Category: Iraqi refugees

USCCB: No hope for Christians in Iraq, bring more to the US

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Well, that is basically the gist of what the US Conference of Catholic Bishops told President Obama lately.  Check out the whole story Clerical Whispers:

The president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops urged the U.S. government to “redouble its efforts to assist Iraqis” in providing safety for its citizens, especially religious minorities.

“To meet its moral obligations to the Iraqi people, it is critically important that the United States take additional steps now to help Iraq protect its citizens, especially Christians and others who are victims of organized attacks,” said Cardinal Francis E. George of Chicago in a Nov. 9 letter to U.S. President Barack Obama.

Read it all, but, I warn you, it is one of those dark websites that are hard to read.

Regular readers know that the USCCB is largely funded by you, the taxpayer, because we have written about that a zillion times on these pages (one of many recent posts is here).   The USCCB and Catholic Charities around the US are busy resettling Muslims to cities near you and could very well say to Obama, point blank, we want to resettle more Christians because they are being persecuted in Iraq and elsewhere in Muslim countries, but they are too squishy to say it.  Maybe this is about as close as they are going to get.  My fear is that the USCCB is really saying let’s bring an even larger total number of refugees (because we are paid by the head) instead of substituting the desperate Christians for some others.

Time magazine: Sweden deporting Iraqi Christians

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

But, how many???

I saw the headline and read the story in Time entitled:  ‘Why Christian Iraqis are running scared—in Sweden.’  But I would like to know how many of those deported are Christians?  We know from many previous posts that Sweden is having a huge problem with Muslim immigrant populations in certain cities and that there is a growing ‘close the borders’ political movement in the former welfare mecca of Europe.  Just one recent story is here.

Here then is Time from Saturday:

With numerous attacks against Iraq’s Christians in recent weeks — including a Halloween day massacre in a Baghdad church, which left 52 dead — the country’s religious minority fears for its survival within the boundaries of the Middle Eastern nation. Yet, a long way from their native land, many Iraqi Christians are also living in terror in a far more serene place: Stockholm.

Swedish immigration officials have been deporting Iraqi refugees to Baghdad on flights about every three weeks, declaring that some of them have no legitimate claim to political asylum in Sweden. That includes Iraqi Christians — a category that does not automatically imply a risk of persecution, according to Swedish guidelines. Of the 80,000 or so Iraqi refugees in Sweden, about 6,000 of them are Christian, according to estimates by the Syriac Orthodox Church in Stockhold.

Read it all.

O.K. so there are 6,000 Iraqi Christians and 74,000 Iraqi Muslims in Sweden, but I cannot see where the article says how many of each batch of deportees are truly Christians.  I’m so cynical I think the Christians supposedly deported are used as a PR tool to stop all deportations.   Someone in Sweden, please give us the facts.

Off topic a little, but almost two years ago I reported that Time magazine wrote a politically correct version of the Rohingya illegal aliens story and completely ignored its own reporting from 2002 about Rohingya links to Islamic terrorism.  Bottomline, I don’t trust Time magazine’s reporting on immigration issues.

Update on Iraqi refugees: conditions no better

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Iraq: The Ignored Victims is the title of a September 14 article by Cardinal Theodore McCarrick in the New York Review of Books. He visited Iraq and surrounding countries to see the situation for himself. What he found seems little changed from previous reports.

The humanitarian consequences of this seven-year war on Iraqi civilians are too often unreported. Since 2003, 2.5 million Iraqis have fled the country, mainly to Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, while another two million have been dislocated inside Iraq, many of whom are now living in makeshift camps on the outskirts of Baghdad and other cities. Neighboring countries have by and large been willing to allow in fleeing Iraqis, though often without offering them any legal status; and this influx has created severe strains on their own populations and resources. To be fair, the international community, led by the United States, has provided basic assistance to these Iraqis and a small number have been resettled in third countries, including in the US and Europe, but a long-term solution to this mass displacement has been elusive.

At one point a couple of years ago the Iraqi government was making attempts to get refugees back and to settle the property disputes that prevented many of them from returning. I haven’t heard anything about that for a long time, and since a government hasn’t been able to form since the elections months ago, it’s doubtful anybody is thinking about refugees at all.

The Cardinal reports briefly on the situation for Christians:

Moreover, Iraqi Christians continue to be targets of systematic violence, especially in Mosul and Ninevah. These Christians belong to ancient communities that once grew and thrived in Iraq but now face potential disappearance there. Christians in Iraq told me of threats they had received to abandon their faith or risk death. Others described how their homes or churches had been attacked.

On August 25, at the time of the US troop withdrawal, Iraqi soldiers reportedly filled the streets of Mosul, anticipating a resurgence in sectarian violence. If there is not an increase in security in Christian neighborhoods, any chance for Christians to return to Iraq in the near future and reestablish their communities is not bright.

This too sounds just like what was being reported a couple of years ago. Since numbers are hard to come by, the reports at that time let me to expect that the Christian communities were pretty well on their way out. It sounds like they’re hanging on, but we still have no idea of what that means in terms of actual numbers.

I doubt the future is bright for any of these refugees. We have some responsibility for the situation, but I doubt there is the will to put forth the effort to create a law-abiding society, to figure out how to get the refugees back safely, or to protect the threatened Christians. Perhaps it’s not possible to do this at all.

56 Iraqis deported from Europe

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

These must have been some really bad dudes for these do-gooder countries to send them back to Iraq and risk the wrath of the United Nations.

From AP at the Boston Globe:

BAGHDAD — Several dozen Iraqis who did not gain asylum in Europe returned to Iraq yesterday despite concerns the country is still too dangerous, the UN refugee agency said.

Security has dramatically improved in Iraq since the height of sectarian bloodshed in 2006 and 2007, but the UN agency has urged governments not to force Iraqis who fled the country after the 2003 US-led invasion to return, citing continued attacks and human rights violations.

Check out the countries doing the deporting:

The plane arrived from Stockholm with 27 Iraqi deportees from Sweden, nine from Norway, four from the Netherlands, and an unknown number from the United Kingdom, Sybella Wilkes, a UN spokeswoman, said. The Iraqi official said 56 deportees were returned yesterday.

I guess Europe is getting the picture.

For everything you wanted to know about Iraqi refugees, visit our Iraqi Refugee category, here.  This is our 479th post on the topic.

Reminder! Visit Friends of Refugees blog

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I know I’ve said it before, but I can’t say it enough.  Visit ‘Friends of Refugees’ here where investigative blogger Christopher Coen has some very informative posts about how the US Refugee Resettlement program continues to falter leaving communities struggling and refugees in the lurch.   In Arizona for instance the State Refugee coordinator is begging the US State Department to send no more Iraqis to Arizona.

Meanwhile we hear that this week the Obama Administration will tell Congress that they will aim for 80,000 more refugees in FY 2011 which begins October 1.