The US State Department acknowledged this week that the US government is falling far short of its stated goal of allowing 7,000 Iraqi refugees into the country in fiscal year 2007, which began October 1, 2006. The US government reports that a mere 133 Iraqis have been resettled since October 2006.
Here in Jordan, it is clear that there have been significant changes since that time. The United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees (UNHCR) offices have increased their staff of case workers and organizations partnering with UNHCR to provide services to Iraqis driven from their country have boosted their levels of service as new money has come in to support growing refugee populations. Many of the Iraqis with who have obtained refugee status interviewed by Electronic Iraq in the early months of this year have been told that their cases have been referred for resettlement to the United States, Sweden, or Australia, indicating that UNHCR is at least to some degree doing its part to meet its stated goal of referring 20,000 Iraqis for resettlement by the end of this year.
But the gap between what is being done and what is needed remains immense. The flurry of action on the part of NGOs and UNHCR here will have little impact if the countries fail to meet their responsibilities and commitments to process and welcome refugees referred to them.
Yesterday an Iraqi member of the Electronic Iraq team attended a meeting at the UNHCR offices in Amman for 200 families who had been told they had been referred for resettlement to Sweden. When members of these 200 families arrived, they were told that Sweden had unexpectedly reduced the number of families they would accept for resettlement - after initially committing to accept the 200 families, they would now accept only 15. UNHCR had not budgeted for continued services to the remaining families, and so their ability to receive ongoing benefits to meet their needs was in question. They would have to wait, and decisions would be made later, they were told. A low-intensity panic began and despair at this new setback began to spread among Iraqis here.
Meanwhile, the worsening humanitarian emergency and ongoing violence in Iraq continue to force ever-greater flows of refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs). Estimates by UNHCR place the numbers of IDPs in Iraq at more than 2 million, with refugees outside the country at more than 2.4 million and climbing. An estimated 2,000 Iraqis arrive in Syria each day, to say nothing about other countries. It is thought that similar numbers would otherwise be arriving in Jordan, but the borders have been effectively closed for months, though some continue to arrive, circumventing the tight restrictions imposed by the Jordanian government, at least for a time.
While the United States and other countries continue to balk at a perceived blanket "security threat" posed by Iraqi families, widows, orphans, and people in need of urgent medical treatment, the chaos and violence in Iraq continue, and the desperation and deprivation bred by the displacement crisis continue to threaten the future of the region as a whole.
Earlier this week, we visited a woman who had just been flown from Iraq to a hospital in Jordan. A mortar fired by an unknown group struck her house in Iraq. Three other women in her home were killed. The woman, the only survivor, was rushed to a US army hospital and quickly transferred to an Iraqi hospital, which did not have the necessary facilities to treat her. Then, through the intervention of family friends, she was flown to Amman. One leg was amputated above the knee, and the other had suffered a compound fracture, as had her arm. A 30-inch wound in her abdomen has left her vital organs entirely open and unprotected by the abdominal wall - her stomach and intestines, when not bandaged, are exposed to the open air. As her family searches for $18,000 for emergency surgery, Iraqis here who have heard about her case are left to wonder about a system that entangles Iraqis--even those in life-and-death situations--in bureaucratic security checks and arbitrary quotas, and about the values motivating a humanitarian enterprise and a global community that continues to tolerate it.
Noah and Natalie Baker Merrill are in Amman, Jordan on behalf of the Electronic Iraq Direct Aid Initiative. To support the work of the initiative and to learn more, click here.
