Overlapping Waves of the Dispossessed
In its first four years, the Iraq war created three overlapping waves of refugees and IDPs.
It
all began with the Coalition Provisional Authority, which the Bush
administration set up inside Baghdad's Green Zone and, in May 2003,
placed under the control of L. Paul Bremer III. The CPA immediately
began dismantling Iraq's state apparatus. Thousands of Baathist Party
bureaucrats were purged from the government; tens of thousands of
workers were laid off from shuttered, state-owned industries; hundreds
of thousands of Iraqi military personnel were dismissed from Saddam's
dismantled military. Their numbers soon multiplied as the ripple effect
of their lost buying power rolled through the economy. Many of the
displaced found other (less remunerative) jobs; some hunkered down to
wait out bad times; still others left their homes and sought work
elsewhere, with the most marketable going to nearby countries where
their skills were still in demand. They were the leading edge of the
first wave of Iraqi refugees.
As the post-war chaos continued,
kidnapping became the country's growth industry, targeting any
prosperous family with the means to pay ransom. This only accelerated
the rate of departure, particularly among those who had already had
their careers disrupted. A flood of professional, technical, and
managerial workers fled their homes and Iraq in search of personal and
job security.
The spirit of this initial exodus was eloquently expressed by an Iraqi blogger with the online handle of AnaRki13:
- "Not
so much a migration as a forced exodus. Scientists, engineers, doctors,
architects, writers, poets, you name it -- everybody is getting out of
town.
- "Why? Simple: 1. There is no real job market in Iraq. 2.
Even if you have a good job, chances are good you'll get kidnapped or
killed. It's just not worth it staying here. Sunni, Shiite, or
Christian -- everybody, we're all leaving, or have already left.
- "One
of my friends keeps berating me about how I should love this country,
the land of my ancestors, where I was born and raised; how I should be
grateful and return to the place that gave me everything. I always tell
him the same thing: 'Iraq, as you and me once knew it, is lost. What's
left of it, I don't want…'
- "The most famous doctors and
university professors have already left the country because many of
them, including ones I knew personally, were assassinated or killed,
and the rest got the message -- and got themselves jobs in the west,
where they were received warmly and given high positions. Other
millions of Iraqis, just ordinary Iraqis, left and are leaving --
without plans and with much hope."
In 2004, the Americans
triggered a second wave of refugees when they began to attack and
invade insurgent strongholds, as they did the Sunni city of Falluja in
November 2004, using the full kinetic force of their military. Whether
the Americans called for evacuation or not, large numbers of local
residents were forced to flee battleground neighborhoods or cities. The
process was summarized in a thorough review of the history of the war
compiled by the Global Policy Forum and 35 other international
non-governmental organizations:
- "Among those who flee, the
most fortunate are able to seek refuge with out-of-town relatives, but
many flee into the countryside where they face extremely difficult
conditions, including shortages of food and water. Eventually the Red
Crescent, the UN or relief organizations set up camps. In Falluja, a
city of about 300,000, over 216,000 displaced persons had to seek
shelter in overcrowded camps during the winter months, inadequately
supplied with food, water, and medical care. An estimated 100,000 fled
al-Qaim, a city of 150,000, according to the Iraqi Red Crescent Society
(IRCS). In Ramadi, about 70 percent of the city's 400,000 people left
in advance of the U.S. onslaught.
- "These moments mark the beginning of Iraq's massive displacement crisis."
While
most of these refugees returned after the fighting, a significant
minority did not, either because their homes (or livelihoods) had been
destroyed, or because they were afraid of continuing violence. Like the
economically displaced of the previous wave, these refugees sought out
new areas that were less dangerous or more prosperous, including
neighboring countries. And, as with that first wave, it was the
professionals as well as the technical and managerial workers who were
most likely to have the resources to leave Iraq.
