Waiting to escape
>> Millions of Iraqi refugees are
stuck between war and apathy

 

THE LUCKY ONES: The Difai family

Four years ago, Jasim Ibadi had no trouble with his neighbours. Now when I call him, he climbs to the roof of his home before he answers. He is worried his younger children will hear our conversation and repeat it on the street. “Just like the days of Saddam,” he says. “We are scared to speak.”

Ibadi, a Sunni Muslim and the leader of a Sufi order, a mystical branch of Islam, lives in Zafaraniya, a mostly Shiite Muslim town south of Baghdad that runs along the bank of the Tigris River. The town is controlled by the Mahdi Army, the Shiite militia mainly responsible for Iraq’s feared death squads that target Sunnis, and which draws its membership from the Shiites whom Saddam Hussein oppressed and impoverished. Their leadership controls several ministries in the current Iraqi government. A former officer in the Iraqi army under Hussein, Ibadi fears for his life. Gunmen snatched his neighbour, a Sunni, from his home two months ago.

"His family twice sent money to the kidnappers, but it’s been two months,” he says. “I think he’s dead.”

Playing Shiite

A mortar round struck Ibadi’s home four months ago. “God knows where it came from,” he says. It might have been from the Mahdi militia, which has attacked Sunni homes in Zafaraniya. Some Sunnis in the town now display strategically placed portraits of Shiite saints in their living rooms. The mortar might have been a stray intended for a Shiite home, fired from the Sunni town Arab Jabour, which lies across the river. Arab Jabour is a bastion of the Sunni militias who fight the U.S. and British occupation, and who have killed thousands of Iraqi Shiites.

Ibadi feels he is living on borrowed time. “A man with the Mahdi militia was asking about me, saying I was with Saddam’s secret service. I was a sport instructor in the army. I went to him and showed him my army papers. I told him, ‘Look, I was a sport instructor. If I die, it’s your fault.’ He said all right. But every mosque and Husseiniya”—a Shiite house of worship—“has its own cell of the Mahdi militia. Maybe you can reach an agreement with one, but the others won’t listen,” he says.
 

His son, Basim, 23, was shot in the stomach and leg; his leg is now paralyzed and he defecates into a colostomy bag. Ibadi desperately wants to leave Iraq, and has sent his documents to a Lebanese non-governmental organization (NGO) that helps Iraqi refugees, and which he hopes will help him (“We can’t do anything for him until he reaches here,” says the head of the NGO).

He has seven children. “If I make it out, I can get them to follow me,” he says. “Until then, I will cope. I’m not scared. I’m from a big tribe, I’m a big man, and strong,” he blusters, and then bursts into tears He says he wants to come to Canada.

Death in Anbar

Sitting in his living room in Ville St-Laurent, Safaa Difai watches his daughter, Fatima, 5, who was born as a refugee in Lebanon, as she plays on the carpet. Difai arrived in Canada three months ago after the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) granted him refugee status and referred him to the Canadian consulate for resettlement. Difai, a Shiite, fled Iraq in 2000. “My family never got along with the regime,” he says. His brother, Sadeq, was jailed after the failed Shiite uprising against Hussein in 1991, which left more than 100,000 Shiites dead, and after his release, he fled to Canada and settled in Montreal.

Last year, while Safaa was preparing to come to Montreal, Sadeq, 38, paid him a visit in Lebanon. He was on his way to visit their mother in Karbala, Iraq. “I told him, ‘Don’t take the road to Iraq,’” he says. “It is too dangerous. But before Iraq, he went to Syria to meet my cousin, who owned a taxi, and they decided to drive to Karbala.” Driving through Anbar, a province controlled by Sunni tribes and rebels, Sadeq and the cousin were stopped by armed men, who beckoned the other cars in the convoy to drive on.

“We heard they were kidnapped,” says Difai. “Forty days later, they found the bodies. We have Sunnis in our tribe, and we used our connections to find out what happened. The men who stopped them were takfiris”—Sunni sectarian extremists—“and they killed them when they found they were Shiite.” It was a cruel twist for Difai, but he says “now I’m settled. I’m calm.”

Over two million Iraqis, most of whom fled after the U.S-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, have taken refuge in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. Most are considered illegal by the governments, and could be deported if picked up by authorities. In Lebanon, host to about 30,000 Iraqi refugees, Difai lived in the Beirut suburb of Dahiya, a stronghold of the Shiite party Hezbollah. “They protected us,” says Difai. “No one dared to take us from there.” (Difai and the other refugees evacuated from the suburb when the Israeli air force flattened it in July).

Feeling the brunt

“UNHCR has repeatedly asked the [Lebanese] government to provide some form of protection to Iraqis in Lebanon, not to detain them and not to deport them,” says Lebanon UNHCR spokeswoman Laure Chedrawi. She says the detentions continue, however, although fewer refugees have been deported recently, and the government ignores the 1,000 refugees recognized by UNHCR.

UNHCR cannot cope with the number of refugees fleeing the civil war in Iraq, and host countries in the Middle East are trying to find ways to stem the influx. “There’s talk of a regional conference sometime in March,” says Robert Breen, head of the UNHCR mission in Jordan, which hosts about 700,000 refugees. “Jordan and Syria feel they are being singled out” in having to cope with the refugees, he says. Both countries are trying to close their borders.

UNHCR appealed in early January for additional funding and called on several countries, including Canada and the U.S., to resettle more Iraqis. Some 361 Iraqi refugees arrived in Canada last year, 105 of them sponsored by the government, according to Canada UNHCR spokeswoman Nanda Na Champassak.

The Canadian government says it will look into resettling more refugees this year. “There are consultations with the UNHCR, and ongoing discussions within Citizenship and Immigration Canada,” says Citizenship and Immigration Canada spokeswoman Sheila Watson.

Little help coming

During a visit to Canada last week, American Assistant Secretary of State Ellen Sauerbrey also asked Canada to accept more Iraqi refugees. The U.S government set a quota last September of 500 Iraqi refugees it would resettle in 2007, sparking widespread criticism by U.S. media and a Senate hearing on Iraqi refugees.

The criticism appears to have had a chastening effect on the government. “The State Department plans to make a significant contribution of $60-million to UNHCR and NGOs working with the refugees,” says State Department spokeswoman Janelle Hironimus. Assistant secretary Sauerbrey told the Senate hearing last week that she wanted the government to accept 20,000 more Iraqi refugees this year.

It seems impossible, however, that any amount of aid will go a long way in solving the refugee problem. The brutal civil war in Iraq shows no sign of ending, and at least 1.7 million Iraqis have been displaced within their own country, many as a result of the sectarian killings by Sunni and Shiite militias that are partitioning the country into sectarian enclaves. More than 34,000 Iraqis were killed last year, according to the UN.

Canadian citizens can help  sponsor refugees.

See www.cic.gc.ca/english/pub/ref-sponsor/section-3-01.html

for information