Written Testimony: The Plight of Iraqi Refugees

The Plight of Iraqi Refugees     
Testimony of Anna Husarska,
Senior Policy Adviser, International Rescue Committee
before the Congressional Human Rights Caucus
March 29, 2007

 Thank you for inviting me to testify at this important briefing.

 I am senior policy adviser at the International Rescue Committee. IRC is a humanitarian organization that provides relief and rehabilitation to refugees, internally displaced persons and other conflict victims in 25 countries and offers resettlement services in 24 communities around the United States.

 In February and March of this year I traveled across the Middle East. With my colleagues from IRC who specialize in humanitarian relief or refugee resettlement, we visited Jordan and Syria, then I proceeded to Turkey and Lebanon.

 I got acquainted with a few hundred stories of refugees and I spoke to some fifty families - Sunni, Shiia and Christian - in Amman, Damascus, Istanbul and Beirut. All agreed to talk to me, hoping (they said) that it is only because of ignorance that the world does not help them.

 I have described their fates in articles that were published in Newsweek International, The New Republic and Slate. I am requesting that these kindly be entered into the record.

 In my testimony I will share with you a few of the stories I heard. I will conclude my statement by offering some policy recommendations concerning this tragic situation.

 As the refugees were telling me why they fled Iraq, it was obvious that they meet the definition of refugee, that is, a person with a “well-founded fear of persecution.”

 This is also the opinion of the office of the UN refugee agency, UNHCR: "At the moment, given the level of violence in Iraq, every single Iraqi should be considered a refugee because they are victims of violence," UNHCR's regional representative in the Middle East told me.

 The most common signs of mayhem in Iraq we hear about are the daily bombings. Yet in my conversations with Iraqi refugees, the words "kidnapping" and "ransom" popped up as the most frequent explanations for why they fled.

 Often those stories ended up in tragedies difficult to listen to with dry eyes:

 Take the Iraqi Christian who owned a liquor store and lived with his wife and seven children in Baghdad. One day he found a threatening note under the door demanding that he close the store since selling alcohol violates Islamic law.  Soon he was attacked and robbed. A pay-off of $10,000 was demanded. He was unable to come up with the money. Some days later his one-year-old son was kidnapped. This time the ransom was $30,000. With the help of his son in Australia, the Liquor Store Owner was able to raise $10,000, which he delivered as instructed. The next morning he found a package on the porch: one plastic bag with the head of his son and another with his little beheaded body. The Liquor Store Owner buried his son and as soon as they got the travel documents, he, his wife and their six children fled Iraq.

 Another case, also a Christian Iraqi: A single mother. This woman had a beauty salon, and received threats by phone and in writing from Muslim extremists: close your business or else... (Her type of business is banned by the Sharia law). One evening she was alone in her salon when a man in a black hood came in, beat her, pulled the crucifix off her neck and raped her. A week later, her son, an only child, was kidnapped and the same man called; she recognized his voice. He asked for $10,000 if she wanted to see her son alive. She managed to gather $7,000 and paid the ransom. Her son was returned and she fled the country with him as quickly as she could.

 The total number of people displaced by the civil war that followed the US invasion is nearly 4 million; of these, roughly half are internally displaced within Iraq, while most of the others fled to Jordan or Syria. This mass exodus did not happen in 2003, when it had been expected and the tents were ready, but rather later, after the February 2006 bombing of the grand mosque in Samarra.

 The number of Iraqis in the region and how exactly those individuals are described is a huge question. The numbers most commonly heard is 700,000 people in Jordan and over a million in Syria, with much smaller numbers in Turkey, Lebanon and Egypt.  However, there is no meaningful basis for these numbers.  The ranges quoted depend on who is speaking, and there is no break-down of the numbers to indicate the make-up of the population, when they escaped from Iraq, and what their relative needs are.

