| July
30, 2007
CounterPunch Diary
Four
Million Iraqis on the Run
By PATRICK
COCKBURN
Sulaymaniyah
Two
thousand Iraqis are fleeing their homes every day. It is the greatest
mass exodus of people ever in the Middle East and dwarfs anything
seen in Europe since the Second World War. Four million people,
one in seven Iraqis, have run away, because if they do not they
will be killed. Two million have left Iraq, mainly for Syria and
Jordan, and the same number have fled within the country.
Yet,
while the US and Britain express sympathy for the plight of refugees
in Africa, they are ignoring - or playing down- a far greater tragedy
which is largely of their own making.
The
US and Britain may not want to dwell on the disasters that have
befallen Iraq during their occupation but the shanty towns crammed
with refugees springing up in Iraq and neighbouring countries are
becoming impossible to ignore.
Even
so the UNHCR is having difficulty raising $100m (£50m) for
relief. The organization says the two countries caring for the biggest
proportion of Iraqi refugees - Syria and Jordan - have still received
"next to nothing from the world community". Some 1.4 million
Iraqis have fled to Syria according to the UN High Commission for
Refugees, Jordan has taken in 750 000 while Egypt and Lebanon have
seen 200 000 Iraqis cross into their territories.
Potential
donors are reluctant to spent money inside Iraq, arguing the country
has large oil revenues. They are either unaware, or are ignoring
the fact that the Iraqi administration has all but collapsed outside
the Baghdad Green Zone. The US is spending $2 billion a week on
military operations in Iraq according to the Congressional Research
Service but many Iraqis are dying because they lack drinking water
costing a few cents.
Kalawar
refugee camp in Sulaymaniyah is a microcosm of the misery to which
millions of Iraqis have been reduced.
"At least it is safe here," says Walid Sha'ad Nayef, 38,
as he stands amid the stink of rotting garbage and raw sewage. He
fled from the lethally dangerous Sa'adiyah district in Baghdad 11
months ago. As we speak to him, a man silently presents us with
the death certificate of his son, Farez Maher Zedan, who was killed
in Baghdad on May 20, 2006.
Kalawar
is a horrible place. Situated behind a gas station down a dusty
track, the first sight of the camp is of rough shelters made out
of rags, torn pieces of cardboard and old blankets. The stench is
explained by the fact the Kurdish municipal authorities will not
allow the 470 people in the camp to dig latrines. They say this
might encourage them to stay.
"Sometimes
I go to beg," says Talib Hamid al-Auda, a voluble man with
a thick white beard looking older than his fifty years. As he speaks,
his body shakes, as if he was trembling at the thought of the demeaning
means by which he feeds his family. Even begging is difficult because
the people in the camp are forbidden to leave it on Thursday, Friday
and Saturday. Suspected by Kurds of being behind a string of house
robberies, though there is no evidence for this, they are natural
scapegoats for any wrong-doing in their vicinity.
Refugees
are getting an increasingly cool reception wherever they flee, because
there are so many of them and because of the burden they put on
resources. "People here blame us for forcing up rents and the
price of food," said Omar, who had taken his family to Damascus
after his sister's leg was fractured by a car bomb.
The
refugees in Kalawar had no option but to flee. Of the 97 families
here, all but two are Sunni Arabs. Many are from Sa'adiyah in west
Baghdad where 84 bodies were found by police between June 18 and
July 18. Many are young men whose hands had been bound and who had
been tortured.
"The
majority left Baghdad because somebody knocked on the door of their
house and told them to get out in an hour," says Rosina Ynzenga,
who runs the Spanish charity Solidarity International (SIA) which
pays for a mobile clinic to visit the camp.
Sulaymaniyah
municipality is antagonistic to her doing more. One Kurdish official
suggested that the Arabs of Kalawar were there simply for economic
reasons and should be given $200 each and sent back to Baghdad.
Mr
Nayef, the mukhtar (mayor) of the camp who used to be a bulldozer
driver in Baghdad, at first said nobody could speak to journalists
unless we had permission from the authorities. But after we had
ceremoniously written our names in a large book he relented and
would, in any case, have had difficulty in stopping other refugees
explaining their grievances.
Asked
to list their worst problems Mr Nayef said they were the lack of
school for the children, shortage of food, no kerosene to cook with,
no money, no jobs and no electricity. The real answer to the question
is that the Arabs of Kalawar have nothing. They have only received
two cartons of food each from the International Committee of the
Red Cross and a tank of clean water.
Even
so they are adamant that they dare not return to Baghdad. They did
not even know if their houses had been taken over by others.
Abla
Abbas, a mournful looking woman in black robes, said her son had
been killed because he went to sell plastic bags in the Shia district
of Khadamiyah in west Baghdad. The poor in Iraq take potentially
fatal risks to earn a little money.
The
uncertainty of the refugees' lives in Kalawar is mirrored in their
drawn faces. While we spoke to them there were several shouting
matches. One woman kept showing us a piece of paper from the local
authority in Sulaymaniyah giving her the right to stay there. She
regarded us nervously as if we were officials about to evict her.
There
are in fact three camps at Kalawar. Although almost all the refugees
are Sunni they come from different places and until a month ago
they lived together. But there were continual arguments. The refugees
decided that they must split into three encampments: one from Baghdad,
a second from Hillah, south of Baghdad, and a third from Diyala,
the mixed Sunni-Shia province that has been the scene of ferocious
sectarian pogroms.
Governments
and the media crudely evaluate human suffering in Iraq in terms
of the number killed. A broader and better barometer would include
those who have escaped death only by fleeing their homes, their
jobs and their country to go and live, destitute and unwanted, in
places like Kalawar. The US administration has 18 benchmarks to
measure progress in Iraq but the return of four million people to
their homes is not among them.
Patrick
Cockburn is the author of 'The Occupation: War, resistance
and daily life in Iraq', a finalist for the National Book Critics'
Circle Award for best non-fiction book of 2006.
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