Refugees

Here is a video from the UN Refugee Agency on how Darfur refugees in eastern Chad are dealing with water scarcity.  

For the past 10 months, Hanna Ingber Win has reported on the Iraqi refugee community in El Cajon, California, where a high concentration of Chaldean Christian Iraqis have settled.   The LA Weekly feature that resulted from her months-long reporting project offers an important window into the difficulties that Iraqi refugees face in the United States.   Here's Ingber-Win:

We go to the home of Saad and Baan Shaya. It is a workday, but the Shayas have no jobs and are home watching Arabic television. We sit down in their living room, on furniture donated to the couple by another church group, and the Shayas tell us that they left Baghdad in 2003 because of the war. They moved to Mosul in northern Iraq, and Saad owned a liquor store. In 2006, Muslim extremists threatened him, telling him to leave his store. When he didn’t, the extremists shot Saad in the leg and then bombed the store. He walks to the couch, pulls up the leg of his jeans and reveals a scar from the gunshot. The store bombing killed Saad’s 43-year-old brother. Saad escaped Iraq and fled to Turkey.

Baan says she left Iraq because a militia came to her home with a flier, giving the family three options: Convert to Islam, pay the militia monthly taxes or leave the country. She says some of her friends never had the chance to escape because they were kidnapped.

Bazzi pauses from translating to say that a militia murdered her own cousin two years ago. “They took the money and killed him,” she says. “They skinned his face. They couldn’t recognize him if it wasn’t for his ring.”

The Shayas registered as refugees in Turkey, and the United States resettled them in El Cajon in February. They have both been looking for jobs since they arrived. They receive about $580 a month from the government, but that will only continue for eight months. They speak almost no English and don’t have transportation. Baan says she has been walking around, looking for a job every day. She says she would take anything — but she hasn’t had any offers.

“How will we live here if we don’t find a job?” Saad asks.

As opposed to other western countries that have received large numbers of Iraqi asylum seekers, the United States has a smaller social safety net.  The Shayas and other refugee families in the United States face the double hurdles of chronic poverty and adapting to life in a country in which they do not speak the language.  It is a pretty tragic situation.  

The United States government has a deep and enduring moral obligation to make the life of displaced Iraqis as comfortable as possible--in El Cajon and beyond. Check out Refugees International for more on the Iraqi Refugee crisis.

Madam Secretary passes on a text message-based appeal made by Secretary Clinton yesterday to help raise emergency humanitarian relief funds for displaced persons in Pakistan's embattled Swat Valley: text "swat" to 20222 to provide a $5 donation to the UN refugee agency's life-saving work in the region.  You can also provide your support directly through UNHCR.

Readers will also be reassured to know that Telecoms sans Frontieres, those technological humanitarians extraordinaires, have deployed to Pakistan to provide emergency telecommunications infrastructure.

(image from UNHCR)

The United Nations Refugee Agency has just revised its guidlines on how countries receiving refugees from Iraq should approach Iraqi asylum requests.  I think you can file this one under "good news" in the sense that UNHRC believes the situation in certain Iraqi regions is stable enough for the return of refugees.  From the Washington Post:

Under the new UNHCR guidelines, governments reviewing asylum requests from Iraqis from the semi-autonomous northern region and the south are urged to assesswhether claimants are at direct risk because of their religious, ethnic or professional affiliation, or their sexual orientation.

"We are now saying rather than blanket consideration, these people can be given individual interviews to determine their status," Redmond said, saying that specific groups of people in those regions may still require protection.

These include public officials, U.N. and other aid workers, journalists, human rights activists, homosexuals, and people seen to be affiliated with opposing armed groups, political factions, multinational forces and foreign companies, he said.

While it's great news that parts of Iraq are stable enough for return, UNHCR still believes that Iraqis from large swaths of western Iraq, including Baghdad and the Anbar province, still require blanket asylum.  I, for one, would like to see the United States accept a greater number of Iraqi asylum seekers.  According to a recent report from Human Rights First, only 4,200 Iraqis have made it to the United States since 2003, though at least 20,000 have applied for asylum.  The report says that progress has been made since Congress passed the Refugee Crisis of Iraq Act in January 2008, but there is still a long way to go for the United States to live up to its obligations to accept more Iraqi asylum seekers.  It seems to me that for having started this war, the United States has a special obligation to help people uprooted from violence in Iraq.

Photo of an Iraqi refugee in Damascus from Flickr user Catholicrelief.

The United Nations posts this video about the predicament of Iraqis who fled Mosul over three years ago. Residents of a shantytown are coming to terms with the fact that they may live in these "temporary" shelters far longer than they would like.

...and the media doesn't really pay attention, do they still drown?  Of course they do.  And there are a whole lot more than seven:

UNHCR said 350 boats and 17,936 people have arrived in Yemen this year after crossing the Gulf of Aden from the Horn of Africa. To date, 116 people have been reported dead and 66 are missing at sea.

This is one of the places in the world where dangerous migration attempts, by refugees so down-and-out where they are that they are willing to risk their lives crossing (even piracy-infested) seas, result in trauma and tragedy for many would-be migrants.  Maybe with all those ships out there fighting piracy, the plight of those desperately trying to pass through might get a little more focus.