Faiza
It's always fun to meet a fellow blogger while traveling, and I had contacted Faiza through her blog, A Family in Baghdad. I wound up meeting her over lunch yesterday with her five Americans on a Global Exchange mission. Many of my friends from Boulder have been on their missions and spoke highly of Global Exchange, and I was fortunate to be invited to join her group for several meetings with NGOs including the Jordanian office of Save Our Children and the National Coordination Committee In Iraq for NGOs.
Faiza's own story is that she was a water engineer in Baghdad and fled two years ago because militias had seized control of her neighborhood.
Ali
Ali looked to be in his late thirties, and arrived from Baghdad just over two months ago. Ali fled because his neighborhood was being used to stage Al Quada attacks on American troops and he feared an American retaliation. A slightly overweight man, Ali had been a car salesman in Bagdhad and like everyone else in Amman was now unemployed; He asked of our plans: "Didn't American understand there were many ethnic groups in Iraq?"
Enas
A plain woman in her early forties, Enas first left Iraq eight years ago because of the economic effects of the sanctions. She and her husband are both engineers and they took a job in Sudan until the fall of Saddam when, full of hope, they returned to Iraq in 2004. They had to flee again in early 2007 when her brother was killed and his house was seized by gangs. They arrived in Amman just over a year ago and she's upset that the Americans aren't providing more help to the refugees that they caused. She believes that we should have taken Saddam out in 1991. Her husband went back to Iraq six months ago to bury his mother, but he has not been able to return. Apparently he has been delayed at the border for months and the Jordanians are not allowing him in yet.
Mohamed
The sixteenish son of Enas, Mohamed appeared almost Goth with a brass skull necklace, gloves with no fingers, and low-riding jeans also featuring skulls. He said he is frightened because he sees his mother crying every night because they don't know when or if their father will return from Iraq. He spoke some English so we communicated directly in addition to through the translator, and he seemed enthusiastic about meeting an American. He gave me his website and when I looked at it later I saw he listed Snoop Dogg, Eminem, and Grand Theft Auto among his interests.
Amna
The younger daughter of Enas, twelve year old Anma came home from school while I was there and gave a poetry recital of a poem she wrote about how she and her family longed to return to Iraq. She proudly sported a Strawberry Shortcake backpack and her webpage, decked out in pink proclaiming "go girls!" features sparkling fairies and anime figures.
Omar
A 20ish, smartly dressed university student with gelled hair studying graphic design, Omar and two of his friends had been kidnapped "because of our names" (they are Sunni) by Shi'ia militia, beaten up (his eye area is still scarred), and ransomed back to their families for $50,000. Needless to say, after this episode Omar's family decided to leave Iraq. His parents are now in Syria and he studies in Amman and lives in the university district.
I listened to their personal stories (briefly summarized above) and then asked questions about the situation in Iraq, their thoughts on American actions, and what we should do next. I collected email addresses and contact info from those who had it and plan to stay in touch with them as the situation develops.
One of the unique aspects of the Iraqi refugee population is that they are disproportionally educated, wealthy professionals. Composed of many doctors, lawyers, engineers, professors, and teachers it was primarily the secular intellectual elite that could afford to leave and who the extremists targeted. As the intelligentsia of Iraq was hunted down and forced to flee, it reminds me of the (more deliberate and organized) intellectual purges of Mao's Cultural Revolution.
The stories of Iraqi refugees can blur together; There are likely over four million Iraqis who have fled the violence stemming from the aftermath of the US invasion. I could have stopped in and visited with any of Enas's neighbors and received thousands, indeed millions, of similar stories to the ones above. Lost an uncle, house was taken, beaten up and threatened. By talking to a few Iraqis, at least I got some personal sense of what many of them are going through. I asked one if they knew anyone who had been kidnapped who I could talk to and they summoned a cousin from a nearby room in minutes. These are the typical stories for all the four million or so refugees, not the exception. Human suffering writ large.
