Category: Iraqi refugees

Calling the State Department: You have another volag screwing up

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Update October 2nd:  Lutheran Social Services gets defensive.

 

 ….and, another Iraqi refugee family angry.    In the last 15 months, since we began writing Refugee Resettlement Watch, I have lost track of the number of stories I’ve read about the volags (supposedly voluntary agencies) that are contracted by the US State Department to resettle refugees and are not fulfilling their contracts.  

Like it or not, these agencies, many of them church groups such as this Lutheran outfit in New Hampshire are paid by you to take care of refugees for the first few months they are in the US.   They are required to supply the refugees with basic needs to set up their new homes, and over and over again they are screwing up (sorry to use that language but it infuriates me!).   If we are going to bring refugees by the tens of thousands to the US, then we better be prepared to take care of them. 

And, on top of it all, this story of refugee abuse from the Concord Monitor involves Iraqis—those very same people that every bleeding heart on the left in the US has been hollering about, “Bring more Iraqis now, you bad Bush Administration!”

Yes, bring them so they can get the things they need from a dumpster!

Rasim Mueen and Sendes Abd Zead watch the Dumpster outside their Parkview Place apartment for things they can use. The couple, both 32, have collected a stained pillow and faded blankets that they’ve washed in the bathtub and hung to dry on a cord strung across the apartment’s one bedroom. They’ve found stuffed animals for their 6-year-old son, Dear Rasim, to play with, and a shower curtain cut into a circle to serve as a tablecloth.

The Iraqi family has lived in New Hampshire for nearly a month. They came to Concord as refugees, settled here by Lutheran Social Services, a federal refugee resettlement contractor. But they feel they have had little help.

“We are human, and we come here to get a better life, not to pull the things we need from the trash,” Abd Zead, 32, said through a translator.

The Iraqi family is very unhappy and their story goes on. 

Earlier this month, Mueen and Abd Zead saw a woman at the 7-Eleven near their home wearing a headscarf like Abd Zead. They asked her if she spoke Arabic and if she could help them. The woman was Mona Ibrahim, who came to Concord as a refugee in late 2006 with her husband, Tirhaga Gobara. The Sudanese couple understood how the Iraqi family felt. They too had felt lost and, at times, abandoned, after arriving. They went weeks without food stamps and had to rely on other refugees for help, they said.

It doesn’t make Mueen feel better to know that others have been through what they are going through, or to know that other Iraqi families recently settled here are struggling along with them. The way refugees are treated is wrong, he said.

“Lutheran Social Services, they think we are not human,” Mueen said.

Mueen said the couple have seen little of Lutheran staff and, while they have food stamps, they have received no money or guidance on obtaining a job.

“Twenty-five days, they don’t have $1 in 25 days,” Gobara said, translating for Mueen. 

I’m sure many of our readers are saying, they shouldn’t get any money, our grandparents didn’t when they came.  However, Lutheran Social Services has signed a contract with the government to provide them with some cash and expenses for the first few months until they find a job or go on some other forms of welfare in this highly touted public/private partnership!

Then it turns out that these do-gooder groups are squabbling with each other.

Some groups have had a history of tense relations as they compete over grant money, volunteers’ time or dueling philosophies of how to help. Volunteers with the Concord Multicultural Project and some refugees complain about Lutheran Social Services not adequately preparing refugees for life in the United States or being unwilling to work with outside groups. However, many also say that simply pointing fingers at Lutheran, which is limited by its federal funding and specific mission, is unfair.

Well if the federal funding is limited, go out and raise money privately or stop bringing refugees.

Remember what that wise boy in Arizona said a couple of weeks ago—it’s better to have 10 satisfied Iraqi refugees then 100 angry ones.    The Concord Iraqi summed up, just as the Long Island Iraqi did the other day:

“United States is like a dream,” Abd Zead said. “We come here to get a good education, good health . . . but all of that dream is broken now.”

By the way,  where is AP reporter Matthew Lee now?   Every month like clockwork he, at the behest of his handlers in the NGO lobbyist world, yapped about how we needed to bring more Iraqis to the US, how about a little follow-up Mr. Lee?

Another unhappy Iraqi refugee (sigh)

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

This story comes today from Long Island (East Hampton, NY) and is another in a long line of stories about Iraqi refugees arriving in America and finding it disappointing—not all they thought it would be.   They are lonely and unable to find work for which they can use their education and training.    I recently told you about a high school student in Tucson who said the same thing of newly arrived Iraqis in Arizona.

