One Utah

As I blogged here a month ago, the United Nations estimates that 1.8 million Iraqis have become refugees in other countries and another 1.6 million are internally displaced as a result of the violence accompanying the occupation and civil war. In other words, 3.4 million people have been driven out of their homes in Iraq, which is even more than the estimated two million in Darfur.

According to the New York Times:

The United States has even run similar [asylum] programs in Iraq, helping to resettle about 40,000 Iraqi refugees in the United States and other countries after a failed uprising against Saddam Hussein in 1991. In 1996, about 6,500 Iraqis who had links to an American-sponsored coup attempt against Mr. Hussein were granted asylum.

The Bush administration suspended resettlement of Iraqi refugees after the Sept. 11 attacks, and it did not resume until April 2005, after the process had begun for other Arab countries. A total of 198 Iraqis were resettled in the United States as refugees in the fiscal year of 2005, and 202 in 2006, but most were in the pipeline before the 2003 invasion, and few of the cases address the increasingly dire situation for Iraqis today.

Some of the personal stories of Iraqis who are attempting to flee to the USA, as told in a recent Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, are horrifying.

In USA Today, Adam Goodheart and John R. Bohrer remember that President Gerald Ford’s administration rescued some 130,000 Vietnamese refugees in 1975. Nearly a million more would be admitted through other channels in the years that followed. “To do less,” President Ford later recalled of his effort, “would have added moral shame to humiliation.”

At the recent hearings, Assistant Secretary of State Ellen Sauerbrey said that her department wishes it could allow as many as 20,000 Iraqis to seek asylum here. Yet she admitted that the difficulty of setting up asylum application centers in Iraq might make it impossible.

Baghdad in January 2007 has still not reached the point of Saigon in April 1975. If the Ford administration could quickly save 130,000 people amid the tidal wave of a full-scale military defeat, surely the Bush administration can save 20,000, or more, from Iraq.

UPDATE: Reuters has a special report on the exodus from Iraq, and America’s refusal to help. The latest UN figures indicate about 3.7 million of Iraq’s 24 million people have fled their homes, and continue to do so at the rate of 50,000 a month. Bill Frelick, refugee policy director for Human Rights Watch, says that politics (i.e. the Bush administration’s refusal to face up to reality) plays a role:

“The very people the U.S. is relying on for the enterprise of building a stable democracy in Iraq are the very people who are fleeing the country. To admit those people are fleeing would be to recognize the enterprise is not succeeding,” Frelick said.

This entry was posted Tuesday, January 30th, 2007 at 3:25 pm and is filed under Disaster, Human Rights, Immigration, Iraq, This Blog, War. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.