In early 2005
the third wave began, developing by the next year into the veritable
tsunami of ethnic cleansing and civil war that pushed vast numbers of
Iraqis from their homes. The precipitating incidents, according to Ali
Allawi -- the Iraqi finance minister when this third wave began -- were
initially triggered by the second-wave-refugees pushed out of the Sunni
city of Falluja in the winter of 2004:
- "Refugees leaving
Falluja had converged on the western Sunni suburbs of Baghdad, Amriya
and Ghazaliya, which had come under the control of the insurgency.
Insurgents, often backed by relatives of the Falluja refugees, turned
on the Shi'a residents of these neighbourhoods. Hundreds of Shi'a
families were driven from their homes, which were then seized by the
refugees. Sunni Arab resentment against the Shi'a's ‘collaboration'
with the occupation's forces had been building up, exacerbated by the
apparent indifference of the Shi'a to the assault on Falluja.
- "In
turn, the Shi'a were becoming incensed by the daily attacks on
policemen and soldiers, who were mostly poor Shi'a men. The targeting
of Sunnis in majority Shi'a neighbourhoods began in early 2005. In the
Shaab district of Baghdad, for instance, the assassination of a popular
Sadrist cleric, Sheikh Haitham al-Ansari, led to the formation of one
of the first Shi'a death squads… The cycle of killings, assassinations,
bombings and expulsions fed into each other, quickly turning to a
full-scale ethnic cleansing of city neighbourhoods and towns."
The
process only accelerated in early 2006, after the bombing of the Golden
Dome in Samarra, a revered Shiite shrine, and crested in 2007 when the
American military "surge" onto the streets of Baghdad loosened the hold
of Sunni insurgents on many mixed as well as Sunni neighborhoods in the
capital. During the year of the surge all but 25 or so of the
approximately 200 mixed neighborhoods in Baghdad became ethnically
homogenous. A similar process took place in the city's southern
suburbs.
As minority groups in mixed neighborhoods and cities
were driven out, they too joined the army of displaced persons, often
settling into vacated homes in newly purified neighborhoods dominated
by their own sect. But many, like those in the previous waves of
refugees, found they had to move to new locales far away from the
violence, including a large number who, once again, simply left Iraq.
As with previous waves, the more prosperous were the most likely to
depart, taking with them professional, technical, and managerial
skills.
Among those who departed in this third wave was
Riverbend, the pseudonymous "Girl Blogger from Baghdad," who had
achieved international fame for her beautifully crafted reports on life
in Iraq under the U.S. occupation. Her description of her journey into
exile chronicled the emotional tragedy experienced by millions of
Iraqis:
"The last few hours in the house were a blur. It
was time to go and I went from room to room saying goodbye to
everything. I said goodbye to my desk -- the one I'd used all through
high school and college. I said goodbye to the curtains and the bed and
the couch. I said goodbye to the armchair E. and I broke when we were
younger. I said goodbye to the big table over which we'd gathered for
meals and to do homework. I said goodbye to the ghosts of the framed
pictures that once hung on the walls, because the pictures have long
since been taken down and stored away -- but I knew just what hung
where. I said goodbye to the silly board games we inevitably fought
over -- the Arabic Monopoly with the missing cards and money that no
one had the heart to throw away…
"The trip was long and
uneventful, other than two checkpoints being run by masked men. They
asked to see identification, took a cursory glance at the passports and
asked where we were going. The same was done for the car behind us.
Those checkpoints are terrifying but I've learned that the best
technique is to avoid eye contact, answer questions politely and pray
under your breath. My mother and I had been careful not to wear any
apparent jewelry, just in case, and we were both in long skirts and
head scarves...
"How is it that a border no one can see or
touch stands between car bombs, militias, death squads and… peace,
safety? It's difficult to believe -- even now. I sit here and write
this and wonder why I can't hear the explosions..."
The Human Toll
The
number of Iraqis who flooded neighboring lands, not to speak of even
approximate estimates of the number of internal refugees, remains
notoriously difficult to determine, but the most circumspect of
observers have reported constantly accelerating rates of displacement
since the Bush administration's March 2003 invasion. These numbers
quickly outstripped the flood of expatriates who had fled the country
during Saddam Hussein's brutal era.
