[Marxism] One more cruel hoax of Bush Admininistration

["Nasir Khan" <nasir.khan@xxxxxxx>]

Republished: http://nasir-khan.blogspot.com and http://sudhan.wordpress.com

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Iraqi Refugees Return

By John Ross | Counterpunch, December 14, 2007

with the first presidential primaries on the U.S. doorstep January 3rd, the 
usual unholy alliance of Bushites, Democrats, and Big Media are doing their 
damndest to skam a skeptical electorate into swallowing the lie that the surge 
has worked, the drawdown has begun, and the war in Iraq is just about over. 
Security is so improved in Baghdad thanks to the Bush-Petraeus putsch that New 
York Times reporters can walk certain streets without armed escort. Even the 
refugees, driven off by unspeakable violence, are returning to Baghdad in 
droves.

This myth is being perpetrated by the likes of Fox News and CNN. A four-column 
full-color photo on the front page of the New York Times November 20th of a 
gala Baghdad wedding party was accompanied inside by a shot of smiling 
adolescents playing fussball and a banner headline "BAGHDAD EXHALES AS SECURITY 
IMPROVES." 

The U.S. military affirms that insurgent activity is at its lowest level since 
the February 2006 bombing of the Golden Dome in Samarrah that set off sectarian 
bloodshed. Yet more U.S. troops have lost their lives in 2007 than in any other 
year of this brutal war precisely because of Bush's surge. 

All this happy talk gets Bush and the Republicans off the hook for an 
overwhelmingly unpopular war just in time for the U.S. presidential election 
season. It also means that the Democrats won't have to defend their 
half-hearted call for withdrawal and risk being tarred as traitors on the 24 
House news cycle. Indeed, the purported calm that has returned to the streets 
of Baghdad is mostly a photo op touted by Bush's Big Media collaborators that 
defuses the war as a campaign issue.

The truth of the matter is that the much-hyped success of the surge and the 
return of the refugees is as big a bosh as Bush's WMDs. The streets of Baghdad 
and Mosul remain deadly killing grounds and the refugees are being manipulated 
like pawns in a political bunko game to get a U.S. president elected. Moreover, 
the myth of their return is a cruel hoax that could shred them of the 
legitimacy of sanctuary.

The campaign to foist these lies on the U.S. electorate began congruently 
enough just a few hours into this past November election day. On November 7th, 
the Washington Post reported on a Baghdad press conference by the U.S.-Iraqi 
Joint Pacification Command at which General Quassin al-Moussawi insisted the 
city had grown so safe that over 46,000 refugees had returned in October. 
Moussawi was seconded by his U.S. counterpart Major General Joseph Fils: "there 
is no question that families are returning to Baghdad." The next day, New York 
Times correspondent Damien Cave met with General Fils over egg rolls in the 
Green Zone and later wrote "by all accounts, Iraq families who fled their homes 
in the past two yeas are returning to Baghdad." 

Then on November 12th, Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki announced that 
7000 families had already returned to Baghdad thanks to the good offices of 
Bush's surge and invited the millions of Iraqis still displaced by the carnage 
to come home. A spokesperson for the Displacement Ministry backed up the Prime 
Minister, estimating that 1600 families a day had returned from internal and 
external exile during October, many of them on free buses the Iraqi puppet 
government had sent to Damascus to transport refugees home. 

Days later, even Cave had to concede the numbers were bogus. General Moussawi's 
46,000 seems to represent all Iraqi citizens crossing the borders from Syria 
and Jordan during October 2007 and included returning vacationers, business 
travelers, religious pilgrims, and exiles temporarily returning to retrieve 
money or for medical care or to bury a relative - in addition to a few refugees 
going home for good. Even foreign fighters and three insurgents who had fled to 
Syria and were arrested in Baqouba days later are thought to be in the mix.

