Refugee Crisis Threatens Future of Iraq
Michael Schwartz, Tomdispatch.com
War on Iraq: Close to 5 million Iraqis have fled their homes, depriving
Iraq
of its most precious resource.
I'm an innumerate, but the figures on this -- the saddest story of our
Iraq
debacle -- are so large that even I can do the necessary computations. The
population of the United States is now just over 300,000,000. The
population
of Iraq at the time of the U.S. invasion was perhaps in the 26-27 million
range. Between March 2003 and today, a number of reputable sources place
the
total of Iraqis who have fled their homes -- those who have been displaced
internally and those who have gone abroad -- at between 4.5 million and 5
million individuals. If you take that still staggering lower figure,
approximately one in six Iraqis is either a refugee in another country or
an
internally displaced person.
Now, consider the equivalent in terms of the U.S. population. If Iraq had
invaded the United States in March 2003 with similar results, in less than
five years approximately 50 million Americans would have fled their homes,
assumedly flooding across the Mexican and Canadian borders, desperately
burdening weaker neighboring economies. It would be an unparalleled, even
unimaginable, catastrophe. Consider, then, what we would think if, back in
Baghdad, politicians and the media were hailing, or at least discussing
positively, the "success" of the prime minister's recent "surge strategy"
in
the U.S., even though it had probably been instrumental in creating at
least
one out of every ten of those refugees, 5 million displaced Americans in
all. Imagine what our reaction would be to such blithe barbarism.
Back in the real world, of course, what Michael Schwartz terms the
"tsunami"
of Iraqi refugees, the greatest refugee crisis on the planet, has received
only modest attention in this country (which managed, in 2007, to accept
but
1,608 Iraqi refugees out of all those millions -- a figure nonetheless up
from 2006). As with so much else, the Bush administration takes no
responsibility for the crisis, nor does it feel any need to respond to it
at
an appropriate level. Until now, to the best of my knowledge, no one has
even put together a history of the monumental, horrific tale of human
suffering that George W. Bush's war of choice and subsequent occupation
unleashed, or fully considered what such a brain drain, such a loss of
human
capital, might actually mean for Iraq's future. Tom
Iraq's Tidal Wave of Misery: The First History of the Planet's Worst
Refugee
Crisis
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 tsunami of misery is social and
economic in nature. It dislodges people from their jobs, sweeps them from
their homes, tears them from their material possessions, 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.
The victims of this human tsunami 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 sup****t,
and
no government aid. All the normal social props that sup****t human lives
are
removed, replaced with...nothing.
Overlapping Waves of the 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, which the Bush
administration set up inside Baghdad's Green Zone and, in May 2003, placed
under the control of L. Paul Bremer III. The CPA immediately began
dismantling Iraq's state apparatus. Thousands of Baathist 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'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.
MORE: http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/76841/?page=entire
Move 'em to Crawford.
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