By early 2006, the United
Nations High Commissioner for Refugees was already estimating that 1.7
million Iraqis had left the country and that perhaps an equal number of
internal refugees had been created in the same three-year period. The
rate rose dramatically yet again as sectarian violence and ethnic
expulsions took hold; the International Organization for Migration
estimated the displacement rate during 2006 and 2007 at about 60,000
per month. In mid 2007, Iraq was declared by Refugees International to
be the "fastest-growing refugee crisis in the world," while the United
Nations called the crisis "the worst human displacement in Iraq's
modern history."
Syria, the only country that initially placed
no restrictions on Iraqi immigration, had (according to UN statistics)
taken in about 1.25 million displaced Iraqis by early 2007. In
addition, the UN estimated that more than 500,000 Iraqi refugees were
in Jordan, as many as 70,000 in Egypt, approaching 60,000 in Iran,
about 30,000 in Lebanon, approximately 200,000 spread across the Gulf
States, and another 100,000 in Europe, with a final 50,000 spread
around the globe. The United States, which had accepted about 20,000
Iraqi refugees during Saddam Hussein's years, admitted 463 additional
ones between the start of the war and mid-2007.
President
Bush's "surge" strategy, begun in January 2007, amplified the flood,
especially of the internally displaced, still further. According to
James Glanz and Stephen Farrell of the New York Times, "American-led
operations have brought new fighting, driving fearful Iraqis from their
homes at much higher rates than before the tens of thousands of
additional troops arrived." The combined effect of the American
offensive and accelerated ethnic expulsions generated an estimated
displacement rate of 100,000 per month in Baghdad alone during the
first half of 2007, a figure that surprised even Said Hakki, the
director of the Iraqi Red Crescent, who had been monitoring the refugee
crisis since the beginning of the war.
During 2007, according
to UN estimates, Syria admitted an additional 150,000 refugees. With
Iraqis by then constituting almost 10% of the country's population, the
Syrian government, feeling the strain on resources, began putting
limits on the unending flood and attempted to launch a mass
repatriation policy. Such repatriation efforts have, so far, been
largely fruitless. Even when violence in Baghdad began to decline in
late 2007, refugees attempting to return found that their abandoned
homes had often either been badly damaged in American offensives or,
more likely, appropriated by strangers (often of a different sect), or
were in "cleansed" neighborhoods that were now inhospitable to them.
In
the same years, the weight of displaced persons inside Iraq grew ever
more quickly. Estimated by the UN at 2.25 million in September 2007,
this tidal flow of internally displaced, often homeless, families began
to weigh on the resources of the provinces receiving them. Najaf, the
first large city south of Baghdad, where the most sacred Shiite shrines
in Iraq are located, found that its population of 700,000 had increased
by an estimated 400,000 displaced Shia. In three other southern Shia
provinces, IDPs came by mid-2007 to constitute over half the
population.
The burden was crushing. By 2007, Karbala, one of
the most burdened provinces, was attempting to enforce a draconian
measure passed the previous year: New residents would be expelled
unless officially sponsored by two members of the provincial council.
Other governates also tried in various ways, and largely without
success, to staunch the flow of refugees.
Whether inside or
outside the country, even prosperous families before the war faced grim
conditions. In Syria, where a careful survey of conditions was
undertaken in October 2007, only 24% of all Iraqi families were
supported by salaries or wages. Most families were left to live as best
they could on dwindling savings or remittances from relatives, and a
third of those with funds on hand expected to run out within three
months. Under this kind of pressure, increasing numbers were reduced to
sex work or other exploitative (or black market) sources of income.
Food
was a major issue for many families; according to the United Nations,
nearly half needed "urgent food assistance." A substantial proportion
of adults reported skipping at least one meal a day in order to feed
their children. Many others endured foodless days "in order to keep up
with rent and utilities." One refugee mother told McClatchy reporter
Hannah Allam, "We buy just enough meat to flavor the food -- we buy it
with pennies... I can't even buy a kilo of sweets for Eid [a major
annual celebration]."