The 1600 families who had reportedly returned daily during October were more 
like 50, a representative of the bus line chartered by the Maliki government to 
bring them home, told Cave. Once more, thousands were still fleeing Baghdad - 
more than were returning according to a bulletin issued by the Iraqi Red 
Crescent. Those on the run were mostly being forced into internal displacement 
- traffic between Baghdad and Damascus has been greatly diminished because the 
Syrian government is no longer issuing temporary visas to Iraqis seeking 
sanctuary. In fact, some of the would-be refugees being turned back at the 
border may have been counted into Moussawi's numbers.

The United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR) counts 4.2 million 
displaced Iraqis, 2.2 million internally displaced and the rest dispersed in 
neighboring countries, the largest forced displacement in the Arab world since 
the Palestinian exodus of 1948. The Middle East now accounts for half the 
world's refugees - according to the Swiss-based International Organization on 
Migration (IOM), the Iraqi diaspora has been responsible for a 14% spike in the 
number of refugees worldwide. Yet the world has been slow to recognize the 
crisis and the Iraqi displacement doesn't have the visibility that the Darfur 
Crusade, bankrolled by Hollywood moguls, has had.

The internally displaced are the most vulnerable. Herded into ragtag desert 
camps where violence and disease are epidemic, they face a harsh winter with 
little resource - UNHCR calculates that half the refugees are children. Some, 
having been refused residency by 11 out of Iraq's 18 provincial governments, 
have taken up Maliki's offer of a million dinars ($800 USD) and are returning 
to Baghdad but nowhere in the numbers that Maliki claims. According to the 
displacement ministry, only 4300 families, 25,000 Iraqis, have availed 
themselves of the stipend. UNHCR tallies indicate that 28,000 Iraqis, 3000 more 
than returned, left Baghdad in October.

A third of the returnees return to find someone else living in their homes, 
Dana Ladek of the IOM told the Times. Because many Sunna have lost their homes 
to Shiia families, the housing of returnees has the potential for amping up 
sectarian confrontation. Ominously, the Maliki government has charged former 
CIA asset and convicted embezzler Ahmad Chalabi, a wily veteran of Iraqi's 
bruising political wars (U.S. troops once stormed his mansion) with resolving 
the returnees' housing crisis.

An estimated 2,000,000 Iraqis have escaped across the country's borders since 
the war began in March 2003 - 1.2 to 1.5 million to Syria; 750,000 to Jordan; 
and several hundred thousand more to the Gulf states and Arab capitals like 
Cairo and Beirut - although the threat of renewed civil war is reportedly 
driving Lebanese into the refugee flow, further impacting the refugee crisis in 
the Middle East. 20,000 Iraqi Christians have been granted sanctuary in Sweden 
but a jittery Europe is reluctant to admit more Muslims. 

The U.S., with 65,000 Iraqi collaborators in harm's way, has been notoriously 
lackadaisical about admitting refugees - only 466 were granted residency 
through fiscal 2005-6 with another 1608 added in fiscal 2006-7. Although 12,000 
visas are supposed to be issued in the current fiscal year, the October quota 
was only 450, less than half of the projected monthly goal. Washington blames 
Syria for the delay because it has refused to allow Homeland Security to screen 
applicants in Damascus.

For 2,000,000 Iraqis in external exile, life is uneasy. Their presence puts 
pressures on the cities and countries where they seek sanctuary, exacerbating 
already debilitated infrastructure and precious resources like water, driving 
up housing prices and driving down wages, and their welcome has often been a 
hostile one. In Jordan, where the authorities fret that terrorist acts like the 
2005 bombings at three luxury hotels that took 57 lives could spread across the 
border, the refugees are regarded with suspicion. Iraqi children were not 
allowed to enroll in school until this year. Work permits are virtually 
impossible to obtain and Iraqi workers are unscrupulously exploited in the 
underground job market. 

