sign forms saying that they will not apply for asylum while in the US, and they are not allowed to travel back to Iraq during their vacation time. He also reported one instance of a Fulbright scholar getting pregnant. When she could no longer hide it in her 8th month of pregnancy, she was sent back to Iraq. You can hear more from Haider on a June 2007 episode of This American Life.
Can the United States really just pull out? Fighting needs to stop, and the presence we have currently in Iraq is shameful. So much of the debate in the primaries talks about troops, their removal, or their continued presence. This does not address the need for responsible and responsive aid for the victims of the war. During the panel, the current situation was contrasted with the resettlement of Vietnam refugees, both in Vietnam and in the United States. What are we doing differently this time, and why?