According to a rigorous McClatchy
Newspaper survey, most Iraqi refugees in Syria were housed in crowded
conditions with more than one person per room (sometimes many more).
Twenty-five percent of families lived in one-room apartments; about one
in six refugees had been diagnosed with a (usually untreated) chronic
disease; and one-fifth of the children had had diarrhea in the two
weeks before being questioned. While Syrian officials had aided refugee
parents in getting over two-thirds of school-aged children enrolled in
schools, 46% had dropped out -- due mainly to lack of appropriate
immigration documents, insufficient funds to pay for school expenses,
or a variety of emotional issues -- and the drop-out rate was
escalating. And keep in mind, the Iraqis who made it to Syria were
generally the lucky ones, far more likely to have financial resources
or employable skills.
Like the expatriate refugees, internally
displaced Iraqis faced severe and constantly declining conditions. The
almost powerless Iraqi central government, largely trapped inside
Baghdad's Green Zone, requires that people who move from one place to
another register in person in Baghdad; if they fail to do so, they lose
eligibility for the national program that subsidizes the purchase of
small amounts of a few staple foods. Such registration was mostly
impossible for families driven from their homes in the country's
vicious civil war. With no way to "register," families displaced
outside of Baghdad entered their new residences without even the
increasingly meager safety net offered by guaranteed subsidies of basic
food supplies.
To make matters worse, almost three-quarters of
the displaced were women or children and very few of the intact
families had working fathers. Unemployment rates in most cities to
which they were forced to move were already at or above 50%, so
prostitution and child labor increasingly became necessary options.
UNICEF reported that a large proportion of children in such families
were hungry, clinically underweight, and short for their age. "In some
areas, up to 90 per cent of the [displaced] children are not in
school," the UN agency reported.
Losing Precious Resources
The
job backgrounds of an extraordinary proportion of Iraqi refugees in
Syria were professional, managerial, or administrative. In other words,
they were collectively the repository of the precious human capital
that would otherwise have been needed to sustain, repair, and
eventually rebuild their country's ravaged infrastructure. In Iraq,
approximately 10% of adults had attended college; more than one-third
of the refugees in Syria were university educated. Whereas less than 1%
of Iraqis had a postgraduate education, nearly 10% of refugees in Syria
had advanced degrees, including 4.5% with doctorates. At the opposite
end of the economic spectrum, fully 20% of all Iraqis had no schooling,
but only a relative handful of the refugees arriving in Syria (3%) had
no education. These proportions were probably even more striking in
other more distant receiving lands, where entry was more difficult.
The
reasons for this remarkable brain drain are not hard to find. Even the
desperate process of fleeing your home turns out to require resources,
and so refugees from most disasters who travel great distances tend to
be disproportionately prosperous, as the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina
in New Orleans so painfully illustrated.
In Iraq, this
tendency was enhanced by American policy. The mass privatization and
de-Baathification policies of the Bush administration ensured that
large numbers of professional, technical, and managerial workers, in
particular, would be cast out of their former lives. This tendency was
only exacerbated by the development of the kidnapping industry,
focusing its attentions as it did on families with sufficient resources
to pay handsome ransoms. It was amplified when some insurgent groups
began assassinating remaining government officials, university
professors, and other professionals.
The exodus into the Iraqi
Diaspora has severely depleted the country's human capital. In early
2006, the United States Committee on Refugees and Immigrants estimated
that a full 40% of Iraqi's professional class had left the country,
taking with them their irreplaceable expertise. Universities and
medical facilities were particularly hard hit, with some reporting less
than 20% of needed staff on hand. The oil industry suffered from what
the Wall Street Journal called a "petroleum exodus" that included the
departure of two-thirds of its top 100 managers, as well as significant
numbers of managerial and professional workers.
