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electronicIraq.net
War Every Day (eIraq Blog)
A status report on Iraq's brain drain
Jeff Severns Guntzel, Electronic Iraq
Oct 6, 2008
There have been frequent reports of Iraqis returning home by the
busload after fleeing the violence in recent years. Some say security
is better. Others say they are as afraid as they ever were but ran out
of money in Syria or Jordan or wherever they fled to.
Los Angeles Times reporter Tina Susman, working with five Iraqi colleagues, looks at the state of Iraqi displacement in numbing detail. Here's some of the information they gathered...
First, more Iraqis are leaving than are returning:
...more
than 2.5 million Iraqis have fled, and the exodus continues. Political
and business leaders believe it will be many years before the loss of
professionals can be reversed.
The Office of the United Nations
High Commissioner for Refugees said it monitored numbers at the main
border crossing linking Iraq to Syria from January to July this year
and found that 7,200 more Iraqis left than entered. And some say a new
U.S. policy opening the door to more Iraqi refugees each year is
exacerbating the situation. Iraqi professionals and specialists have fled in devastating numbers:
After the fall of Hussein, the Iraqi American Chamber of
Commerce and Industry in Baghdad would get 200 to 300 applications when
it placed a newspaper ad seeking
a staff attorney, public relations executive, engineer or
administrative worker. Now, [it] is lucky to get 20, usually from
people sorely lacking in experience and with checkered resumes
resulting from wartime upheavals.
Then there are the doctors:
More than 7,000 physicians have left, including virtually all who had
20 years' or more experience, said Mustafa Hiti, a member of parliament
who sits on its health committee. About 600 have returned, he said, but
none are the sort of top-flight specialists needed here.
Most
specialists were Sunni Arabs who, to achieve their professional status,
were members of Hussein's Baath Party. Even if they did not adhere to
its ideology, they were ostracized and forced from their jobs after
Hussein was ousted. Now, they do not feel comfortable in a country run
by Shiite Muslims, said Hiti, who expressed doubts about the
government's commitment to moving away from the so-called
de-Baathification policies.
And of course the educators:
At the Ministry of Higher Education, spokeswoman Siham Shujairi said
6,700 professors had left Iraq and only about 150 had returned. About
300 have been killed.
"Even though security has improved," Susman writes, "professionals continue to be targets
of assassinations by extremists who see them as being pro-Western or
religious infidels. In addition, the power in Iraq lies with
conservative Shiites, and there is no sign that will change any time
soon. "
The coming elections are not, in Susman's report, a light at the end of
the tunnel. "Even if provincial elections, considered key to
balancing power among Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds and others, take place by
early next year, the parties now in power probably will come out on top
again. That's because of name recognition and their appeal to religious
voters."
The report ends with the words of Ali, 26, who has a medical degree and is looking for a way to the United States:
"Nothing is guaranteed. That's the problem ... Here,
everything is possible -- but in a negative sense."
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