The refugees I talked to, who have suffered brutally at the hands of warlords and militias, feel that America could and should do more to stop the militias. Some believe that America is deliberately not stopping the militias so that the violence continues and we have an excuse to continue our occupation. Faiza refers to the warlords (Chalabi, Hakim, and Sadr were her examples) as "mini-Saddams" and would like to see them either killed or bought off and settled into distant retirements with their ill-gotten gains.
Many of the Iraqi refugees want mutually exclusive and contradictory things. They want America to leave Iraq; they want America to do more to defeat street gangs and warlords. They think the new Iraqi government is corrupt and illegitimate; they bemoan that the new Iraqi government has no authority anywhere. And even within families there is little consensus: Enas argues that the Americans should leave now, but her son Mohamed says that we should stay and try to stabilize things.
They are frustrated; frustrated that a country as great as America could possibly invade Iraq without a plan of what to do next. The more paranoid among them believe that the plan was precisely to sew chaos in the region for our own unknown ends, perhaps to seize Iraqi oil. I responded by asking them if they honestly thought George Bush was that clever, which generated a laugh.
The remarks of several of them can be summarized as: If we're going to do something, like help the Iraqi government beat the militias or meaningfully rebuild their infrastructure then they want us to stay, but our presence has been so useless and counterproductive that they are now skeptical we can do anything right to help so we might as well pull out now to avoid causing even more devastation.
The majority attitude about Saddam is that he was a bad dictator but what they have now is much worse. You find one opinion, and you find a dozen others condemning and bad-mouthing it. Even from the same Iraqi you can hear five or six contradictory opinions inside a few minutes; they are justifiably frustrated at the loss of their homeland and their way of life; frankly I'm impressed that they are so civil with me about this horrible ordeal.
There are many Iraqs, and each one exists inside every thoughtful Iraqi.
Jobless refugees
Through the poor luck of its location, little Jordan finds itself deluged with refugees.
Jordan has a population of 5.9 million people, and there are estimated to be over one million Iraqi refugees and two million Palestinian refugees (some of the latter are included in the population count because they were allowed to become Jordanians).
To put the impact on Jordan in perspective, it is estimated that the United States has about 18,000,000 undocumented immigrants within our total population of about 300,000,000. Jordan, with a population of 6,000,000 now has over 1,000,000 Iraqi refugees. That's the equivalent of over twice as many undocumented immigrants for the US, and we all know how edgy a lot of folks are about America's current underground workforce.
Exporting regional instability is yet another negative repercussion from the invasion of Iraq. Even the official figures indicate that over 2,000,000 Iraqis have fled for Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, Europe, and elsewhere, but most estimates show the actual figure to be as high as 4,000,000 refugees. Iraq's pre-war population was 26,000,000, so this means more than 1 in 6 Iraqis are no longer in Iraq.
In Jordan, the refugee problem is just hitting the fan; many Iraqi families came with money, having sold their possessions in Iraq but they are now nearing the end of their personal savings and are not allowed to work. The reason for this, according to my Jordanian interpreter, is that in order to maintain their national sovereignty the Jordanian government has been hesitant to bestow permanent status or working permits on the refugees. Surely this is a recipe for disaster, or at least a costly UN effort to provide housing and sustenance for Iraqis who have spent through their savings, cannot yet return (if ever), and have not found a country that allows them to resettle and get on with their lives.
Enas's idea is to bring jobs to refugee camps by letting Iraqi teachers teach Iraqi students, Iraqi doctors treat other Iraqi refugees, and Iraqi professors lecture to students. My meeting with Save Our Children was extremely informative in this area. They are focused on providing services to Iraqi refuge children in Syria and Jordan. The Iraqis, most of them educated professionals, sit idle and wait for world events to give them a role in pursuing their own destinies once again.
There is also trouble on the Jordanian side of things. Most Jordanians I talked to expressed frustration that the Iraqis have money and have driven up real estate prices and crowded the schools (now that they are allowed to attend). Though I think they may be even more frustrated when the Iraqis run out of money, they do have a point. The
patience of the hosts is starting to wear thin.