Even before
the huge 2007 exodus from Baghdad, the United Nations Commissioner of
Refugees warned that "the skills required to provide basic services are
becoming more and more scarce," pointing particularly to doctors,
teachers, computer technicians, and even skilled craftsmen like bakers.
By mid-2007, the loss of these resources was visible in the
everyday functioning of Iraqi society. By then, medical facilities
commonly required patients' families to act as nurses and technicians
and were still unable to perform many services. Schools were often
closed, or opened only sporadically, because of an absence of qualified
teachers. Universities postponed or canceled required courses or
qualifying examinations because of inadequate staff. At the height of
an incipient cholera epidemic in the summer of 2007, water purification
plants were idled because needed technicians could not be found.
The
most devastating impact of the Iraqi refugee crisis, however, has
probably been on the very capacity of the national government (which
de-Baathification and privatization had already left in a fragile
state) to administer anything. In every area that such a government
might touch, the missing managerial, technical, and professional talent
and expertise has had a devastating effect, with post-war
"reconstruction" particularly hard hit. Even the ability of the
government to disperse its income (mostly from oil revenues) has been
crippled by what cabinet ministers have termed "a shortage of employees
trained to write contracts" and "the flight of scientific and
engineering expertise from the country."
The depths of the
problem (as well as the massive levels of corruption that went with it)
could be measured by the fact that the electrical ministry spent only
26% of its capital budget in 2006; the remaining three-quarters went
unspent. Yet, at that level of disbursement, it still outperformed most
government agencies and ministries in a major way. Under pressure from
American occupation officials to improve its performance in 2007, the
government made concerted efforts to increase both its budget and its
disbursements for reconstruction. Despite initially optimistic reports,
the news was grim by year's end. Actual expenditures on electrical
infrastructure might, for example, have slipped to as low as 1% of the
budgeted amount.
Even more symptomatic were the few successes
in infrastructural rebuilding found by New York Times reporter James
Glanz in a survey of capital construction throughout the country. Most
of the successful programs he reviewed were initiated and managed by
officials connected to local and provincial governments. They
discovered that success actually depended on avoiding any interaction
with the ineffective and corrupt central government. The provincial
governor of Babil Province, Sallem S. al-Mesamawe, described the key to
his province's success: "We jumped over the routine, the bureaucracy,
and we depend on new blood -- a new team." They had learned this lesson
after using provincial money and local contractors to build a school,
only to have it remain closed because the national government was
unable to provide the necessary furniture.
The government's
staggering institutional incapacity is, in fact, a complex phenomenon
with many sources beyond the drain of human capital. The flood of
managers, professionals, and technicians out of the country, however,
has been a critical obstacle to any productive reconstruction. Worse
yet, the departure of so many crucial figures is probably to a
considerable extent irreversible, ensuring a grim near-future for the
country. After all, this has been a "brain drain" on a scale seldom
seen in our era.
Many exiles still intend to, even long to,
return when (or if) the situation improves, but time is always the
enemy of such intentions. The moment an individual arrives in a new
country, he or she begins creating social ties that become ever more
significant as a new life takes hold -- and this is even truer for
those who leave with their families, as so many Iraqis have done.
Unless this network-building process is disrupted, for many the
probability of return fades with each passing month.
Those
with marketable skills, even in the dire circumstances facing most
Iraqi refugees, have little choice but to keep seeking work that
exploits their training. The most marketable are the most likely to
succeed and so to begin building new careers. As time slips by, the
best, the brightest, and the most important carriers of precious human
capital are lost.
The Displacement Tsunami
The
degradation of Iraq under the American occupation regime was what
initially set in motion the forces that led to the exile of much of the
country's most precious human resources -- absolutely crucial capital,
even if of a kind not usually considered when talk turns to investing
in "nation building." How, after all, can you "reconstruct" the ravaged
foundations of a bombed-out nation without the necessary professional,
technical, and managerial personnel? Without them, Iraq must continue
its downward spiral toward a nation of slum cities.
