Hi Everyone,

We’ve cut together a short highlight video from the trip, please take a look and feel free to pass it along. A longer version will be posted later this week. And of course the video on the crisis is still to come, look for that in the spring.

All the best,

IVAP Team

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.

Inspired by the stories of Iraqi refugees

These are just some of the sentiments that we have gathered from the many stories shared with us from the Iraqi refugee families that we have met.  All of them have been poignant.  All painful.  All waiting…hoping…wishing for home – to start life again in a place that offers the promise of peace & tranquility as well as a means to care for themselves and their families – if they still have one.

Yet through these stifled voices, I heard most loudly the deafening silence from the children.  The ones that are seen but never heard.  The ones often asked, no required, to forego school either because they need to work to bring home money for the family, or because they must remain in hiding so that they would not be found, kidnapped, and persecuted again.

It was the speechless, somber children that met me at the start of each and every workshop I gave, their large beautiful eyes staring and wondering who this new person was with the strange clothes and curious hair…but gratefully, they gave me a chance – and their silence quickly turned to cacophonous song and belly-filled laughter through the universal therapeutic heart-opening power and blessing of music, dance, play & song.

These beautiful souls just starting out on this life journey – all of whom have seen and heard atrocities I cannot even begin to imagine – these are the ones that slowly began to smile from ear to ear as they merrily played the drum with me, giggled when we danced the hokey pokey, and cackled uproariously when we tried with all of our might to learn from them how to say drum, shaker, bells, eggplant, & pumpkin in Arabic.

These sweet little ones are the key to keeping this culture alive.  They are the ones that hold the delicate thread of their ancestry, their traditions, and their culture, and although many of them have yet to receive these gifts because it is too painful for their parents to recount, they still carry the desire to play, laugh, learn, & mostly – LOVE.

As our music & dance workshop with the kids at the health clinic came to a close today, I heard them continuing to sing the songs that they had learned with eager ease. All of the parents and the clinic social workers were amazed at the way that all of them stayed so attentive and  joyful – particularly one child in a wheelchair, who normally remains disengaged due to his physical condition, but bounced and rocked with glee today as we all danced around him, gave him instruments to play, and included him in the fun.

All in all, to quote my colleague Eduardo Vargas, one of the co-directors of this trip, “No matter what else happens today, the smiles alone on the faces of these children, makes it a mighty fine day”.

Never truer words were spoken.  Shukran.

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.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ld4P3DnQfhQ

The IVAP team followed a Caritas social worker on a home visit with an Iraqi refugee family living in Saida. Caritas Lebanon is a member of Caritas Internationalis, a worldwide confederation which figures among the worlds largest humanitarian networks.

The IVAP team met with Stéphane Jaquemet, United Nations Regional Representative in Beirut to talk about issues relating to the resettlement of Iraqi refugees.

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.

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

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.