For months the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) and NGOs have been trying to draw attention to the huge refugee crisis in and around Iraq, appealing for urgent help.
The UN says it is the biggest refugee crisis in the
since the Palestinians were driven out of their homeland in1948. It estimates that 2 million refugees from Iraq are living in neighbouring countries and that 1.9 million are displaced within Iraq itself.
Some agencies believe these estimates are far too low. More people are leaving daily, including from Kurdistan. The crisis is actually a regional one, as Syria, Jordan and Egypt together are sheltering most of those who have fled Iraq.
Syria has taken in one million refugees while Jordan has given refuge to 700,000. Syria and Jordan are spending far more on hosting refugees than In richer countries. (Syria claims to have spent SI billion in the last year.) This is even though the refugees they have admitted do not necessarily all have access to public services, and most do not have secure residency rights.
According to international agencies the response to appeals to governments for help in the Iraq refugee crisis has been shamefully inadequate most notably from Britain and the US -the two countries most directly involved in the Iraq occupation.
Britain seems determined to ignore the grave situation as far as possible. Ministers have remained tight-lipped or have engaged in cant. Overseas Development Minister Hilary Benn, for example, says that he knows from his constituency that England "is very generous to Iraqis".
Well, if his constituency is like many others, it will probably have a large number of rejected Iraqi Kurdish asylum seekers who are destitute and fearing deportation to Iraq.
Recent answers to parliamentary questions give no indication that the Home Office intends to contribute towards resettling the large numbers of people displaced by the Iraq war.
Of European governments, only Sweden is at present giving residency rights to a large proportion of applicants from Iraq according to the European Council for Refugees.
Even there campaigners for refugee rights are finding that at least 20% of Iraqis in Sweden are having problems with their residency permits. The majority of countries are still refusing most applications.
The US is currently offering to spend $100 million on helping displaced persons within Iraq, a drop in several oceans, and even this is not all new money. It is also insignificant compared with the amount Washington spends every month on the war.
Recently the US grudgingly agreed to resettle 7000 Iraqis. By May, just 68 of the 3000 referred to them by UNHCR had been resettled.
The US has also agreed to set up a scheme to resettle some people who have had to leave because of association with the occupiers.
They are told they can send their details to the US Department of Homeland Security. Then they will have to wait while DHS argues with the Bureau for Population, Refugees and Migration as to which department should actually do something. And that is for their friends!
UNHCR held a conference mid April in Geneva, in an attempt to raise the profile of the issue internationally and to raise funding.
It seems that while some countries responded positively, the US conspicuously failed to do so. UNHCR is now saying that the scale of The UN says it is the biggest refugee crisis in the Middle East since the Palestinians were driven out of their homeland in 1948. the crisis is too big even for it to deal with.
The focus of the US and Britain remains almost entirely on their military, political and economic goals.
They apparently feel no need to bother with the humanitarian consequences of their involvement in Iraq. Such callousness could perhaps be seen as one of the signs that capitalism is entering a new and even more brutal phase.
The disaster of displaced people from Iraq is worsening all the time yet the official media hardly scratch the surface of this question. It is vital, therefore, to make the public more aware of what is going on and to magnify the voices of solidarity organisations and UNHCR by taking up the issue in the anti-war movement and the migrants movements. • Further information: www.refugeesinternational.org www.ecre.org www.web.amnesty.org/library/ eng-irg/index www.unhcr.org www.iragoccupationfocus.org. uk