If you think Israelis treat Palestinians bad, look how their Arab brothers treat them

Iraqslogger reports:

The plight of Palestinian refugees fleeing violence in Iraq and stranded in camps on the Syrian-Iraqi border is continuing to deteriorate as the summer heat intensifies and a solution remains elusive.

There is currently one camp on the Syrian side of the border, one in no-man's land and one on the Iraqi side of the border housing Palestinian refugees.

As the summer heat has increased, with temperatures now reaching 50 degrees Celsius, living conditions in the desert have become increasingly hazardous with snakes, scorpions and sand storms.

"The weather is very, very hot and people are becoming very nervous and upset," said one Palestinian in Al-Tanf camp, situated on no-man's land between Iraq and Syria. "We can't live here, it's too difficult. We need help, particularly air coolers."

"Children in particular are developing medical conditions that they've never had before simply because of the high heat and dust storms," said Sybella Wilkes, spokesperson for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Syria. The refugees are becoming increasingly desperate.

Iraqi refugees, by contrast, haven't been herded into such camps. I wonder what the difference is - that's right, the Palestinians aren't really human - they're just political pawns to be moved around the region's chessboard - or at least that seems to be the Arab view.

Hell on earth: Being a refugee in an Arab state

We're all familiar with the hell of Palestinian refugee camps. Now see how Iraq refugees are forced to live in Syria. The New York Times reports:

For anyone living in Damascus these days, the fact that some Iraqi refugees are selling sex or working in sex clubs is difficult to ignore.

Even in central Damascus, men freely talk of being approached by pimps trawling for customers outside juice shops and shawarma sandwich stalls, and of women walking up to passing men, an act unthinkable in Arab culture, and asking in Iraqi-accented Arabic if the men would like to “have a cup of tea.”

As the New York Times goes on:

Many of these women and girls, including some barely in their teens, are recent refugees. . . . a United Nations report found last year, [that] many girls and women in “severe need” turn to prostitution, in secret or even with the knowledge or involvement of family members. In many cases, the report added, “the head of the family brings clients to the house.”

Dietrun Günther, an official at the United Nations refugee agency’s Damascus office, told the Times that the U.N. was, in her words: “Especially concerned that there are young girls involved, and that they’re being forced, even smuggled into Syria in some cases,” she reportedly said.

And then saying that the U.N. has "had special talks with the Syrian government about prostitution,” she went on to describe the [Syrian] officials’ new openness as “a great step,” according to the Times.

Ignore the cultural condescension of this U.N. official's last remark - as if the best an Arab government can be expected to be is to be open about such a situation as opposed to competent enough to resolve it.

Anyway, as a Syrian women's rights lawyer, Mouna Asaad, told the Times: “Sometimes you see whole families living this way, the girls pimped by the mother or aunt.”

I suppose Syria deserves some credit for being willing to provide any kind of haven to the Iraqi refugees, in contrast to the oil-rich Gulf states who have kept their doors closed.

This, of course, hasn't stopped young men from the Gulf countries from taking advantage of the desperate Iraqis, however. As the Times goes on to report:

Inexpensive Iraqi prostitutes have helped to make Syria a popular destination for sex tourists from wealthier countries in the Middle East. In the club’s parking lot, nearly half of the cars had Saudi license plates.

From Damascus it is only about six hours by car, passing through Jordan, to the Saudi border. Syria, where it is relatively easy to buy alcohol and dance with women, is popular as a low-cost weekend destination for groups of Saudi men.

I suppose after hitting up the Iraqis in Syria, the next stop for many of these young men is ideally Iraq. If they can just find a way to blow themselves up in a crowded market there, then they can get the 72 virgins in Paradise, the jihadists promise them.

Is this why there are so many Iraqi refugees abroad?

Jane Arraf, CNN's senior Baghdad correspondent and fomer bureau chief, reports for Iraqslogger from the Iranian-Iraqi border crossing at Zurbathia:

The line stretches into the hundreds as the wind whips up the sand at this border post.

Women in black abayas – the long cloaks - surrounded by fidgety children and bulging, dust-covered suitcases, young men in blue jeans, religious clerics in flowing robes and black or white turbans – all of them waiting to cross over from Iran to Iraq.

