In September I wrote that an unmentioned consequence of the Iraq war will be refugees, specifically Iraqi refugees created because of their support for the Americans—

Sooner or later we are going to withdraw from Iraq, and what we are going to leave behind—as in Vietnam—is not going to be an America-friendly environment. When that day comes, there will be the refugee crisis that everyone expected at the start of the war. Instead, it will come at the end.
....

As in Vietnam, the U.S. will be considered, by many of its citizens and by most other countries, to have a responsibility to these refugees. These people supported the U.S., and our sense of fairness—indeed, the world's sense of fairness—will demand that the U.S. do all that it may to help.

But the Iraqi refugee problem is going to be far more burdensome to the United States—and to the non-Muslim world—than the Vietnamese crisis could ever have been.

Here's why: Compare the situation with that of Vietnam. When the U.S. and other countries allowed entry to the Vietnamese refugees, I'm sure they made an effort to exclude supporters of the North Vietnamese regime. But if they made a mistake, so what? There are probably some former Viet Cong drawing Social Security even as I write.

But the Iraqi refugees, whether by fact or supposition, will be perceived as potential terrorists and suicide bombers. Who among the non-Muslim countries is going to take them?

My purpose was to write of the aftermath of some future withdrawal. But Iraqi collaborators are trying to get out now—and they certainly have a well-founded fear of persecution.

Let's see how things are going.

According to Gaiutra Bahadur of Knight Ridder Newspapers,

More than 700,000 Iraqi refugees live in Jordan and Syria; 15,000 of them arrived in Amman after the American invasion two years ago, according to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. They include religious minorities, doctors and other professionals who fear being kidnapped for ransom, and a growing number of Iraqis who were threatened because of their work with the U.S. government and its contractors.

Nongovernmental organizations first became aware of the problem as U.S. soldiers approached them for help in getting their translators out of the country, only to be told it was impossible.
....

So many former employees have sought protection in other countries that UNHCR [United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees] recently rewrote its guidelines for Iraq to include those ties as reasonable grounds for fear of persecution, said Marie Helene Verney, a spokeswoman for the agency in Geneva.

"Such people should be of special humanitarian concern to the U.S.," Bill Frelick, the director of refugee programs for the human-rights group Amnesty International, wrote in a letter to U.S. officials in February.

The letter, signed by more than a dozen human-rights, church and refugee aid groups, called on the State Department to resettle Iraqis, including those targeted by insurgents who view them as U.S. collaborators.

So what is the U.S. response?

The American government has evacuated a small number of Iraqis through humanitarian parole, a mechanism usually used to let people into the United States temporarily for medical care. A few who reached American shores on tourist or other visas have been able to win political asylum. A former Knight Ridder Newspapers translator whose family was gunned down on the streets of Baghdad received asylum in the United States. But the United States hasn't resettled any Iraqis as refugees, a category that would allow for a permanent stay, since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

"In principle, there is no blunt refusal," said Verney, the UNHCR spokeswoman. "The few cases in the pipeline are taking a long time."

All of this has been highlighted by the case of Alyaa and her cousin—

Alyaa, who asked that her last name be withheld out of fear for her safety, fled to Jordan with her cousin Shaimaa after insurgents killed an uncle and kidnapped Shaimaa and another cousin. Alyaa hoped to find a haven in the United States but discovered the State Department isn't resettling refugees from Iraq. She's lost her faith in the country she once loved.

"We gave them our friendship," Alyaa said during a recent interview at an Amman restaurant, wearing jeans and smoking cigarettes. "We gave them our hard work. And they don't even help us to have a new life." Is it so hard, she asked, "for America to give a visa to Iraqis to have a new life that they took from them?"

Refugee aid workers and U.S. and U.N. officials said the United States had turned away Iraqi refugees because it was trying instead to create a democratic society from which no one had to flee, and was sacrificing plenty of American lives in the process. To succeed, it needs the talents of the very people who want to leave.

"The whole purpose of being here is to create an environment of stability and security so that's not an issue," said Joanne Cummings, refugee coordinator at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.

Cummings said the embassy valued people who'd put themselves at risk and it kept a close watch on them.

Does anybody know the Arabic word for "laughable"?

Alyaa and Shaimaa are being supported by an American soldier—

... the soldier was Army Capt. Patrick J. Murphy of the 82nd Airborne Division, their supervisor and an Iraq war veteran who's now working as a lawyer in Philadelphia.

"They fought just as bravely as we did over there, and I think we owe it to them as a grateful nation to do everything we can to help them become Americans," he said.

Capt. Murphy is the likely reason that their case has gotten coverage, the details of which are pretty horrific—

The threats against Alyaa and her family arrived last June in sealed envelopes at their homes in Dora, a Baghdad neighborhood that's rife with insurgents. There were six letters, one for each member of the family who was working for the United States.

"'You help the people you're supposed to fight,'" Alyaa said they read. "'You deserve death.'"

The letters, signed by a group calling itself the Jihad Units, instructed the family to post signs at the local mosque within three days saying they'd quit their jobs - or face beheading. But before the deadline passed, her uncle, a construction contractor for the United States, was ambushed on his way to work and shot in the heart with a pistol.

The slaying scattered the family. Alyaa went into hiding, hop-scotching from house to house and finally fleeing north. While she was away, a gang of men kidnapped two female cousins, the ones whose father had just been killed.

They held one of them - Shaimaa, 26, who also worked at Camp Scania - for six weeks in a one-room mud house near Ramadi that served as a weapons storehouse.

Shaimaa said the men taunted her with specific details about the young women's friendships with soldiers at the base. They disparaged Alyaa, asking Shaimaa if Alyaa made love to a captain when she worked behind closed doors with him. And they killed Shaimaa's fiance while they held her captive.

The family sold their properties to pay $60,000 for Shaimaa's release. She emerged "almost crazy," Alyaa said. For a long time after her release, Shaimaa wouldn't sit in the same room with her brother and wouldn't watch television because her abductors believed it was un-Islamic to do so.

She still has dark bruises on her right forearm and incisions in the nails of both middle fingers, where the insurgents had attached cables to administer electric shocks. And she still wakes crying from nightmares.

The cousins flew to Amman in December. They joined a community of Iraqi expatriates that's swollen to such a degree that one commercial road in the Jordanian capital has been nicknamed Tigris and Euphrates Street. The influx has inflated real estate prices and tightened the job market, leading the Jordanian government to crack down. Iraqis can't work or study there. And they can't live there continuously for more three months unless they have hefty deposits in Jordanian banks, because every day beyond that carries a fine.

Alyaa and Shaimaa registered as refugees with the UNHCR office in Amman but returned to Baghdad in frustration in early April, as their three months came to a close.

"I cannot stay in Baghdad," Alyaa said. "I cannot go to another country. I cannot stay in Jordan."

But we don't want her to leave because, despite all this, she and her cousin should work as interpreters.

Even advocates who are urging the United States to offer sanctuary to former workers recognize the challenges that a formal refugee program would pose.

"It's a really tough thing," said Amnesty International's Frelick. "If you let all the interpreters leave the country, then what are you going to do?1 ... If we start evacuating Iraqis because it's too unsafe for them there, is that going to create a backlash in the U.S at a time when we're sending U.S. soldiers to Iraq and they're dying?"

Pascale Isho Warda, the Iraqi minister for migration and displacement, doesn't think a refugee program is a solution: "Patience is the best solution for everybody. ... It's not new for us to be in a life of fear."

I suspect that he may change his opinion once the Americans withdraw.

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Refugees will be an inevitable consequence of this war (9/24/04)