Their country ravaged by Bush's war, Iraqi refugees find the U.S. indifferent to their plight

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from In These Times:



Features > April 21, 2008
They Can’t Go Home Again
With their country ravaged by Bush’s war, Iraqi refugees find the United States indifferent to their plight

By Adam Doster


On a rainy March morning, in a drab office complex off one of Metro Detroit’s many expressways, I met Mona and Fadi Rabban.

In broken English, they greeted me graciously, keeping their heads slightly bowed. The diminutive Fadi was dressed in black jeans and a beat-up leather jacket. His beautiful middle-aged wife donned a thin, black cardigan and black slacks, which seemed less suitable for the Midwest winter.

Just six months earlier, the Rabbans had been in Jordan awaiting resettlement to the United States. Their arrival in America capped a journey that began in early 2006, when insurgents forced them to flee their Baghdad home.

Fadi, who was an accountant for 35 years, worked for a company that occasionally did business with American firms — which, in today’s Iraqi capital, is a dangerous venture. “When they send you a threat, you have to do , otherwise they will kill you,” he says. “They are serious about it, it’s not like a joke.”

In a war and occupation that has wrought innumerable, horrific consequences, the Iraqi refugee crisis is among the most disheartening. More than 4 million Iraqis — including the Rabbans — have been externally or internally displaced since the American invasion, and while their stories are ignored in much of the West, their forced migration constitutes a humanitarian and political crisis that has yet to be adequately addressed.

Iraqis flee

In the upcoming book War Without End: The Iraq Debacle in Context, Michael Schwartz, a sociologist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, writes that Iraq has undergone three waves of displacement since the war began.

First, de-Baathification of the Iraqi government, the disbandment of the Iraqi military and the closing of state-owned industries in 2003 left hundreds of thousands of Iraqis with limited economic prospects. A kidnapping industry boomed shortly thereafter, forcing much of Iraq’s moneyed and political elite — many of whom were targeted for ransom — to flee. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3611/they_cant_go_home_again/