Hope for Iraqi Refugees

By NYTimes Editorial
Published: July 4th, 2009

One of the many terrible consequences of the Iraq war has been the displacement of millions of Iraqis since the Iraq War began in March 2003. According to the most recent statistics from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, more than two million Iraqis have fled to neighboring Syria, Jordan, Turkey and Lebanon, as well as Australia and Europe, and another 2.5 million or more have been displaced within the country, most of them between 2006 and 2008.

These numbers are staggering. If a similar proportion of the U.S. population were displaced, that would mean 30 million refugee Americans.

The Iraqi refugee crisis is the worst in the history of the Middle East. The number of refugees surpasses the number of Palestinians displaced in 1948 by a factor of at least four. And while in 1948 the international community and the United Nations established entities to provide refugees with the bare minimum of education and aid, the response to the Iraqi refugee problem has been seriously inadequate on all levels. Many women have been forced into prostitution, and many children have no educational opportunities.

Among the displaced are most of the doctors, teachers, nurses, and educated professionals who formed the basic fabric of Iraqi society and are an integral building block of any reconstruction effort. Iraq’s recovery, which will take a few decades at best, will be impossible without the return of these citizens.

The Bush administration ignored this disaster, as to acknowledge it would have been an admission of its role in creating it. The number of Iraqis so far granted asylum in the U.S. is still less than that accepted by Sodertalje, a village in Sweden, as reported recently in the Washington Post.

A recent program initiated by the American Embassy in Baghdad offers up to 5,000 U.S. visas per year to Iraqi translators and other occupation collaborators. But high-ranking U.S. officials do not believe that this allowance can cover even direct employees of the American Embassy itself, let alone of other occupation entities such as Halliburton, Bechtel, and the U.S. Armed Forces.

Now that the war is over, no one can afford to neglect Iraqi refugees, and a serious and comprehensive plan to resettle them must be a priority for the new administration. The Evangelicals’ generosity is terrific (see “Evangelical Churches Announce Policy of Sanctuary for Iraqi Refugees,” Page A7), but what is really needed is a major policy change.