Refugees?..From Iraq?..Why not do with them as the TParty wants to do with the Central Americans children on out borders..ship them home..no matter the violence..Not In My backyard!!
During a press conference Saturday, President Obama maintained that he would not send combat troops into Iraq, but called on countries to help refugees on the run from the Sunni Al-Qaeda offshoot Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). As the crisis worsens in Iraq, internal displacement is becoming a more and more serious problem, while neighboring countries are also facing questions of what to do with those seeking refuge over the border.
Just this week alone, the rapid advance of ISIL forces in several cities of Iraq has forced the internal displacement of about 195,000 refugees, including adherents of the religious Yazidi sect, Palestinians, and Turkmen living in Iraq — a move that has sent neighboring countries and international agencies scrambling to accommodate the refugee crisis within Iraq.
“We feel confident that we can prevent ISIL from going up a mountain and slaughtering the people who are there,” Obama said, referring to the Yazidis, the most recent refugees caught up in ISIL’s wrath. “But the next step will be complicated logistically. How do we give safe passage for people coming down from the mountain and where can we relocate them so that they are safe. That is what we have to do internationally.”
To meet the need of refugees, this week, Turkish officials began building up a camp to house 20,000 ethnic Turkmen in Iraq’s Dahuk province (about 50 miles north of Mosul). A Turkish Disaster and Emergency Management Directorate (AFAD) official confirmed that while the camp was predominantly set up for the Turkmen minority, it would remain open to other nationalities fleeing violence. The AFAD official told Reuters, “There is no preparation right now for building a camp or camps inside Turkey for those coming from Iraq. There is no such need. There is no refugee exodus from Iraq, as was the case in Syria.”
Turkey’s Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said this week that it would increase aid for the 1.5 million refugees, noting that the stability of the Iraqi northern Kurdish province was “very important” since the region acts as a buffer zone for his country. Although Turkey sent thousands of tents and 200 trucks to Iraq, the country is also taking in some of these refugees. The Chicago Tribune noted that 150 Yazidis were placed in state-run facilities along Turkey’s Sirnak province and the city of Batman. Still, Turkey is already overwhelmed by about one million Syrian refugees — about 300,000 of whom live in state-run camps, and the half-million Iraqis displaced after the First Gulf War.
Overall, nearly 200,000 internally displaced people have fled away from major cities, like Qaraqosh, the largest Christian city captured by ISIL this week, with the greatest concentration of people fleeing towards the northern provinces of Dahuk, Erbil, and Kirkuk, and Sulaymaniyah, near Turkey. Between January and July, there were at least 1.2 million displaced refugees within Iraq. And in June, the United Nations upgraded Iraq’s crisis to a level 3 humanitarian disaster — the most severe rating it has.
In its attempt to establish an Islamic caliphate stretching from Syria to Iraq, ISIL has targeted, forcibly converted, or killed Iraqi minority religious groups including the Yazidis, Christians, Shi’a Muslims, and ethnic minorities like the Shabak and Turkmen. At least 40,000 Yazidi adherents have taken to the Sinjar Mountains, and reports indicate thousands of Christians fled Mosul (the second largest city in Iraq) after ISIL took over the city in June.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~`
America’s Response to Child Refugees
The media’s characterization of what’s going on at our southern border as a “crisis,” politicians pointing fingers at one another and Washington’s refusal to provide the resources necessary to care for a small wave of refugees — not to mention the bipartisan push to send them back home — is just as shameful when one considers the context.
America’s Response to Child Refugees on the Border is Downright Shameful
July 11, 2014
In
this July 9, 2014 photo, Iraqi refugee children from Mosul stay at a
temporary camp for refugees who fled from Mosul and other towns outside
Irbil, northern Iraq, nearly a month after Islamic militants took over
the country's second largest city. (AP Photo)
The media’s characterization of what’s going on at our southern border as a “crisis,” politicians pointing fingers at one another and Washington’s refusal to provide the resources necessary to care for a small wave of refugees — not to mention the bipartisan push to send them back home — is just as shameful when one considers the context.
In June, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reported that in 2013, the global population of refugees from war and persecution hit 51.2 million — exceeding 50 million for the first time since World War II.
Half of them were children.
The vast majority were “internally displaced persons,” homeless people within their home countries. Many live in fetid refugee camps run by underfunded NGOs, where they face continuing privation and abuse.
There are over ten million refugees in Africa, and five million in Asia. More than six million people have been displaced for years, and in some cases decades. The UN estimates that 6.3 million people have been displaced in Syria alone.
The US has had a hand in this global crisis. According to the UNHCR, Afghanistan accounts for the world’s largest population of refugees; in Iraq, many of the two million people who fled the country after the US-led invasion in 2003 are now returning, despite the fact that many of its 1.7 million internally displaced citizens remain homeless, and more than one million new refugees have fled ISIS, or The Islamic State. Iraq has also absorbed about one million refugees from Syria.
Many countries with nowhere near the wealth or infrastructure of the United States have kept their borders open on humanitarian grounds, including Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey. The BBC reported in June that “the UN is concerned that the burden of caring for refugees is increasingly falling on the countries with the least resources. Developing countries are host to 86% of the world’s refugees, with wealthy countries caring for just 14%.”
This immense global tragedy rarely even makes the evening news here. But step back and contrast those grisly statistics with what Americans are casually referring to as a “crisis.”
Of the world’s almost 12 million international refugees (and people living in what the UNHCR calls “refugee-like situations”), less than 400,000 – or three percent — are in Latin America.
Refugees by continent, 2007-2011. (Source: World Bank calculations based on UNHRC data.)
It’s anything but a crisis. The US is not only one of the world’s wealthiest countries, we also have one of the lowest population densities in the developed world.
To the degree that there is a crisis on the Southern border, it’s one of our own making: Border Patrol has been overwhelmed by the spike in detainees, especially children, and Congress refuses to devote the modest resources required to care for them in a dignified way. (As economist Dean Baker pointed out, Obama’s request for $3.7 billion to address the spike in refugees — most of which would be spent sending them back to a bloodbath rather than caring for them — represents just one-tenth of 1 percent of the federal budget.)
This is not our finest hour.
No comments:
Post a Comment