 There is a further problem with getting the real numbers: those registered are only a tiny part of the total population of refugees. However, because the two main host countries – Jordan and Syria – are not parties to the Refugee Convention, they do not recognize the status of the refugees and therefore consider most Iraqis to be “illegal immigrants.” Therefore registering with the UNHCR gives them only very marginal protection and their precarious situation in the host country makes them avoid any contact with any authorities.

 The conditions in which these people now live make it obvious that local integration is not an option. Abu Omar, for example, a Sunni who escaped after his son was kidnapped, now "lives" with his wife and three children in one room whose broken windows are stuffed with plastic shopping bags: no heat, no furniture, no cooking utensils, no mattresses. They sleep on a green plastic mat. It does not get more squalid than that.

 Of the several hundred cases I got familiar with, most have concerns because of their illegal status in the host country. An example is Hassan, a 39-year-old Shi'ia taxi driver, a pleasantly smiling father of six small children. He has taught them not to use typically Iraqi words in the street. He fears deportation if their Iraqi identity is discovered.

 A most burning issue is how to help those Iraqis who worked for the United States, who trusted the US and who now because of this affiliation are in danger and in urgent need of being rescued.

 These are not only Iraqis working for the Departments of State and of Defense, but also people employed by U.S. companies doing reconstruction, subcontractors of USAID, those working for the non governmental organizations and for the media as translators, fixers, drivers, office employees, etc.

 This problem has now been recognized: The Senate (Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security and Refugees, chaired by Senator Edward Kennedy) held hearings on this subject back in January, as did the House Committee on Foreign Affairs’ Subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia earlier this week at the request of Congressman Gary Ackerman. Both subcommittees heard testimony from anonymous Iraqis. George Packer who wrote a most compelling article for The New Yorker magazine, also testified. CBS’ “60 minutes” broadcast a story entitled “Left Behind,” I described in a long piece in The New Republic the fate of a few families who chose to work for Americans and then had to run for their lives.

 In spite of all this congressional and media attention, the administration is still unable to come up with any quick solution. Just earlier this week when Congressman Ackerman asked a high official from the State Department what the Iraqis who worked for the Americans and who now fear for their life because of this affiliation should do, the answer was “flee to Jordan or Syria.” Chairman Ackerman pointed out that the situation is indeed very serious if the U.S. is advising people to look for safety in Syria.

 But an Iraqi need not be directly employed by Americans to receive death threats. In 300 cases that I reviewed 96 fled from Iraq because of problems arising from “some” association with Americans or other foreigners: “My welding workshop was visited by American soldiers and then I had threats...” “My mother worked as a cleaner at hotel where foreigners stay,” “my brother was a cook for a U.S. base.” Americans’ laundry washed, mobile phones sold to Americans, spare car parts purchased by GIs... Once Iraqis enter in contact with people from the U.S. they are viewed by the extremists as “unclean”

 Other Iraqis were in danger without ever having encountered Americans: Take Majeda now refugee in Damascus because she refused to marry a Shia; Leila because her son was an engineer, that is an intellectual; Gina because she refused to wear a veil; and so on. All have fled Iraq, and all have heartbreaking stories.

 But just because they are in apartments, or squatting with distant relatives or renting some space that can hardly be called “home” does not make these refugees any less miserable than those living in tents.

 Most Iraqi refugees cannot return home in the foreseeable future. Since the principal host countries --Jordan and Syria-- are not offering local integration to the refugees, and the difficult economic, political, and social situation in those countries doesn't favor any local absorption, the option of third-country resettlement is the most compelling.

 Of the maybe 1.5 million Iraqi refugees in Jordan and Syria, about 70,000 have been registered as asylum-seekers so far by UNHCR although such recognition confers no particular rights on them. The option of resettlement to third countries is the best one, if only because there is no other obvious solution.

