On Thursday July 22nd, The Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, known as The Helsinki Commission, hosted a hearing to examine the humanitarian situation for displaced and vulnerable Iraqis. The hearing was titled “No Way Home, No Way to Escape” an apt description of the plight of approximately two million Iraqis who have been forced to flee their homes in the last seven years of U.S. engagement in Iraq.
L. Craig Johnstone, Refugees International President ad interim, drew on his own experiences in Vietnam in his testimony for the Commission. Mr. Johnstone along with Lionel Rosenblatt, President Emeritus of Refugees International, went AWOL from the State Department in order to help get southern Vietnamese who had worked for the U.S. government out of Vietnam. Johnstone characterized the U.S. government’s initial attitude towards the security of its Vietnamese employees as one of “callous disregard.” However, once the American people mobilized, the U.S. government stepped up to the plate and ended up resettling hundred of thousands of Vietnamese to the U.S. “We now face an analogous situation in Iraq,” said Mr. Johnstone. “The United States must again wake up to its responsibility – this time to the millions of Iraqi civilians displaced by the war.”
The United States has made drastic improvements since the early years of the Iraq war, with the program to resettle Iraqi refugees going from admitting one or two refugees a month to one or two thousand a month. However, the process to apply for resettlement remains sluggish and many Iraqis are not receiving the protection that they need in time.
Kirk Johnson is executive director of the List Project to Resettle Iraqi Refugees, an organization that he started as a USAID employee in Baghdad. Mr. Johnson witnessed many of his Iraqi colleagues being threatened and killed for their affiliation with the United States. He affirmed how the United States’ reputation for initially failing to support our allies in Vietnam followed us to Iraq: “What ensued in those early morning hours on the rooftops of Saigon, as desperate Vietnamese clamored beneath departing helicopters, would be rebroadcast by Al-Jazeera throughout 2005. My Iraqi colleagues were demoralized by the footage, and asked us if the same would happen to them when we left.”
Just as our legacy in Vietnam followed us into other wars, whether or not we live up to our commitments in Iraq as we draw down militarily will have an impact elsewhere, most immediately on the level of cooperation we see in Afghanistan. “We will be hard-pressed to find more help in Afghanistan if the United States is seen as quick to abandon its friends,” argued Representative Alcee L. Hastings, co-chairman of the commission. Echoing this sentiment was Eric Schwartz, Assistant Secretary of State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration (PRM) who also testified at the hearing. Swartz pointed out that the United States has both a “strategic interest and a moral responsibility to sustain assistance and to promote protection.”
The December 2011 date for complete withdrawal of our troops may still seem far away but by the end of August, half will have already left. “As we disengage from this conflict, we cannot disengage from our humanitarian obligations,” said Mr. Johnstone. “We have a special obligation in this case and we need to step up to it.”