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final thoughts from Syria

Tuesday, October 20th, 2009

Last week, I spent some time talking with a young woman — I’ll call her Adab — who had just arrived in Syria from Iraq the previous day.  Unlike most of the Iraqis I’ve met here, she hadn’t exactly fled, and she wasn’t exactly a refugee.  Instead, she’d come to Syria to participate in the Iraqi Student Project, a Damascus-based effort to get qualified young Iraqis out of a war zone or the limbo of exile and into colleges in the United States.

In some respects, then, Adab came to Syria for less than typical reasons.  In other ways, though, her story was all too familiar.  Halfway through high school, for instance, she left Baghdad (and her family) and went to Basra to finish studying there.  Why?  Because during her sophomore year, a militia and the U.S. Army got into a massive gunfight at her school.  Militia violence at schools is tragically typical in Iraq, but this particular incident was so bad that the school actually shut down.  (In a sense, Adab was lucky, not only because she survived the gunfight but also because she was able to continue her education.  Many Iraqi kids I talked to had stayed home from school — had, indeed, barely left their homes — for months or years.)

Adab was fifteen when the gunfight happened.  By then, she told me, she had already come to school more than once to find decapitated bodies on the doorstep.  (After the first time her then-six-year-old sister witnessed that, Adab told me, she didn’t speak for a week.)  On other days, the entrance was splattered with — here she had to ask me for help with the word in English — innards.

I supplied the word, but who can really translate the experience?   This is the question I’ve been grappling with throughout my time in the Middle East.  In fact, Adab and I talked about it, too, because it turns out that she wants to become a journalist as well.  As she put it, she wants to spend her life covering important issues and bringing the truth about them to the world.

“The truth” and “the world” are the kinds of concepts you look at a bit skeptically after a decade or so as a practicing journalist.  As often as not, both are way too complicated and multifaceted to be reduced to that single unitary “the.”  Still, Adab’s sentiment was an honorable one, and in one form or another, it is the underpinning of conscientious journalism.  The reality about the Iraqi refugee crisis is that no one but Iraqis will experience it firsthand, and precious few people will experience it even secondhand, as I have.  Much as I often want to, none of us can bring the world to the truth — meaning, bodily drag every person on earth over for two or twenty or two million cups of tea with the two million Iraqi refugees.  As a result, those of us who have had the privilege of meeting some of these people bear the responsibility of bringing a part of their reality back home with us (since we also have the privilege, as they do not, of going home).  As the old and rather apt saying goes: if Mohammed won’t come to the mountain, the mountain must go to Mohammed.

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refugee mathematics 101

Friday, October 16th, 2009

There’s an equation in large-scale humanitarian disasters that’s always hard to wrap your head around.  It goes something like this:

If T = the tragedy of one person’s experience

and N = the number of people affected

Then T x N = … ?

You tell me.  When it comes to situations of mass misery, we have a story versus scope problem: we can be moved by individual people’s sufferings, and we can be stunned by statistics, but we cannot sum them up, in either sense of the phrase.

Inside waiting area

Iraqis waiting at UNHCR to register, receive assistance or check on the status of their application.

This reality hit home for me again here in Syria, where the Iraqi refugee crisis comes closest to showing its true proportions.  At the peak of the crisis in 2007, some 6000 Iraqis traveled the one-way road from Baghdad to Damascus every day.  Now, two years later, an estimated 1.2 million refugees make their home here, such as they can.  That makes for 1.2 million stories in Syria alone.

The trouble with that many stories is that no one person can absorb them all — let alone one person in a position to do anything about the problem.  (UNHCR, the one entity in the world that actually tries to listen to every refugee’s story, has registered only around 250,000 of them in Syria.)  The trouble, too, is that it risks creating a kind of morbid oneupmanship, in which it is no longer enough simply to have suffered the kind of tragedies that would level you and me: constant exposure to violence and danger; the murder of multiple friends and neighbors; the utter rearrangement, for the worse, of your nation as you knew it; the need to leave behind your career, your home, and virtually all your possessions and flee to a country where you are not a citizen, can’t work, and can’t provide for your family; and, subsequently, complete uncertainty about and precious little control over your future.

In an environment where that kind of hardship is the baseline, it’s easy for only the most extreme stories to stand out — particularly gruesome torture cases, for instance, or the murder of children.  This troubling tendency has real consequences.  UNHCR, for instance, is not above relying on a kind of Comparative Suffering metric to make decisions about who should be resettled and who must continue to wait.  Ditto much of the media, which sifts through these stories looking for the best of them — by which we mean, perversely, the worst of them.  But I’ve yet to meet an Iraqi refugee, any Iraqi refugee, whose reasons for leaving his or her homeland were anything short of horrible.