For instance, Jordanian schools were not exactly well funded to begin with, and most schools in Amman now run double shifts with 50-80 children in each class in order to accommodate the refugees. The teachers are underpaid, and they can't even find enough teachers to staff all classes. One solution as Enas suggested would be to hire Iraqi teachers, who are proportionally if not more so represented in the exile population, but Jordan is opposed to allowing them to work for fear that they will put down roots in Jordan and never return to Iraq and also because it doesn't want a two-track education system (one for Iraqis, one for Jordanians).
The refugees are hopeful that they can return to Iraq, but are also resigned. Omar said he thinks it might be twenty years before he can return. Unfortunately he might be right.
How the surge is "working."
With our global exchange group in Amman, we went to see the NGO Coordinating Committee for Iraq.
Our Global Exchange minibus pulled up near a school, and we were told to wait for someone to show us the exact location of the NCCI. Even in Jordan, the committee coordinating the non-profit sector's efforts to provide aid in Iraq still has to be kept hidden and secret because of security risks. Finally we followed their representative on foot through some back alleys to reach their humble unmarked office.
The aid organizations (NGOs) doing work in Iraq got together in 2003 because no government agency existed to oversee them and they didn't want to be part of a military coordination effort. They feel that even today there is no one to work with at the Ministry of Civil Society (representatives of which I met with in Baghdad a few days earlier) and the national government has established neither its legitimacy nor a meaningful presence in most of Iraq.
On the wall, surrounded by maps of Iraq and Baghdad with various notations on them, was a sheet of paper that said:
In the Orwellian world of Bushspeak ~ success is a relative matter whereas failure is always avoided, incompetence is always competence , accountability is ignored at all costs and apathy reigns
The NCCI representative said that one of the reasons that the violence in Iraq has decreased is that the ethnic purges have almost entirely been completed. Few mixed ethnic areas are left.
The "surge," according to the NCCI representative, has also reduced violence by increasing the isolation of neighborhoods. From the relief worker perspective, it has made it extremely difficult to move food and aid around Baghdad. When there is no hospital in your neighborhood, it is now extremely difficult to move to another. Isolation is increased; it is very difficult to get from one part of the city to another: "Yes less death, but at what price," the director summarized.
The director eloquently summed up the question we are facing about whether America should maintain its military presence in Iraq:
"Is America preventing a national dialog or postponing a massacre?"
No answers, just questions.
Faiza, Enas, Ali, Omar, Amna, and Mohamed don't know what America should do to help them at this point. They hope that America knows what to do, but we don't. But we all agree that the person who is responsible for initiating this war should have had a plan before he started it, and that if we can't figure out what to do we should get out rather than make things worse.
We have really, REALLY messed up Iraq and the region; restoring stability will take a long time and a lot of hard work.
Amna's poem, which I filmed her recite and promised to put up on youtube for her, was a touching tribute to her lost country and her childhood interrupted. Amna is a child of the global age, and her home page could be the home page of any young girl in Boulder, London, Topeka or Tokyo.
The Iraqi refugees languish in this desert outpost on the outskirts of Amann, biding their time waiting for events to reintegrate them somewhere into the world they were so recently part of. The children represent A New Hope; time will tell if Amna, Mohamed and their friends will be a force for reconciliation, wisdom, and light or whether the next generation will perpetuate the cycle of hatred, revenge and darkness.
Jared Polis
Candidate for US Congress
Colorado 02
www.polisforcongress.com
Donate now to help our fight!
I will be departing Amman in a few hours for Colorado, and cannot comment or post for about twenty-four hours, but please do have at it in my absence!
Previous installments:
I am going to Iraq
My Arrival in Amman, Jordan
Arrival in Baghdad
In Iraq for Thanksgiving
Inside a private mercenary compound
Coming in a few days:
THE CLOSET OF FEAR: The systemic execution of gays and lesbians in Iraq
POST-IRAQ-JORDAN THOUGHTS: Where do we go from here? |
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