The orgy
of failure and corruption in 2007 was an unmitigated disaster for Iraqi
society, as well as an embarrassment for the American occupation. From
the point of view of long-term American goals in Iraq, however, this
storm cloud, like so many others, had a silver lining. The Iraqi
government's incapacity to perform at almost any level became but
further justification for the claims first made by L. Paul Bremer at
the very beginning of the occupation: that the country's reconstruction
would be best handled by private enterprise. Moreover, the mass flight
of Iraqi professionals, managers, and technicians has meant that
expertise for reconstruction has simply been unavailable inside the
country. This has, in turn, validated a second set of claims made by
Bremer: that reconstruction could only be managed by large outside
contractors.
This neoliberal reality was brought into focus in
late 2007, as the last of the money allocated by the U.S. Congress for
Iraqi reconstruction was being spent. A "petroleum exodus" (first
identified by the Wall Street Journal) had long ago meant that most of
the engineers needed for maintaining the decrepit oil business were
already foreigners, mostly "imported from Texas and Oklahoma." The
foreign presence had, in fact, become so pervasive that the main
headquarters for the maintenance and development of the Rumaila oil
field in southern Iraq (the source of more than two-thirds of the
country's oil at present) runs on both Iraqi and Houston time. The
American firms in charge of the field's maintenance and development,
KBR and PIJV, have been utilizing a large number of subcontractors,
most of them American or British, very few of them Iraqi.
These
American-funded projects, though, have been merely "stopgaps." When the
money runs out, vast new moneys will be needed just to sustain
Rumaila's production at its present level.
According to
Harpers Magazine Senior Editor Luke Mitchell, who visited the field in
the summer of 2007, Iraqi engineers and technicians are "smart enough
and ambitious enough" to sustain and "upgrade" the system once the
American contracts expire, but such a project would take upwards of two
decades because of the compromised condition of the government and the
lack of skilled local engineers and technicians. The likely outcome,
when the American money departs, therefore is either an inadequate
effort in which work proceeds "only in fits and starts;" or, more
likely, new contracts in which the foreign companies would "continue
their work," paid for by the Iraqi government.
With regard to
the petroleum industry, therefore, what the refugee crisis guaranteed
was long-term Iraqi dependence on outsiders. In every other key
infrastructural area, a similar dependence was developing: electrical
power, the water system, medicine, and food were, de facto, being
"integrated" into the global system, leaving oil-rich Iraq dependent on
outside investment and largesse for the foreseeable future. Now, that's
a twenty-year plan for you, one that at least 4.5 million Iraqis, out
of their homes and, in many cases, out of the country as well, will be
in no position to participate in.
Most horror stories come to
an end, but the most horrible part of this horror story is its
never-ending quality. Those refugees who have left Iraq now face a
miserable limbo life, as Syria and other receiving countries exhaust
their meager resources and seek to expel many of them. Those seeking
shelter within Iraq face the depletion of already minimal support
systems in degrading host communities whose residents may themselves be
threatened with displacement.
From the vast out-migration and
internal migrations of its desperate citizens comes damage to society
as a whole that is almost impossible to estimate. The displacement of
people carries with it the destruction of human capital. The
destruction of human capital deprives Iraq of its most precious
resource for repairing the damage of war and occupation, condemning it
to further infrastructural decline. This tide of infrastructural
decline is the surest guarantee of another wave of displacement, of
future floods of refugees.
As long as the United States keeps trying to pacify Iraq, it will create wave after wave of misery.
Michael
Schwartz, professor of sociology at Stony Brook University, has written
extensively on popular protest and insurgency. This report on the Iraqi
refugee crisis is from his forthcoming Tomdispatch book, War Without
End: The Iraq Debacle in Context (Haymarket Books, June 2007). His work
on Iraq has appeared on numerous Internet sites, including Tomdispatch,
Asia Times, Mother Jones, and ZNET. His email address is
Ms42@optonline.net.
Copyright 2008 Michael Schwartz
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