Deportation is an incessant threat. Much like undocumented Mexican workers in 
the U.S., the refugees live in the shadows fearing that they will be swept up 
and sent home. Like Mexican workers in the U.S., deportations often split 
families and women are left alone to raise children in a strange land.

Given the difficulties and disappointments of exile, some refugees have packed 
up and gone back - but they are driven by desperation rather than the false 
promises of improved security in Baghdad, one Iraqi activist in Amman affirms. 
An UNHCR survey of 110 Iraqis returning from Syria in October found that most 
were on the bus because they had run out of money or the stress of making a 
living had grown too onerous or simply because their visas had expired. "This 
is not the time to promote, organize, or encourage return," UNHCR spokesperson 
Jennifer Paconis told a Damascus press conference. "There is no sign of large 
scale repatriation as the security situation remains volatile in many parts of 
Iraq."

The stories that Sasha Crow and Mary Madsen, the founders of the Pacific 
Northwest-based Collateral Repair Project, have been hearing as they trudge the 
sewage-strewn back streets of Amman, are heartbreaking. But despite the 
hardships they face, few families will be going home soon. 

Some are longtime refugees driven from their homeland by Saddam and the 
U.S.-U.N. sanctions - there were already a million refugees when the war began. 
Some are double refugees like the Palestinians expelled from Iraq and now 
camped out at al-Rahwead on the Jordanian border. Most are more recent arrivals 
who fled Iraq after the Golden Dome bombing triggered sectarian slaughter in 
2006. Many still tremble when they recount the terror they lived - Bush's shock 
& awe show that still causes refugee children to scream when they hear an 
airplane, the headless bodies in the streets of Baghdad, the murder of a parent 
or spouse. Many seem to suffer post-traumatic stress but there are few doctors 
to diagnosis it.

Some have thought it was safe to go back and met with tragedy. Um Saif's 
husband, an employee of the Iraqi foreign ministry forced to flee after 
Bremmer's De-Baathization order, returned to Baghdad to treat his ailing heart 
and was shot dead by political enemies, his body tossed out near the city 
morgue. "Saleena" (not her real name), a refugee activist, reports that a 
teenager, one of the first returnees, was found stabbed 16 time. 

The rumor of the Baghdad killing of 11 members of refugee journalist Diha 
al-Kawaz's family electrified Iraqi exiles in Amman even if the rumor proved 
untrue. The November 23rd bombing at the al-Ghazzi pet market in Baghdad, a 
showcase for the new security in that ravaged city, put the lie to Maliki's 
promises and is not a good sign for the return business.

"I want only to go to my home," Meha, the 14 year-old daughter of an Iraqi 
agrarian engineer who now sells pickles on the streets of Amman to make ends 
meet (thanks to a Collateral Repair micro-loan) told Sasha and Mary. When asked 
what she would like to say to U.S. teenagers, Meha was candid: America must 
leave her country. Then she can go home.

All refugees everywhere dream of going home. Return is an unshakeable obsession 
that permeates every waking moment and is dreamt about every night. But above 
all, Iraqis want to go home to a country and a city that is safe like Baghdad 
was before the U.S. invasion and occupation, before the car bombings and 
kidnappings and sectarian bloodletting, when there was no ten hour wait for 
gasoline and you could drink the water and there was electricity all day and 
the wedding parties erupted joyously on the downtown streets every Thursday at 
dusk. 

One morning near Farduz Square, I watched the owner of a nearby candy shop 
singing happily to himself as he stacked his shelves with sweets for the coming 
holidays. Chattering birds were in the trees and the tea wagons were doing a 
brisk business. Men and women in pairs strolled the streets in safety and 
peace. That was in March 2003, ten days before Bush launched his genocidal war 
on the Iraqi people and forced millions of refugees into exile.


Read Sasha and Mary's reports from Amman at www.collateralrepairproject.org. 

John Ross is looking at Mexico through his fake eye. If you have further 
information write johnross@xxxxxxx 


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