He doesn’t exactly have a choice [about a job teaching Arabic].  Mr. Taresh is a 32-year-old Iraqi refugee who resettled in the United States on Aug. 21 with his mother, Malkia, and younger brother, Ali. He trusts that he’s in the land of opportunity, but so far, his experience has been one of immobility and discouragement.

“When I first got here, it was disappointing,” he said. “It wasn’t like how I had dreamed it. I was thinking I’m going to find a job easily, especially with my qualifications in my field. I thought I was going to get a scholarship to complete my studies.”

He was a civil and environmental engineer working for Bechtel in Iraq.   Here he is living on welfare at the moment.

In America, he expected to find the opportunity to continue his studies, if not work as a civil engineer.

“But all my dreams turned to nightmares,” he said. “There is no public transportation, there are no people to mingle with — no Arab community at all, and we are feeling very isolated.” In Baghdad and Damascus, Syria, “we were surrounded by our people. It didn’t pass your mind that you’re going to miss something like this.”

Above he makes a point we have stressed before.   People want to live with people like themselves.  It is understandable that Iraqis want fellow Iraqis nearby, or that Somalis stay segregated in their own neighborhood or apartment complexes, but somehow only Americans of European background are called racist xenophobes for expressing that same desire.

Back to Mr. Taresh…  In a couple of months his taxpayer funded welfare will begin to run out (some welfare lasts longer than 3 months though) so the volag workers, caseworkers (also paid by you) are coming calling to get him off the dime and get to work.

Last week, Mr. Taresh met with a representative from Catholic Charities, a local partner of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, which is contracted by the government to help handle refugee aid. They discussed concerns such as health insurance, food stamps, employment authorization documents, and finding a job.

Even Mom will have to work.

The transition has been hardest for Mr. Taresh’s mother. “She wants to go back,” he said. Mrs. Taresh found a job baby-sitting an 8-month-old on Shelter Island. “It’s kind of a shame for me to allow my mom to have a job. We are from a different culture. Back home, our mothers don’t have to work. They depend on us 100 percent.”

We have said this before.  Wouldn’t it have made more sense (and cost us far less) for the US and the Iraqi government to take care of valuable workers like Mr. Taresh somewhere in the region until it is safe to go home and rebuild Iraq.  It might even be safe enough now.    But, then these volags wouldn’t have warm bodies to resettle and collect their government contracts and the leftist NGO’s wouldn’t be able to continue to bash the War in Iraq for their own political ends.

So what did that teenager in Tucson say:

It is better to have 10 Iraqi refugees who are satisfied with their lives than having 100 angry ones with no life at all.

Iraqi Red Crescent is in trouble

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

The Red Crescent is the Muslim equivalent of the Red Cross. I posted in May, here, about Said I. Hakki, its president. I liked him because when an interviewer asked him if the United States owes it to Iraq to take in refugees, he replied: “If we allow Iraqis to go somewhere else, then who is going to build Iraq?” He said the Red Crescent should be taking care of Iraq’s internal refugees, and was doing that as far as it could.

Today comes a report in the Washington Post titled Iraqi Red Crescent Paralyzed by Allegations. It begins: 

BAGHDAD — The Iraqi Red Crescent, the country’s leading humanitarian organization, has been crippled by allegations of embezzlement and mismanagement, including what Iraqi officials call the inappropriate expenditure of more than $1 million on Washington lobbying firms in an unsuccessful effort to win U.S. funding.

The group’s former president, Said I. Hakki, an Iraqi American urologist recruited by Bush administration officials to resuscitate Iraq’s health-care system, left the country this summer after the issuance of arrest warrants for him and his deputies. He and his aides deny the allegations and call them politically motivated.

Then follows the usual complicated tale of corruption, with denials and counter-accusations. It’s impossible to know the truth, except that money has disappeared and the organization has ceased nearly all its humanitarian work.  Hakki has been controversial for several years; in 2005 there was an arrest warrant against him for corruption charges, though it was later rescinded. The Red Crescent grew rapidly under his leadership, but other humanitarian organizations claimed there was a lack of transparency with funds.

How sad. Iraq badly needs more humanitarian help for its internally displaced people.

IRC says Iraqi refugee goal for FY2009 is insufficient

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

(Sound of snoring)  For groups like the International Rescue Committee (IRC) any refugee goal from any country at any time is insufficient.   As the new fiscal year begins October 1, you will see and hear more from the volags (supposedly voluntary organizations), who are paid with your money to resettle refugees, issuing press releases like this one. 

The IRC is one of the top ten non-profit groups that receive huge State Department and Health and Human Services grants to resettle refugees.  They are paid by the head—no refugees=not enough money to keep their offices open and staffs busy.

