Crisis Upon Crisis
The blistering murder and mayhem unleashed by the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and the unseating of the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein has resulted in other, less obvious, but entirely predictable problems. People are desperate to escape the violence. They're very well aware of their vulnerability in a country where utter lawlessness reigns, where terrorist militias value nothing but their opportunity to wreak ever more havoc.Human life is expendable in their view, and entire populations are regularly treated to the heart-stopping punctuation of night-time assaults on their neighbourhoods. They know, through sad experience, that other families are suffering grievous losses. They well understand that there but for the grace of another time, go they. And so they go, desperate to escape the inevitable.
Their worry about leaving behind their native land, their possessions, their community and all that people coming from an ancient tradition and culture hold dear, entirely eclipsed by the inescapable need to flee. They may have felt, throughout the years of their former president's long rule that their lives might be improved without his totalitarian presence, but what took its place was as a crucible of hellfire is to a blistering frypan.
Nearly two million people have been made homeless within Iraq, and another 2.2 million have sought refuge in neighbouring states. Syria alone has taken in 1.2 million and Jordan is struggling to accommodate 750,000 Iraqis. Neither they nor the Gulf States, Egypt, Iran, Lebanon and Turkey, which have taken in declining, yet significant numbers of Iraqis, offer the comfort of long-term residence. Iraqis there live in squalid refugee camps.
These are Iraqi refugees, many of whom are looking for a permanent alternative to call home, and some of them have found that alternative in countries which have accepted them as refugee-immigrants; countries like Germany, which has absorbed 52,900, and the United Kingdom and Netherlands, each of which has taken in 22,300, and on a declining scale, Sweden, Denmark and Norway.
Some others have found a home in Australia, to the tune of some 11,100 refugees. Even Canada has taken in 1,860 Iraqis. While the United States, that very country at whose insistence on invading the world watched, irresolute and condemning the hasty rashness of
the invasion, has taken in a paltry 770. Last year, Iraqis represented the leading national group seeking asylum in industrialized countries.
Those Iraqis left behind are those, for the most part, who lack the financial wherewithal to remove themselves and their families from harm's way. The professional strata, the wealthy and educated demographic have long since fled. The country's physicians also decamped, so that hospitals are now desperately short of medical staff. The country's already-damaged infrastructure is crumbling.
As before the invasion, when the U.S.-sponsored embargo was in place against Iraq, children are suffering from chronic malnutrition. A large majority of the country's people doesn't have access to adequate water and sanitation services. A third of the population lives in abject poverty, many regularly going without food. Fully 40,00 to 50,000 people a month continue to stream out of the country. In lock-step with the spiral of violence.
About one hundred Iraqis a day are murdered. Before the most recent few years of undiluted sectarian violence, refugees ironically, who fled Iraq during Saddam Hussein's reign of terror, began to return from Iran to their homes in Iraq, some three hundred thousand of them. That trend was reversed once sectarian killing became widespread, and accelerated with the bombing of the Shi'ite Golden Mosque in Samarra.
The situation has only grown more untenable, more unbelievably dysfunctional, more horrendously violent. Ordinary Iraqis no longer have any hope for the future of their country. The uneasy peace between Shia and Sunni, between Kurds and Christians under Saddam's iron rule has been irremediably shattered.
In its wake is the shards of community, shared custom and history, not soon to be mended. The religious, political, ideological, cultural divisions between a formerly semi-cohesive whole have created an impassable divide. This, one imagines, is what the 15th century Dutch artist Hieronymus Bosch visualized when he painted his visions of hell.
This doesn't quite reflect the blatantly short-sighted, uninformed, assurances of the Bush administration when they pledged to convert a perceived backward society they little understood nor cared about, to the enlightenment of democratic rule.
Labels: Middle East, Viewpoint
posted by Pieface @ Saturday, June 23, 2007
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