Iraqi Refugees -bill moyers interviews george packer and deborah amos

im only posting a portion of the article, its pretty long,
but this inst the first ive heard of how big a problem this is.

Anyone with money has already left Iraq, maybe never to return.

This has created HUGE problems with cities in the region.
Not to mention what it has left in Iraq ?

Only the people who couldn't leave.
Many of those who are young and have no job,
many are recruited by either terror organizations,
or by Shia or Sunni organizations fighting against each other.

Many have called this the most important
under-reported story of the year

Brad
911review.org
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Bill Moyers interviews george packer and deborah amos re:
iraq refugees

September 29th, 2007
·

Deborah Amos:  
It’s very, very tough.
And I’ve covered refugees for most of my career.
And this is a different– this is a different population.
Because you can’t help thinking that it could be me.
You know, I’ve met journalists just like me
who have the same level of education just like me.
And they have been forced to take their savings.
I don’t know what I would do. So,it’s not even empathy.
You don’t have to imagine.
It is so stark and clear to you when you talk to people
who speak English as well as you do
that there’s no translation problem.
You get it.

Bill MOYERS: We turn now
to one of the most neglected consequences of the war in Iraq, the
humanitarian crisis that’s been unfolding since the American
invasion 4
1/2 years ago. It’s almost beyond comprehension, two million
inter-refugees inside the country, a million dispossessed in Baghdad
alone, their numbers rising stupendously during the surge. Another two
million have fled to other countries, over 1 1/2 million to Syria,
another million or so to Lebanon and to Jordan which has now closed its
borders. Among the refugees are Iraqis escaping reprisals for
cooperating with Americans. The Bush Administration has allowed fewer
than 1,000 of them into the U.S. This
week the Senate passed the Iraqi Refugee Crisis Act, calling on the
President to do more. We’re seeing a human tragedy unfold
with
consequences that can only compound in the months to come as the power
vacuum in Iraq spreads. Joining me to talk about this is George Packer.
He’s a staff writer for The New Yorker who’s
acclaimed for his
articles, essays and reviews on foreign affairs. In 2005 his book, The
Assassin’s Gate, America in Iraq was named by the New York
Times as one
of the ten best of the year. This week he’s more justly proud
of being
the father of a brand new baby, Charlie, obviously also one of the ten
best of the year. And National Public Radio’s, Deborah Amos,
who’s been
a colleague of mine in public broadcasting since 1977, 30 years now.
Deb Amos is one of the few American journalists to cover this story.
She’s just back from Syria, Lebanon and Jordan, her fifth
trip to the
region to report on the refugees. Welcome to you both.

DEBORAH
AMOS: Thank you.

GEORGE
PACKER: Thank you.

BILL MOYERS:
Give me a human face to these people. Who are they?

DEBORAH AMOS::
So many of
them, Bill, are the doctors, the professors, the architects, the
intellectuals, the poets. There are the poor who have left. But this
community that’s now in Damascus and Amman and increasingly
going to
Lebanon is the middle class. These are the technocrats, the kind of
people that you need if you want to rebuild a country. And this is the
demographics that has left Baghdad.

BILL MOYERS:
What is life
like for them now? What– what is– we think of
refugees in the Middle
East as Palestinian refugees living in those awful camps.
What– what do
these people face?

GEORGE PACKER:
As Deb says,
they have these — what you might call middle class concerns.
They’re
not so much worried about food although I think as their savings
dwindle they will. They worry about their children’s
education, health
care and the fact that they really can’t work and so they
have - they
are a desperate population but they’re not the kind of
refugees we
think of coming out of Darfur or Somalia. They are very much a middle
class population and the great problem for them is they all left Iraq
with some money and they’re running out of money, and a few
of them are
actually going back to Iraq because they don’t have enough to
spare.

BILL MOYERS:
I think I heard
you report not long ago that in Damascus there’s something
like 20 to
30 people, refugees, living in the same room?

DEBORAH AMOS::
Many people do that. 20 people living in one apartment.

BILL MOYERS:
For how long?

DEBORAH AMOS::
They do it for
months. And it’s not because they’re all broke.
It’s because they have
no idea how long they have to hold out. And when you run out of money
the choices are very stark. The– the incidents of child
prostitution in
Damascus is rising dramatically. There’s a–
there’s a belt of clubs
above Damascus. And this is where some Iraqi families are prostituting
their daughters. That’s how dire–

BILL MOYERS:
For money?

DEBORAH AMOS::
For money.
That is how dire it is becoming in Damascus. Or you go home. There was
a young man who was a sculptor. And he was targeted in Baghdad. He came
to Damascus. He ran out of money. He went home last week and
he’s dead.

BILL MOYERS:
George, why didn’t the administration anticipate this?

GEORGE PACKER:
I think it’s a
piece– with everything that’s gone wrong with the
war, for political
reasons. To acknowledge that there was a huge refugee crisis in the
region, to acknowledge that Iraqis who work with Americans are a
uniquely endangered population in Iraq– I mean, they are as
hounded and
helpless as European Jews in the 1940’s — would
have been to
acknowledge that the war was going badly. That it was creating more
pain than it was alleviating, that the picture of steady, slow progress
was false. And so the administration simply chose to ignore this
crisis. I mean, for the first year or two of the refugee crisis our
policy was, “It’s not happening.” More
recently our policy has been
we’re committing some funds, rather small compared to the
need. But–
our real objective is to create a safe and stable Iraq to which these
refugees can then return. In other words, it’s temporary.
Well, it’s
not temporary. When you talk to Iraqis now compared to at the beginning
of the war they no longer say in six months things will get better as
they used to or in a year things will get better. They now say in two
decades. In other words, for an Iraqi, not really in my lifetime. It
will be my children that see a better Iraq. That means
they’re making
decisions now about what they have to do with their families in order
to ride out a 20 year horror. And that means they’re not
going back to
Iraq.

BILL MOYERS:
What’s the
political consequences of what George just described of a long
migration of refugees who can not go home, who are running out of
money, who are spilling over into the borders of the other countries.
Taking– I assume they’re taking their warring,
sectarian passions with
them, are they not?

DEBORAH AMOS::
The passions,
not necessarily their actions. They know very well that if kidnapping
and assassinations begin in Damascus or Amman that those governments
will kick the entire populations out. So, a lot of it is by remote
control. A family has someone threatened back in Baghdad. But I think
the larger point is this, Bill. We– no refugee situation is
like
another. However, you can make some comparisons to the Palestinian
refugee situation 50 years ago to the Afghan one more recently. And,
these populations are easily recruited. It’s not that the
leadership of
radical movements necessarily comes from the refugee population. But
it’s a great recruiting ground for children who have been out
of school
for– in some cases now, three years.