Iraq: More than two million refugees waiting to come home

The government of Iraq and the international community must establish safe conditions for the return of 2.6 million displaced Iraqis, says a new field report by the non-profit group Refugees International. The report, "Iraq: Preventing the Point of No Return," issued last week, notes that despite encouraging returns, the government of Iraq has not realistically assessed the country's ability to absorb large numbers of returns. RI found that Iraqis who have returned struggle to find shelter, electricity, water, jobs and access to health care. "There is immense pressure on displaced Iraqis to return home. The problem is that they return home to ethnically cleansed neighbourhoods and poor government services," said RI President Ken Bacon. Completed during RI's mission to Baghdad, Eskanderia, Fallujah, Karbala and Hilla to assess the humanitarian situation inside Iraq, the report says the aid community is unable to get a comprehensive picture of conditions and that restrictions placed on U.N. staff need to be adapted to the actual security climate in individual regions. "Security restrictions placed on U.N. staff are unreasonable given the improved security," said Bacon. "No one is saying Iraq is completely safe, but there are measures that can be taken to guarantee U.N. staff safety while increasing access to vulnerable people." Iraqis interviewed by RI expressed a desire to see the U.N. return and function fully in the country. "We visited with groups of displaced Iraqis who lived in deplorable conditions and were not yet registered with the Ministry of Displacement and Migration," added Bacon. "They had yet to receive any assistance from U.N. agencies or aid organisations. These people simply cannot continue to slip through the cracks." According to the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), which has helped with the returns, only 50,000 families have returned, mostly to Baghdad, and only 8 percent of these were refugees from neighbouring countries. In addition, an IOM survey shows that 61 percent of the 2.6 million internally displaced, 1.5 million of them after the Samarra bombings of February 2006, would like to return, but don't feel able to do so now. The Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said it has assisted about 780 people from Jordan and Syria who voluntarily chose to return to Iraq since October. The agency said it does not envision any wide-scale returns in the near future. The report cites the ongoing violence in Diyala and Mosul, as well as recent events in Basra and Baghdad, as proof that the situation in Iraq is still too unstable and violent for people to return home. Of those Iraqis who have returned from Syria, most were unable to go back to their homes, as they would likely be attacked again, and had to move into homogenous, sectarian areas. Others found their homes occupied, and were unable to recover them. "People are not convinced of the sustainability of return. The majority of Iraqi refugees are waiting and seeing," Imran Riza, UNHCR's representative in Jordan, told the Washington Times. "That's why they're not definitively returning. The numbers are relatively low compared to traffic back and forth. So the people going back must have heard from relatives or others that there must be a chance," he said. Many internally displaced Iraqis are unemployed, unable to access their food rations, live in squalid conditions, have run out of resources, and find it extremely difficult to access essential services, according to the report. RI investigation found the Iraqi government to be unwilling and unable to respond to the needs of its people. Though it has access to large sums of money, it is divided along sectarian lines, lacking both the capacity and the political will to use its important resources to address humanitarian needs. As a result, the government does not have any credibility left with Iraqis. Analysts say the reason the international community has been slow to respond is because they see the situation as the U.S.'s problem. "Many donor governments as a result have been reluctant to fully share the burden of Iraq's displaced, believing the United States should foot most of the bill together with the government of Iraq," said Roberta Cohen, non-resident senior fellow in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution in a 2008 report, "Iraq's Displaced: Where to Turn?" "The principle reason I believe that this crisis has not received the attention it should is because we don't see Iraqis living in refugee camps," said Congressman Alcee L. Hastings, speaking at a conference presented by the International Human Rights Law Clinic and the Centre for Human Rights & Humanitarian Law in late March. "Instead they are a mobile population scattered throughout cities such as Amman, Damascus, Cairo and Beirut. This fact alone has made this humanitarian crisis virtually invisible to the international community." Because the government and international community have failed to provide adequate assistance, the report warns that militias of all denominations are improving their local base of support by providing social services in the neighbourhoods and towns they control. Through a "Hezbollah-like" scheme, the Shiite Sadrist movement has established itself as the main service provider in the country. Similarly, other Shiite and Sunni groups are gaining ground and support through the delivery of food, oil, electricity, clothes and money to the civilians living in their fiefdoms. Not only do these militias now have a quasi-monopoly on the large-scale provision of assistance in Iraq, they are also recruiting an increasing number of civilians to their militias - including displaced Iraqis. RI calls on the government of Iraq to devise and implement a plan to address the humanitarian needs of displaced and other vulnerable Iraqis. It asks the U.S. to provide technical expertise to Iraq's relevant ministries, like the Ministry of Migration, to assist Iraq in putting together a viable humanitarian action plan. Though the report calls the U.N.'s recent attention to the crisis "belated," it maintains that the Iraqi government and the U.S. should welcome and support the world body in developing its network of local actors, who, in the face of immense security challenges, are essential in helping gain access to populations in need.