Women waiting

Women wait for their number to be called.

If there’s a moral to this story, it’s that individual solutions are both ethically indispensable and drastically inadequate. Case-by-case assistance matters; just ask anyone who’s benefited from it.  But it only gets us as far as the level of the story.  To solve the problem at the scale at which it really exists — up there in the unimaginable realm of not one or six or ten or twenty tales but multiple millions of them — we need a solution that operates at that scale, too.  Otherwise, we are looking at 4 million people who feel that they have been betrayed by the United States (at least) twice over: once during in invasion that promised freedom and delivered chaos; and again in its aftermath, when those who fled face far too few viable options for rebuilding their lives.

As for the consequences of that — well, that’s some math we can all do.

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where the refugees don’t go

Saturday, October 10th, 2009

Yesterday I wrote about where Iraqis go when they leave their homeland.  But just as interesting is the question of where they don’t go.  One answer is: back to Iraq.

For instance, check out this map. It’s a visual breakdown of how many refugees returned to the nation’s various provinces in the first nine months of 2008.   In two provinces, Dyiala and Baghdad, the numbers are significant: some 41,000 and 84,000 returnees, respectively.  (As with yesterday’s figures, of course, these have a fairly drastic margin of error.  In particular, the numbers are probably inflated by the fact that many people who return do so only temporarily — either to bring family members, money, or property back out with them again, or because they quickly realize that the situation remains unsafe and leave again.)  Elsewhere, though, they are unimpressive: 740 in Anbar; 1030 in Kirkus; 1370 in Basrah.  Remember, those are nine-month totals.  When you consider that 250 Iraqi refugees still cross the border into Lebanon every month — and that’s to say nothing of Syria, a more popular destination by an entire order of magnitude — these return figures start to seem vanishingly small.

The stories I’m hearing from refugees suggest that those numbers aren’t likely to swell in the near future.  To be sure, some people express a longing for their country and a sense of loss, displacement, and deep homesickness in their new lives beyond its borders.  And today, for the first time, someone suggested to me that Iraq needs its people to go back not merely to achieve peace but to restore the nation to its historic role as one of the truly great cultural and intellectual centers of the world.

Overall, though, surprisingly few of the people I’ve talked to have expressed a desire to return to Iraq, even in the fantasy scenario where a full and durable peace has been achieved.  Maybe, as I suggested in an earlier post, they simply can’t bear the thought of returning to the scene of so much trauma and loss.  But maybe, for them, fantasy scenarios are simply too far beyond the point.  Put differently, maybe these refugees are just realists, basing their plans for the future on their knowledge of what’s really going on in Iraq — in high contrast to the grandiose American dreams, untethered to the facts on the ground, that got us into this mess in the first place.

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refugee geography 101

Friday, October 9th, 2009

When Iraqis flee the war in their homeland, where do they go?  Fully seven different nations share a border with Iraq: Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait.  All but the latter (which made it clear from the get-go that it wouldn’t welcome refugees) are playing host, with varying degrees of reluctance, to Iraqi asylum seekers.   Here’s a nice visual overview of the situation:

_44120539_iraq_migr_map416_2

Needless to say, these numbers have a large margin of error.  It’s easy to under-count refugees, for two reasons.  The first has to do with politics.   Here in Jordan, for instance, the official figure is 500,000 and not a soul more.  Why?  Because the Jordanian government fears that publicizing a larger number will encourage more Iraqis to flock here, taxing the already overburdened national infrastructure and creating a kind of second Palestinian refugee situation.  (The official number is enforced, too: if you’re an NGO that wants to continue assisting Iraqis in Jordan, you had best subscribe to the view that there are only half a million of them.)

The second reason is more obvious: you try getting a precise head count on a population that is always in flux and often in fear.   If I’m doing my math right, the above map places the total number of refugees at 2,454,000, while many people now seem to put the figure closer to 2.2. million.  In other words, the numbers on the map are in the right ballpark, but only if you accept that the ballpark is pretty big.

What this map doesn’t show, though, is the complexity of factors that determine why individual Iraqis go where they do.  Over and over when you speak with refugees, they tell you that, before the war, Sunni, Shiite and Christian Iraqis lived together in harmony.  (Two days ago, one man swore to me on his Qur’an that he’d never even known there was a difference between Sunni and Shiite Muslims until the war.)  However much those remarks are colored by nostalgia and historical amnesia, it’s unquestionably true that pre-war Iraq was not riven by the fierce sectarian clashes that divide it today.