Iraqi border guards, checking documents and searching luggage by hand, can process 1,200 people a day from Iran – but there are usually many more. Most of them are Shiite families making the pilgrimage to Iraq’s holy shrines. . .

[The] pilgrims [coming in] from Iran and as far away as Pakistan as well as Iraqis trying to return home wait in the sand and dust to see whether they will part of the group border officials are able to process that day. There are plans to build a waiting hall – and a gate which the Iraqi side can control.

“We’ve been sitting here since seven a.m.,” an elderly woman named Najla tells me. She and her family have been visiting relatives in Iran and are trying to return to their homes in Diwaniya in the south.

“Essentially at the end of the day someone’s got to tell these people they can’t go across and it always creates problems,” says Col Mark Mueller, in charge of the transition team at this crossing. “They’ve waited all this time usually from 8 o clock in the morning until 5 at night and then they have to go back.”

This certainly presents a different picture of the Iraqi refugee problem than a recent New Times story painted that I blogged about here.

What is the real accounting on the Iraqi refugees?

I'm on this topic because yesterday the New York Times ran a story about Iraqi refugees in its magazine section. Nir Rosen wrote:

At a meeting in mid-April in Geneva, held by António Guterres, the United Nations high commissioner for refugees, the numbers presented confirmed what had long been suspected: the collapse of Iraq had created a refugee crisis, and that crisis was threatening to precipitate the collapse of the region. The numbers dwarfed anything that the Middle East had seen since the dislocations brought on by the establishment of Israel in 1948. In Syria, there were estimated to be 1.2 million Iraqi refugees. There were another 750,000 in Jordan, 100,000 in Egypt, 54,000 in Iran, 40,000 in Lebanon and 10,000 in Turkey. The overall estimate for the number of Iraqis who had fled Iraq was put at two million by Guterres.

But now consider what Human Rights Watch reported in February 2003, a month before the U.S.-led invasion:

As of late 2001, between one and two million Iraqis living outside Iraq were thought to have a well-founded fear of persecution if they returned.⁷¹ Of these, only about 300,000 had any formal recognition as refugees or asylum seekers, largely due to the failure of the governments hosting them to put in place refugee status determination procedures. Instead of providing for their needs, many of these host governments imposed hostile policies aimed at restricting refugee rights so as to deter additional Iraqis from entering their territories.

I've been wondering about this issue since I started reading recent press accounts of the numbers involved.

How did all these Iraqi refugees get absorbed so quickly - and so silently - in such relatively small and poor countries like Syria and Jordan?

Did I miss the coverage - not to mention pictures - of these two million Iraqi refugees fleeing Iraq after the invasion?

And did the two million Iraqis that fled Iraq under Saddam come home and then another two million Iraqis left?

Or are they still the same two million refugees?

Could someone help me square these before and after numbers?

How does Jordan manage with the huge influx of Iraqi refugees it is said to have accomodated?

Every time I hear statistics on the number of Iraqi refugees in Jordan - estimated to be 700,000 compared with Jordan's population of 5.6-5.9 million, I wonder how this could be possible. After all, Jordan is not rich. This is how the CIA's World Factbook describes the country:

Jordan is a small Arab country with insufficient supplies of water, oil, and other natural resources. Poverty, unemployment, and inflation are fundamental problems....

According to the World Bank, Jordan (using 2005 statistics) is a lower-middle-income country with a GNI per capita of $2,500.

So how did Jordan absorb an increase in population equal to more than ten percent in less than four years?

The London Guardian, in January reported on the situation in Jordan and quoted one Yusif Agoub, an Iraqi refugee who moved to the capitol, Amman, in 2004 to open the "elegant" Zad al-Kheir: "I am succeeding with the help of our Jordanian brothers, led by His Majesty the King, who make things easy for us. We have a good life here. I would like to go home tomorrow, but it's hard to be optimistic," he was quoted as saying.

According to the Guardian:

The nearby streets in Amman's Umm Udhaina district are a glittering showcase of the wealth that Iraqi exiles like him have brought. The smart new villas and apartment blocks have shady balconies and Filipina maids at work inside.

The few empty plots are for sale or being built on. Iraqi accents dominate in the local mall. Saddam Hussein's daughters and other former Ba'athists keep a low profile. Abdoun, another posh Amman neighbourhood, is now jokingly referred to as Adhamiya - a Sunni area of Baghdad.

