Nobody's Home
Dr. iRack wants to get serious for a moment. As most of you know, more than 4 million Iraqis have become refugees or internally displaced persons since 2003. This is not only a humanitarian disaster--it is also profoundly dangerous. Historically, waves of refugees have contributed to cascading regional instability, and squalid refugee camps throughout the Middle East have become bastions for terrorist recruiting.
But, at the moment, the bigger threat to stability is not be the outward flow of refugees from Iraq, but the desire of externally and internally displaced Iraqis to come home. Improved security in some parts of Iraq has started to "pull" displaced people home, while deteriorating economic conditions for refugees in Jordan and Syria has "pushed" others to return. Yet, in many cases, families come back only to find that their houses are no longer theirs. Instead they are often rented (illegally) to other families (typically from a rival sect) by the very thugs responsible for sectarian cleansing in the first place, or otherwise occupied by squatters.
The Iraqi government has yet to figure out a way to settle property rights disputes, compensate returning families, or resettle them in a way that provides a modicum of justice. And, in the absence of a coherant government plan, JAM and other militias are filling the void, building additional support among displaced individuals by providing services. As the trickle of returnees becomes a flood, the dysfunctional Iraqi government response could become a very big problem for the future stability of Iraq.
You see, one reason security has improved over the past year in Baghdad is the fact that sectarian violence and cleansing got so bad in 2006-2007 that it seperated Sunni and Shia communities, creating more homogenous, defensible enclaves that are increasingly walled-off (literally) from one another. This is a crude and horrible "peace" rooted in an interlocking series of profound injustices. Yet, there it is. And, most commentators agree, it would be a mistake to try to reverse engineer mixed communities for the forseeable future because doing so risks a fresh round of sectarian clashes. But, at the same time, returning families must receive some kind of assistance . . . and the Iraqi government has been slow to step up to the plate.
For a taste of some of the personal and security dilemmas involved here--and the difficult moral positions they produce for U.S. forces caught in the middle of it all--check out this piece from the Christian Science Monitor.
6 comments:
Somewhere, Chaim Kaufmann is cheering you on.
While I don't dismiss the enormous danger for a new round of sectarian bloodletting, there's a simultaneous moral (and strategic) hazard of consolidating divisions and reifying the ethnicization of Iraqi politics if the state funnels returnees into segregated neighborhoods. Bosnia offers a stark lesson in how policies designed to reduce sectarian violence in the short term unintentionally institutionalized ethnic divisions and generated long-term barriers to political progress.
Obviously crafting a policy that balances short and long term priorities is easier said than done, but it makes sense to avoid building any more barriers to political reconciliation than already exist. That said, balanced policy responses are likely to be more resource intensive, and it's not like there's a surplus given the magnitude of the IDP/refugee issue (amongst others); maybe you're right and the least bad policy is the one that keeps things quiet for now, even if it creates problems down the road.
MK
I am curious. ". . and the Iraqi government has been slow to step up to the plate." The meaning of "civil war" has lately been discussed. What is the meaning of "government"?
Is it the entity which maintains control of large scale violence? And ensures the provision of the most basic services? By these metrics Sadr's people are a "government" in a significant part the country, and the "Iraqi government," absent the Americans, in virtually none, as I understand it. Is there some other meaningful standard?
So - while your points about the refugees are very good, I wonder if the implication that the "Iraqi government," with no legitimacy or power of its own outside the Green Zone, is not a diversion.
G Hazeltine, in this case 'Iraqi government' means 'Shiite militias
' means 'the guys who did most of the ethnic cleansing'. From their point of view, they stepped up to the plate already, creating those refugees.
-Barry
There may be more bad statistics than refugees.
The 'four million refugee' number cannot be trusted because it has never been confirmed.
For example, many reporters cite the Red Crescent as the source of this number, yet there's no reason to trust the group, which has spent much of the war working with SUnni killers to undermine the Iraq government.
Reporters also use the UN as a source, but the UN does not actually count refugees - it accepts the numbers offered by host-governments, such as Syria and Jordan, both of whom have reasons to inflate the numbers.
When the numbers are investigated, they fall. For example, a Norwegian non-profit, FAFO, did a sample-survey and estimated there were 161k Iraqis in Jordan. Under pressure from the gov't, they also released a study saying 500K Iraqis were in the country. But the 'four million refugee' claims assumes 750k Iraqis in Jordan.
It's the same story in Syria, where the autocrats say they host 700K or so, but only about 170k Iraqis have registered themselves with the local UN office.
In other words, you have to be rudely skeptical towards even the most commonplace numbers that the media produces from Iraq.
Now, about the numbers of dead Iraqis....
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