Our trip got started with a coincidence: on Friday, Oct. 2, the same day we arrived in Lebanon to begin learning about and drawing attention to the Iraqi refugee crisis, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pit showed up in Syria to … well, to do pretty much the same thing.

There’s a lot to be said — most of it in fairly strident tones — about the merit or (depending on your point of view) absurdity of celebrity activism on enormously complicated geopolitical problems such as the Iraqi refugee crisis.  I’m not going to wade into that terrain right now; but I think it’s reasonable to ask why, if many people think it’s pretty questionable for celebrities to parachute into crisis areas for photo ops and heartfelt messages (and if this is not an issue that you track, take my word for it that many people do think it’s questionable) — if that’s the case, then maybe it makes sense for those of us on this trip to think about and justify why we’re doing what we’re doing.

In other words, the celebrity issue suggests a question that’s relevant to the rest of us: how best can we Americans come here and bear witness to a crisis that is, in very substantial measure, of our own nation’s making?  If that question seems like so much naval-gazing (and I hope it doesn’t, since my end goal here is to write about the Iraqi refugee crisis, not about Americans’ crises of conscience), it seems worth pointing out that it is different in scope but not in kind from the questions we must ask of ourselves and our government as we try determine what role the United States should play in bringing stability and justice to Iraq.

So what of bearing witness?  Well, first, there’s no question that seeing is morally preferable to refusing to see.  As countless students of tragedy have observed, the simplest way to avoid having to intervene in a crisis – in fact, to avoid even having to decide whether to intervene in a crisis – is simply to turn one’s back on the evidence that the crisis exists in the first place.

To no small extent, that kind of willful moral blindness has been the fate of the Iraqi refugees to date.  Of the 26 million people who lived in Iraq before the start of the war in 2003, the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees estimates that roughly 4.2 million have fled their homes.  Half of those are internally displaced people, who are living (in many cases very tenuously) elsewhere in Iraq — typically among members of their own ethnic and religious background, since much of the violence in the country has amounted to a concerted campaign of ethnic cleansing.  The other half, an estimated  2.2 million people, have fled to neighboring nations, primarily Lebanon, Jordan, and (especially) Syria.

In other words, more than one-sixth of the population of Iraq has been displaced by war.  Taken together, these people represent the largest forced migration anywhere in the world – not just currently, but at any time in at least the last half-century.  And yet, unless you track international issues pretty closely, you probably haven’t heard very much about it.  In fact, I’d bet decent money that Darfur emits a stronger blip on your radar screen than Iraq – which, for comparisons’ sake, has hemorrhaged twice as many of its citizens.  (That’s not to suggest that these two conflicts are otherwise comparable, let alone that there is some kind of sliding scale of human suffering – just to point out that we are doing a far better job of bearing witness to the one than the other.)

When it comes to the Iraqi refugee crisis, then, we need to sit up and take notice – since seeing is, in this and all things, the crucial first step to acting.  And yet, bearing witness is a tricky business.  We know from a different domain – the law – that we should be somewhat wary of eyewitness accounts.  There’s nothing like seeing something firsthand to make you believe you really grasp it and to feel certain that you got right – yet eyewitness testimony turns out to be some of the most unreliable evidence there is.  Worse: it is, simultaneously, some of the most convincing.  It’s no accident that mistaken eyewitness are the number one reason innocent people wind up beyond bars.  While the stakes of getting our stories wrong over here might not be as steep, what we think we see matters immensely — for what we learn (and what we don’t learn), what we bring back home, and what kinds of conclusions we influence our friends, our neighbors, and our nation to reach.

So how do we look, yet not be deceived by the limitations of our own impressions?  Like many journalists, I pretty much live on the horns of this dilemma.  On the one hand, you have to go out there and have first-hand experiences and listen to people’s stories and try to make sense for yourself of what’s going on.  On the other hand, it is staggeringly hard to get it right.  Every passionate conviction has an equally impassioned contradiction; every story contests another story.  And when the issue at hand is as vast and complex as the Iraqi refugee crisis – a crisis that involves not just the immediate history of the Saddam years and the U.S. invasion of Iraq, but also the entire colonial and precolonial history of a nation, a region, and multiple religions – well, let’s just say that I’m not sure I trust Brangelina to translate all that to the American public.  Frankly, I’m not sure I trust myself to do so, either.  Like most Americans, when it comes to Iraq, I have virtually everything to learn.

I do trust, though, in two ways that can help us bear witness a little better.  The first is to get seriously acquainted with the facts – and, to that end, I’ll be blogging a lot here about the nuts and bolts of the refugee crisis in the coming days and weeks.  The second is to try, as often as possible, to see through other people’s eyes – especially those with different experiences and opinions than we alone can bring to the table.  To that end, I’ll be linking to lots of other people’s informed work on the refugee crisis, and I encourage everyone to share their thoughts and comments on the blog.

More details (and, I promise, many more stories) soon.

Tags: Cost of War, Iraq, Iraqi Refugees, Refugee Story

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 4th, 2009 at 6:36 am and is filed under Lebanon. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.