"There are some very rich people who stole from Iraq after the war and invested in Jordan," says Rita, who fled Baghdad two years ago with just a small suitcase and counts herself lucky to have a Jordanian residency permit and a job.

According to the Guardian, the Iraqi refugees have driven up housing costs and added to Jordan's already high average unemployment of 14 percent.

Jordanians, not surprisingly, are often resentful. As the Guardian reports:

One Amman taxi driver cursed as a new SUV with Iraqi plates glided past "I'd like to see him drive that in Baghdad." For Ms Aqari[, another Iraqi living in Jordan,] such attitudes are another depressing sign of terribly changed times for Iraqis. "In Saddam's day the Jordanians used to treat us with respect. Now, they are humiliating us too."

Robert Breen, the head of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Jordan, told the Guardian:

"The impression of many Jordanians is that the Iraqis here are all wealthy ... and that they are the cause of the inflation and the rising cost of prices in Jordan."

While the figure 700,000 is generally accepted by the media and human rights organizations as the official number of Iraqi refugees in Jordan, as Breen goes on to say, nobody really knows what the exact numbers are:

"The [Iraqi] population here ... is not easy to define. Those that are here illegally maintain a very shadowy existence," explains Mr. Breen. The UNHCR has officially given refugee status to 700 Iraqis and another 20,000 Iraqis are seeking asylum through UNHCR, but there are no official records on how many Iraqis have entered Jordan - let alone remained there - since 2003.

And so it is (to use a Kurt Vonnegut expression): when it comes to Iraq, we can never seem to get precise information.

One does have to wonder whether there is a hidden agenda here in not having gotten at the actual statistics by now.

Brotherly love in a time of crisis

Anthony Shadid in today's Washington Post reports on the plight of Palestinians who have fled the violence in Iraq.

Before the U.S.-led invasion, there were some 35,000 Palestinian refugees in Iraq. Life was relatively good for the Palestinians under Saddam's regime. As Shadid reports:

Although Palestinians faced restrictions in Iraq that limited their access to land, cars and phone lines, they were perceived as a favored constituency under Hussein. Fashioning himself as a champion of their cause, he provided refugees free or subsidized housing and exempted them from military service.

But once Saddam was gone, as Shadid goes on to point out:

Many Iraqis resented Hussein's aid to families of suicide bombers and others killed in the Palestinian uprising that began in 2000. Weeks after his fall in April 2003, landlords set out to reclaim houses that the government had rented to Palestinians, sometimes for less than $1 a month.

"If you don't leave my house, I will burn it down -- you and your family inside," Abdel-Rahim, bearded and balding, said he was told by his landlord in the Baghdad neighborhood of Hayy al-Salam.

Even though Jordan and Syria have reportedly each welcomed some 700,000 Iraqi refugees since 2003, both countries have been considerably less open to the Palestinians among them.

According to the Washington Post:

For a brief time in 2003, Jordan allowed Palestinians, including Abdel-Rahim's family and a few hundred others, into the Ruweished camp, built about 40 miles from Iraq to house a feared influx of Iraqis fleeing the U.S.-led invasion. Jordan then closed the border. In summer 2006, Syria allowed more than 300 Palestinians into al-Hol camp, on its side of the frontier. Then, like Jordan, it sealed the border again.

Robert Breen, representative of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees in Jordan told the Post that the fear is "if you open up for some, the rest are going to come" adding, "I can't recall ever having seen this kind of situation in such a bleak environment," Breen said. "They can't go backward, and they aren't moving forward. They're literally stuck in the desert -- no way back, and nowhere to go."

What about the other neighboring states? The Palestinian Authority has reportedly offered the Palestinians sanctuary but Israel is not willing to grant the necessary permissions.

If Israel seems hard-boiled in refusing to consider this option, what to think about the "brotherly nations" of Iran, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia who have closed their doors to the refugees? Why don't these rich Islamic countries who claim to have such deep sympathy for Palestinians displaced by Israel, find room in their hearts or nations to provide these newly displaced Palestinians with sanctuary? Surely they could afford to do this what with oil prices being what they are.

But then these rich and prideful Islamic nations have also barred ordinary Iraqis from entering their countries, even as they run in fear of their lives.

So this is Arab unity? This is what it means to be an Islamic state?

Good thing the European "kuffir" nations are willing to come to the rescue.