In researching the previous post on Iraq’s internally displaced people I came across several references including the one below (from the US State Department website) to a report called “Life under Saddam Hussein” that was ostensibly written by some of today’s most vocal NGO critics of the Bush Administration’s handling of the Iraqi refugee issue.   To hear them today, the refugee “crisis” is all Bush’s fault.

I’m not always the greatest at finding stuff on-line so it’s possible I overlooked it.  If anyone has a link to this pre-Iraq War document please send it to me at our e-mail address in the right column.  I would really appreciate it.

Human Rights Watch estimates that Saddam’s 1987-1988 campaign of terror against the Kurds killed at least 50,000 and possibly as many as 100,000 Kurds. The Iraqi regime used chemical agents to include mustard gas and nerve agents in attacks against at least 40 Kurdish villages between 1987-1988. The largest was the attack on Halabja which resulted in approximately 5,000 deaths. o 2,000 Kurdish villages were destroyed during the campaign of terror.

Iraq’s 13 million Shi’a Muslims, the majority of Iraq’s population of approximately 22 million, face severe restrictions on their religious practice, including a ban on communal Friday prayer, and restriction on funeral processions.

According to Human Rights Watch, “senior Arab diplomats told the London-based Arabic daily newspaper al-Hayat in October [1991] that Iraqi leaders were privately acknowledging that 250,000 people were killed during the uprisings, with most of the casualties in the south.” Refugees International reports that

“Oppressive government policies have led to the internal displacement of 900,000 Iraqis, primarily Kurds who have fled to the north to escape Saddam Hussein’s Arabization campaigns (which involve forcing Kurds to renounce their Kurdish identity or lose their property) and Marsh Arabs, who fled the government’s campaign to dry up the southern marshes for agricultural use. More than 200,000 Iraqis continue to live as refugees in Iran.”

In August 2003, Refugees International published a plan which Judy wrote about here.   But, the excerpt above was published at the State Department in April 2003, so there must have been some earlier report about Saddam Hussein creating a refugee crisis.

Judy and I have been following the Iraq refugee “crisis” for months and months and have posted 147 times on the topic.  In not one of those articles critical of the United States (until Judy found a brief mention the other day) were we told that the regime of Saddam Hussein had actually displaced one million people PRIOR to our arrival in Iraq in 2003.  Every article we have read on the subject lays the complete blame for the “crisis” at the feet of President Bush.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not happy with the Bush Administration, but if a solution is to be found (short of bringing a million or more Iraqis to America) then people involved in finding a resolution need to be honest with the public.  And, we need to lay some blame on other institutions including the United Nations for the mess in Iraq today.

Here are some lengthy excerpts from the Brookings Institution in November 2002 (4 months before the war in Iraq began)!

A recent study published by the Brookings-SAIS Project on Internal Displacement (John Fawcett and Victor Tanner, “The Internally Displaced People of Iraq,” Occasional Paper, Brookings-SAIS Project on Internal Displacement, October 2002) recommends a series of steps to manage the problem. First, acknowledge that the expulsion of people from their homes on ethnic grounds constitutes a crime and that those expelled have a right to restitution. Second, set up an official body with representative ethnic and religious makeup and international oversight to enable persons to regain land and property lost as a result of displacement. Third, establish a special task force to coordinate returns and adjudicate disputes, thereby preempting a rush on Kirkuk and other cities. Fourth, apportion oil revenues to compensate those expelled from the Kirkuk area and arbitrarily dismissed from their positions in the oil fields.

…. 

According to the Brookings-SAIS study, this state of affairs is mainly attributable to Iraqi government intimidation combined with a self-imposed “code of silence” practiced by UN officials. Fearing violence, expulsion or other retaliation from Iraq and lack of backup from UN headquarters, UN officials in most cases have refrained from demanding access to the displaced or protesting their treatment, especially in the center/south.

….

It is not too early to begin to address problems of internal displacement in Iraq. In a country of 23 million, Iraq’s more than one million internally displaced persons constitute too large a group to be ignored, and the linkage between their plight and Iraq’s deeper political, economic, ethnic, and social problems suggests that to try to ignore them could undermine any reconstruction effort in fundamental ways.

 REMEMBER, THE ABOVE IS FROM 2002!

 Here is a New York Times article that says the seeds of the refugee crisis in Iraq were planted by Saddam Hussein.

As for those Iraqis who have left Iraq, surely many have been displaced by the war and the sectarian violence but many had left Iraq before we even arrived.  Last fall I posted on another study from the Brookings Institution that mentions that hundreds of thousands of Iraqi refugees in Syria have been there for more than 20 years.  See those posts here and here.

So, to all of you pushing for resettlement of Iraqis to the west, you owe it to the public and our knee-jerk legislators to tell the whole truth about the Iraqi displaced persons problem.