RI Guest Blogger: Greg Hoadley on the Iraqi Refugee Crisis

Greg Hoadley, the Middle East editor of IraqSlogger.com, an all-Iraq news website, is our guest blogger today. He offers us his thoughts on the Iraqi refugee crisis:

"The American debate about Iraqi refugee policy has been far too limited to an emerging biparitisan sense of guilt over those Iraqis who are threatened because they worked with US forces. The rest of Iraq’s millions of refugees, the argument goes, are victims of a “civil war” or of “sectarian hatreds”-- local processes that are out of our hands, and therefore no particular responsibility of the United States.

In fact, there is no established humanitarian principle for distinguishing “good” and “bad” refugees. Many Iraqis who did not work with the United States have fled their homes and are living on the margins, in Iraq or in a neighboring country, and are in desperate need of support from the international community, whether or not they worked with the US after 2003. Moreover, Iraqi refugees -- all of the more than four million of them -- are victims of a deteriorating security situation for which the United States bears large responsibility.

How big is the problem?

There has been much important reporting and research on the question of the Iraqi refugees -- too little, given the enormity of the crisis, but enough that ignorance of the gravity of the situation is no longer an excuse. At IraqSlogger we’ve highlighted some of the most informative recent writing on Iraq’s displaced: Just this week we made available a new study by the Iraqi Red Crescent Organization that found that internal displacement in Iraq had increased by 800% over the last year.

The Red Crescent’s figures for the total number of internally displaced Iraqis are lower than the UNHCR’s estimates, which were also recently revised upward. As with Iraqi civilian casualties since 2003, we will never get a conclusive hard count of the victims, and we are left only with debates over the methodology of how best to estimate the number that we can never know with certitude. The two organizations use different methods and arrive at different results. However, the trend is clear from both studies: A desperate situation is getting worse, and the resources allocated to dealing with the problem -- inadequate to begin with -- are becoming swamped.

Another very important read on the question of Iraqi refugees is a series produced by the Brookings Institution and the University of Bern, presenting survey research of Iraqi refugees. The most recent installment, co-authored by our Iraqi colleague Ashraf al-Khalidi, was released days ago, and provides an unparalleled look at the life of Iraqi exiles in Syria. The Brookings-Bern report on Syria was preceded by a survey of internally displaced Iraqis, and another study is due on Iraqi refugees in Jordan.

As the Brookings-Bern reports make clear, the Iraqi refugee crisis since 2003 has evolved in successive waves. Earlier waves of Iraqi refugees tended to be, on the whole, wealthier and better skilled, and therefore might have fared better in neighboring countries. Combined with the depletion of the resources of the first waves of Iraqi refugees, this means that displaced Iraqis are, on the whole, becoming more destitute, more vulnerable, more marginal, and of course more numerous, and will be increasingly dependent on the international community.

For more close-up portraits of Iraqi refugees, see Jane Arraf’s exclusive report for IraqSlogger about refugees in Iraq compelled by the security situation to live in a Baghdad refuse dump. “Their old homes were in mixed neighborhoods of Abu Ghraib and al-Haswa. Their new homes are literally built of garbage,” Jane writes. Our colleague Nir Rosen’s epic New York Times Magazine cover story looks at Iraqi refugees in Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, without overlooking the plight of the twice-displaced Palestinians who have fled from exile in Iraq to an even more vulnerable exile and statelessness.

The US, which has assumed security responsibility for Iraqi civilians as an occupying power has a responsibility to act in the face of the humanitarian consequences of failure to provide security.

It is time for the United States to get serious about helping the millions of Iraqi refugees, not just those whom it found politically acceptable."

We have a mission returning from the region in the coming days, bringing with them considerable insight on the current situation. Stay tuned to our site for updates and additional information.