When Iraqis fled, though, they faced complicated calculations about where to go.  Some of these questions were basic: what country could they get to safely?  What forms of transportation were available to them?  Where did they have friends and family?  What could they afford?  Which nations had the laxest border requirements, the least expensive visas, the most lenient (or bribe-friendly) authorities?

But questions about cultural identity came into play, too — precisely the kind of questions that hadn’t mattered as much in pre-war Iraq.  For instance: who goes to Lebanon?  Well, for one, Iraqi Christians, who can benefit from its large and established Christian population.  For another, Iraqi Shiites, who head to the south of the country, where the charity arm of Hezbollah provides assistance to its sectarian brethern.  Who goes to Jordan?  First off, the wealthy: Amman ain’t cheap even for Westerners.  Second, the secular: although far more conservative than Lebanon, Jordan is also not an Islamist state, and it’s a comfortable place for non-religious Iraqis to live.

And so it goes on down the list.  In searching for a new homeland — or at least a temporary refuge — Iraqis must make complicated choices based in no small part on the same kind of divisions that have lately torn their country to pieces.  Those choices aren’t inherently dangerous (I’ve yet to hear a credible report of sectarian enmity and violence spilling over from the Iraq war into the refugee community), yet it’s impossible to feel that they aren’t, at the very least, invidious.  And they are a sad fate for a people that seem to be mourning, among their many other losses, the disappearance of a diverse communal life.

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In Lebanon, in limbo

Thursday, October 8th, 2009

I’m writing this in the Beirut airport, on the other side of customs, an exit stamp in my passport, at liberty to go where I want.  Welcome to one of the countless ways that my own life bears almost no resemblance to those of the estimated fifty thousand Iraqi refugees in Lebanon.  For them, leaving is not an option.  They cannot safely return to Iraq (and nor do many of them want to: well over half of those I talked to said that even peace would not lure them back to the site of so many traumatic memories).  But nor can they readily go elsewhere anytime soon.

I met a man today, for instance, who arrived in Lebanon in September with nothing but the clothes on his back.  Having been tortured in Baghdad, threatened and robbed in Damascus, and beaten almost to death in Beirut, he is desperate to be settled somewhere safe.  Yet his first meeting with UNHCR – a meeting that does nothing more than determine if he is eligible for refugee status – was not set to take place until December 29th.  (Safety issues aside, how he was supposed to survive in Lebanon in the intervening four months was woefully unclear.  Without UNHCR recognition, refugees can’t access any of the services provided by aid organizations.)  And that meeting represents only the first step in the long and chronically uncertain process of resettlement.  Those refugees hoping to get into the United States, for example, must undergo three separate screenings by three different agencies: UNHCR, ICMC (the International Catholic Migration Commission, an intermediary organization used by the U.S. to vet potential refugees), and, finally, the Department of Homeland Security.

AE_IraqRef_Leb_0852

Iraqi women and children waiting at a UNHCR refugee processing center in Beirut

In  applying for resettlement, refugees are competing for an extremely scarce resource.  Earlier this month, the United States set its 2010 quota for refugees of all nationalities at 80,000.  The global figure is not much higher, hovering somewhere around 120,000.  Compare those figures to the 2.5 million Iraqi refugees (to say nothing of the estimated 8 million other people fleeing conflict and persecution in other places), and it becomes clear that the resettlement process amounts to a painfully slow, painfully poor-odds crapshoot.

And here’s what makes it worse: the Iraqi refugees in Lebanon can’t leave, but they can’t just decide to stay, either.  Lebanon hasn’t signed on to the 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, the international protocol that outlines the responsibilities of those nations that accept asylum seekers – responsibilities that include granting them legal status.  The Lebanese government could decide to extend such status to refugees from Iraq anyway, but there is roughly zero chance that it will do so.

That resistance has nothing to do with the Iraqis, and everything to do with the most intractable problem facing the Middle East as a whole: Palestine.  Lebanon has long played unwilling host to some 400,000 Palestinian refugees – nearly one-tenth of the country’s total population.  Legalizing those refugees is politically unthinkable.  (That’s its own long and complicated story, but the short version is that doing so would threaten the status and power of Lebanon’s Christian community and foment fears about further tensions with Israel).  And that makes legalizing the Iraqis essentially impossible as well.  As a result, virtually every Iraqi refugee in Lebanon is, technically speaking, living there illegally.