 In the United States, the issue of the Iraqi refugees did not come to light for a long time, so the response was inadequate. Since 2003, the U.S. has taken in only 466 Iraqi refugees. Clearly, the U.S. cannot take all or even most of the two million or more Iraqi refugees. But if Washington were to decide to take a large number it would be sending a signal that it is willing to do its part. This might galvanize others--such as Canada, Australia, or the EU countries--to accept a significant number of Iraqis as well.

 A few of us in the humanitarian community even believed that the U.S. would offer Iraqis all the resettlement places at its discretion for the year—some 20,000 slots. It was therefore a major anticlimax when finally, on February 14, Paula J. Dobriansky, Under Secretary for Democracy and Global Affairs, announced after meeting the UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres that no more than 7,000 Iraqis would be offered a chance to resettle in the United States by the end of 2007.

 Asked whether Washington has special responsibility for Iraqis fleeing violence, the State Department spokesman said that it is a "shared global responsibility." Well, if it is "shared," the U.S. until now has not chipped in its "share."

 How can America step up to the plate? How can it reclaim its past global leadership in protecting the persecuted?

 The International Rescue Committee makes two recommendations:

- First, those who fled Iraq must be offered assistance and the host countries must be given help to deal with the problem. For this the U.S. should increase its financial contribution to UNHCR and also provide sufficient support to the non governmental organizations that – in spite of challenging conditions – are ready to provide humanitarian aid locally to the most vulnerable.

- Second, the United States should immediately help many refugees through a robust resettlement program. For this to be successful, the following steps must be taken:

— The number of Iraqi refugees to be resettled to the U.S. must be urgently increased from the 7,000 currently being planned for.  The resettlement program must include the most vulnerable refugees regardless of their religion or other characteristics, and while the US-employed Iraqis are particularly at risk, other criteria of vulnerability should be applied too, so that others--for instance victims of torture or women at risk-- are also considered.

— The process must be expedited: Iraqi ex-employees of the State and Defense departments have already undergone extensive security checks, so their security clearance to the U.S. need not be lengthy. If non-governmental organizations are allowed to make direct referrals of cases for resettlement, this could speed up the process too.

— The most embarrassing roadblock to be lifted is the one coming from the unreasonably wide definition of what is “terrorist activity” in the post 9/11 anti-terrorism legislation: the Patriot Act and the Real ID Act, which amended U.S. immigration law. These provisions bar the admission of anyone who has committed so-called terrorist activity or provided “material support” to terrorists . While laudable in its goal of keeping out terrorist and their supporters, the absurd application of these provisions to U.S. allies and victims of persecution has become a tragedy.

 Because the screening mechanisms for refugees are much more thorough than for those seeking tourist, student, or business visas--the process includes, among other hurdles, detailed interviews with the Department of Homeland Security--it seems unlikely that a terrorist would choose the "refugee track" as his means of entering the country.

Thus a number of bona fide Iraqi refugees may be unjustly accused of providing material support to terrorists. In this category are:
-- Iraqis who paid ransom to rescue their loved ones kidnapped during this civil war;
-- those who paid the bribe to cross the dangerous province of Anbar as they fled; and
-- those who - under duress - had to make payments, give food or shelter to one of the many terrorists groups operating in Iraq.

 Freedom fighters like that US-trained and US-led Iraqi resistance member whom I met in the Middle East may be accused of being “terrorists” themselves if they participated in fighting at the early stage of the invasion, i.e. before Saddam Hussein was brought down.

 Over the last year I traveled on behalf of the IRC to half a dozen countries in Africa and Asia and saw perfectly bona fide refugees fall victim to similarly unbelievable accusations and obstacles. The “material support” is only part of the problem with Iraqi refugees, but psychologically it is an important part, and it is one that can be easily removed through a legislative amendment.

 Because of the unique responsibility that the U.S. government bears for the well being of the Iraqis, the mindless application of “material support” provisions to victims of terrorism would be particularly outrageous.

 Thank you very much and I will be happy to answer any questions you may have.