CPTnet
16 November 2009
IRAQ LETTER: Iraqi refugees not getting their needs met

by Kathleen O'Malley

[Note:  O'Malley, is part of a delegation sponsored by Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT).  The delegation spent a day in Amman, Jordan, before traveling to Suleimaniya, in the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) area of Iraq.]
Greetings from Suleimaniya, Kurdistan.  As you know, I am leading a delegation to northern Iraq to learn of the situation in Kurdistan as well as the concerns of displaced Iraqis in Jordan.

When we first arrived in Jordan, we met with former neighbors of CPT's apartment in Baghdad.  Hakim had been accosted and beaten in an attempted kidnapping and soon after his wife and daughter were kidnapped, robbed.  and then released.  They also complained about the lack of electricity, intermittent water, and, of course, the ongoing violence.

The family kept repeating the system was better under Saddam.  Hakim yearns to return to family, friends, and his livelihood although his wife vows never to return.  "I don't know who is who.  Who is my friend?  Is he a criminal?  A kidnapper?"  When I asked her if Jordan was now her home, she looked at me with a mixture of anger and sadness and said, "I have no home."

We visited with other refugee families who had fled from the violence.  Nearly one million are currently living in Jordan, most in abject poverty, caught in a system that allows them no legal status and therefore no way to earn a living.  They have three months to apply for a U.N. Asylum Seeker Certificate, which allows them to receive minimal cash assistance.  They then continue to wait for the U.N. to find them a resettlement slot in another county.

We spent time a college professor and her husband, a social worker, and their three young children.  She had lost two of her four brothers during the time of Saddam and the other two in the current war.  One had been killed because he worked for the U.S.  Both her parents died during this time and she fled to Jordan.  The authorities rejected her application for cash assistance with no explanation and she feels desperate.  "Not for me; I am dead inside," she said.  "I walk, I eat, but I am a dead woman.  Only for my children do I keep going."

We interviewed a former schoolteacher who is the father of nine children.  With this assistance, he can only afford a single basement room with one overhead light bulb for all eleven of them.

Jordan, Syria, and the U.N. are struggling to respond to the needs of overwhelming numbers of refugees who continue to seek asylum.  Initially the U.S. agreed to take 12,000 a year, eventually increasing the figure to 17,000, but usually no more than 400 refugees get to the U.S. in any six-month period.

The responsibility to resolve this problem resides with those who created the problem in the first place.  Our old Baghdad neighbor Hakim, offered a simple solution when he said as we left him," Tell President Obama that people who have jobs to feed their families don't shoot each other."