An Iraqi man being interviewed at the UNHCR center

An Iraqi man being interviewed at the UNHCR center

Despite that fact, the Lebanese government has, in many respects, treated the incoming Iraqis fairly well.  Most are granted entry at the border, all have access (in theory, although seldom in practice) to the nation’s education and healthcare systems, and the authorities routinely turn a blind eye to the widespread visa violations.  But by failing to legalize the refugees, Lebanon leaves them frighteningly vulnerable to every form of exploitation and abuse: the shorting or withholding of promised pay by employers, the use of child labor, and forced sex work, to name just a few.  There are laws to protect against such abuses, of course – but the law can’t help you much if you yourself are illegal.

Then, too, there are the psychological costs of living in a country that refuses to recognize that you are likely to remain there.  For Iraqis, Lebanon is not a home so much as a holding pen.  Over and over, the refugees I met there told me that they are living a slow death, that they are just marking time, that they cannot think about the future beyond hoping to be resettled somewhere new.  Because there is a political myth that they are merely passing through (a myth that is even more laughable in the case of the Palestinian refugees, who have been there since 1948), the Iraqis there cannot and do not begin to construct new lives.  Dreams of the future are confined to desperate fantasies of life in the United States or Sweden or Australia – fantasies that are made all the more poignant by being all the less likely to come true.

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Iraq and a hard place

Monday, October 5th, 2009

I met a pair of sisters this afternoon — I’ll call them Amira and Farrah* — whose lives, even in thumbnail-sketch form, capture much of the complexity and tragedy of the contemporary Iraqi experience.

Amira, the younger of the two, is 53 years old.  In Baghdad, she worked for an investment bank and raised her four children alone.  (Her husband died before the war.)  Her eldest son, Samir, was trained as an electrical engineer but started working as an interpreter for the U.S. Army when the war began.  Within a year, the threats against his life had escalated to the point where he had to leave the country.  Now he lives in Florida and works at a gas station.

Back in Iraq, the insurgents who had threatened Samir were undeterred.  They kidnapped his younger brother Ali instead and beat and tortured him, leaving his genitals so badly damaged that he will never be able to have children.  His mother fears that he will never overcome the psychological problems he developed after the kidnapping, either.  Today, Ali lives with his mother and sister in Lebanon, where their lives are in limbo until they can join Samir in Florida.

Amira in Beirut, awaiting resettlement in Florida, where she will be reunited wtih her son for the first time in three years

Amira in Beirut, awaiting resettlement in Florida, where she will be reunited with her son for the first time in three years

Meanwhile, Amira’s sister Farrah  still lives in Iraq.  She is only in Lebanon temporarily, to undergo radiation therapy for breast cancer.  (Cancer rates among Iraqis are alarmingly high, most likely from the use of depleted uranium munitions by Americans during both the 1991 Gulf War and the current one.  A similar trend appears to be emerging among U.S. troops who served in Iraq.)

Farrah is married with three children, and her life in Iraq is extremely difficult.  Her husband goes to his job as a schoolteacher every day, but otherwise, the family leaves the house only when absolutely necessary; the streets of Baghdad are simply too dangerous for all but the most crucial errands.  When I asked Farrah whether she wanted to stay in Iraq or, like her sister, resettle somewhere more stable, she replied that it was up to her children.  If they wanted to go, she would go; if they wanted to stay, she would stay.

It takes money to get out of Iraq, and leaving your homeland out of necessity is an acutely unwelcome prospect: frightening, exhausting, lonely, sad.  Still, even with the financial and emotional difficulties of leaving, it’s hard to imagine, at first, what could possess people like Farah and her family to stay in Iraq.  But consider this: her son just finished medical school — a famously rigorous six-year training program that entitles him to enter a well-paid, well-respected, meaningful profession.

So here is the dilemma facing Ahmed — and by extension his whole family, and by analogy the whole of Iraq.  He can stay in a country where his cousin was kidnapped and tortured, where violence remains so omnipresent that his own life has narrowed almost to the walls of his house — and where he has a newly-minted degree in a prestigious and lucrative field that he loves.  Or he can leave Iraq, wait in limbo in Lebanon or one of the other refugee holding-pins around the Middle East for eight to ten months (the average length of time a refugee resettlement takes, according to the U.S. State Department), after which he can go to Florida and live in safety — and file away his medical degree and his dreams to work with his cousin at a gas station.

Idiomatically, this is called a Morton’s Fork: a choice that consists of two equally bad options.  For Ahmed and millions of other Iraqis, it appears, for the time being, to be the only kind of choice they have.

* All the names in this post have been changed.

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From Beirut, some thoughts on bearing witness

Sunday, October 4th, 2009

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.

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