Here is a post I wrote last fall in which I reported that in 2005, the IRC received $88 million from the taxpayers of the US—that was just for that year!  Its chief executive is paid a salary higher than the VP of the United States or Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.   

If these groups raised all their money privately, then they could advocate for more refugees all they wanted, but they don’t so it causes people to be suspicious when they are busy discouraging Iraqis from returning to Iraq where they are wanted to rebuild that country.

The IRC is alarmed [I bet they are] by exaggerated reports of improving stability in Iraqi communities, as well as statements and enticements that promote the premature return of displaced families.

Yeah, IRC, just bring the Iraqis here to clean motels and get angry.

We have written 233 posts on Iraqi refugees in our special category here.

Did U.S. disarm Christians in Iraq?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

FrontPage Magazine interviews William Murray, chairman of the Religious Freedom Coalition. We’ve posted on Murray and his group’s work with Iraqi Christian refugees before, here, here and here. He summarizes the situation of these refugees thusly:

American political correctness and the Bush Administration’s fear of Islamic backlash have caused the greatest “urban refugee” crisis in history. More than half of the Christian population has been forced to flee their homes in Iraq because of Islamic violence against them. Their churches have been burned and bombed. The official position of the Administration has been that “Coalition Forces assisting the Christians would cause them to be identified with the United States and have even more problems.” As a result they receive no assistance in defending themselves at all. Immediately after the American invasion of Iraq, the Christian militias were disarmed. They were the only militias to be disarmed. American forces allowed both the Sunnis and Shiites to keep their armed militias. Christians first fled from Baghdad to the Nineveh Plains, and then to Jordan and Syria. In Jordan and Syria the American embassies told Iraqi refugees to go to the United Nations because their plight “was not an American problem.” Excuse me? 

Meanwhile the official position of the State Department under Condi Rice is that Christians are harassed by “criminal elements” in Iraq and that no persecution exists. That attitude has caused even greater persecution and led our embassies and other nations to be unhelpful.

The interviewer, Jamie Glazov, asks why Christian militias were disarmed. Murray answers:

Those of us who have questioned the State Department on the disarming of the Christian militias have received mixed answers. However, the favorite answer seems to be that allowing Christians to bear arms in Iraq would give the impression that the United States was leading a “Christian crusade,” and thus it was better for our image to allow the slaughter of Christians.

I have read many times that Christians are the only ones in Iraq who do not have their own armed militias, and that is one reason that have been attacked so much. I had gathered that they had never had militias, without that being specified. I’ve certainly never heard this claim before and I can’t find any reference to it elsewhere. If it’s true, it’s beyond shocking, but I have my doubts.

Interestingly, in looking for information on this question I found a recent article on Islam Online (of all places) called Iraq’s Christian Militias — meaning recently formed ones. (An AFP story on the new Christian militias is here.)

MOSUL — Christians in Iraq have united and formed new militias to protect themselves against what they describe as targeting by Muslim extremists in northern Iraq.

“During five years we were victims of the general violence in Iraq but mainly from violence carried by Islamic extremists who want us to follow their religious behaviors, though we are from a different culture and belief,” Priest Michel Youssef, militias supporter in Mosul, told IslamOnline.net.

Few armed Christians started patrolling their areas last year but now there are 250 of them with official approval from the US army base in Mosul.

Armed with heavy machine guns and assault rifles, they receive salaries of around US $250 and are commanded by Father Yusuf Yohannes.

“The idea to form militias was the only way to protect our families and friends from attacks because we are tired of waiting an action from the government which is preoccupied with politics and never look after us,” said Youssef.  

 

,,, The idea of taking protection in their own hands is very appealing to Christians.

“Our new militias are the start of a possible new life for Christians in Iraq,” believes Annuar, the primary school teacher.

There’s no reference to previous militias here. I’m not sure that William Murray is the most reliable of sources. Look at this statement:

Our government, that is the Bush Administration, does not want the financial and moral obligations that come with the actual declaration of refugee status. As a result none of the refugees, Christian or otherwise, are considered refugees officially by our government. There has been a special effort to make sure that Christians who have fled Iraq are not given any priority treatment despite the fact that they represented a far larger percentage of those who fled compared to their actual percentage of the population.

Of course we consider them refugees. We just let the UN have charge of them. It is true that we give no priority to Christians; we’ve commented on that many times. Murray does not come across as clear and knowledgeable. His group does excellent humanitarian work, and maybe that’s what he should stick to.

I’ll try to track down more information about the disarming of the Christian militias and whether they ever existed before.