The Baghdad government has promised $25 million to take care of the deluge of refugees who have fled across Iraq's borders into neighboring countries, particularly Jordan and Syria.
But, speaking Tuesday at a Geneva meeting of the United Nations High Commission on Refugees, Syria's deputy prime minister said it is costing his country a billion dollars a year to handle the influx of Iraqis into Little Fallujah, Little Mosul and other parts of Syria. Jordan's secretary general of the Interior ministry says his country also needs a billion dollars to handle the estimated 750,000 Iraqi refugees that have fled there.
Syrian Vice Foreign Minister Fayssal Mekdad told participants at the UNHCR meeting, which continues today, that Syria needs $256 million in order to provide aid, health care and education over the next two years. It's said that Syria now has 1.2 million Iraqi refugees living inside its borders.
Estimates of the total number of refugees exiled outside Iraq are usually given as 2 million. But, when all the estimates for Jordan, Syria, Iran, Egypt, the Gulf states, Turkey, Lebanon and Iran are tallied, the figure rises to 2.35 million. Plus another 1.9 million internally displaced. The true count? It's pretty much guesswork. What's not being guessed at is that the forced Iraqi exodus, like the American occupation of Iraq itself, is having a horrific impact on the region that is likely to worsen. Some experts say another million refugees will flee this year, although it is increasingly difficult to get out. Inside and outside Iraq, that would mean 5 million refugees, a fifth of the total population.
At the High Commissioner's 60-nation meeting Tuesday, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon urged Syria and Jordan not to close their borders, something that some critics have already accused Jordan of doing. And he called on other countries, particularly those in the EU and the United States to do more to deal with this catatrophe. Before the meeting, the High Commissioner himself, Antonio Guterres, complained that the refugees and their plight are being pretty much ignored while everybody's attention focused on the horrors happening inside Iraq:
"There is not enough attention on the fact that four million people have been displaced and they live in very, very difficult circumstances, some of them, both inside Iraq and outside Iraq.
"And the expression of international solidarity is absolutely crucial because, until now, let's be honest, they have been basically abandoned by us all..."
The Bush Administration has, as is typical, behaved abominably in this matter, agreeing to spend a paltry $18 million on refugee relief, while, as noted previously, continuing to spend $8.4 billion a month on the occupation. Last year, it permitted 202 Iraqis into the United States. This year - apparently even Bush officials can be shamed - it will let in several thousand, still a drop in the bucket. The whole affair makes you want to poke your eyes out.
As former U.N. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke said late last week:
"This is crazy ... Even Iraqis who were given security clearances to work with U.S. troops in combat positions in Iraq where they could have betrayed the Americans to ambushes are now waiting years and years to get approval."
Crazy. That certainly is one assessment of just about every single aspect of the Bush Administration's policies in Iraq - and the rest of the Middle East. Policies that have rained death on tens of thousands, destabilized the region for a decade or more, heightened sectarian tensions in the Muslim world, weakened America's military, strengthened the influence of Iran (supposedly the worst of the "Axis of Evil"), demolished the almost universal good will shown our country after Nine Eleven, wrecked 50 years of diplomacy designed to build international cooperation, turned Iraq into a terrorist training camp and given Osama bin Laden and his jihadi compatriots a greater victory than they could have possibly imagined six years ago.
Of course, it hasn't been so crazy for the likes of Halliburton or the energy companies who have profited off the volatility of oil prices in great part created by the war and occupation. To them, four or five million Iraqi refugees make no never mind so long as they have no impact on the bottom line.