The daily killing of innocent people in Iraq is a great tragedy, all the more scandalous because it seems to have no end and no prospect of accountability for those who brought it about. The violence monopolizes the attention of the international community and the media. The war and the occupation, however, are also inflicting on the Iraqi people other daily tragedies: displacement and impoverishment.

 

A recent report by the United Nations estimated that close to 2 million Iraqi refugees have fled the country and about 1.8 million have been internally displaced. It is estimated that 50,000 Iraqis are fleeing the country every month.

 

The movement of Iraqi refugees and internally displaced persons has been compared in its magnitude to the tragic Palestinian exodus during the establishment of Israel in 1948.

 

The comparison is ironic because the United Nations Refugee Agency is also concerned about the fate of Palestinian refugees in Iraq. It issued a special appeal to help the Palestinian refugees leave Iraq in safety. ““Of all the groups being targeted in Iraq,” an official of the UN Refugee Agency said, the Palestinians are the most vulnerable as they literally have nowhere else to flee, and in many cases have been denied travel documents.”

 

Neighboring countries-especially Syria and Jordan- are bearing the brunt of having to cope, with little or no outside support, with the influx of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi refugees.

 

Syria, which has been subjected to a war of propaganda and intimidation by the Bush administration, has admitted about one million Iraqis fleeing the violence. Jordan, which is already the host of a large Palestinian refugee population, has received about 700,000 Iraqis. Both countries are said to be restricting their liberal residency rules and may no longer accept more Iraqis.

 

Contrast this with the position of the Bush administration, largely responsible for the mayhem that characterizes life in Iraq today. It has shown remarkable insensitivity toward the tragedy of Iraqi refugees.  It has only accepted about 200 Iraqi refugees in 2006 and has recently announced it would let in about 7,000, including those Iraqis who collaborated with the occupation.

 

And there seems to be no end in sight to the massive displacement of people in Iraq. The Geneva-based International Organization for Migration estimates that as many as 1 million Iraqis will flee their homes this year.

 

Along with the nightmare of having to flee one’s home in the hope of rebuilding a shattered live somewhere else, the Iraqi people have to contend with another byproduct of the invasion and the occupation: impoverishment.

An official of the UN Refugee Agency warned that: “Large numbers of Iraqi refugees are poor…There are reports of women and young girls forced to resort to prostitution, and children forced into labour or other forms of exploitation in order to survive.”

A United Nations Development Report recently found that one third of today’s Iraqi population, who once enjoyed one of the highest standards of living in the Arab world, lives in poverty. The UNDP report blamed the policies introduced by the occupation authorities to lift subsidies, dismantle state social protection programs, and the wholesale transformation of the Iraqi economy into a market economy.

The imperial arrogance of the US administrators in Iraq, who decreed that Iraq would be turned into a free for all market economy regardless of what the Iraqis themselves thought, have been criticized by a US official who worked in Iraq.

Ambassador Timothy Carney described the US policy in Iraq in the two years following the invasion thus: “incompetent, foolish, dubious in all of its aspects are the most charitable way to look at that period,”

Yet, the same imperial arrogance seems to be at work regarding the future of Iraqi oil, generally suspected to be one of the chief reasons for the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

A leaked draft of the oil law, seen by the British newspaper The Observer, suggests that the Iraqi government may sign away the right to exploit the Iraqi oil reserves-the second largest in the world- to multinational oil companies. (Feb 25, 07)

 

The Observer also confirmed that Britain and the US had been pressuring the Iraqi government to pass the oil law which may give foreign companies, rather than the Iraqi government, not only exploitation rights but possibly too control over production levels. This would undermine the ability of oil producing countries cartel such as OPEC, to affect production quotas and market price. It would also upset Iraq’s relations with other oil-producing countries.

 

A law that affects the most valuable national resource of the country ought to be the subject of a public debate with input from the people themselves and through their representatives in parliament.

 

Yet, the Iraqi people, struggling to survive in the face of daily violence and confronted with growing poverty, are not given the opportunity to participate in the crucial decision affecting their national wealth. The Iraqi people’s representatives in parliament have reportedly learned about the law only when it was leaked and published in the West. 

 

Hasan Jumah Awwad al-Asadi, leader of the Iraqi oil workers’ union warned: ‘History will not forgive those who play recklessly with the wealth and destiny of a people.’

 

Four years ago, the Bush administration claimed that its army came to liberate the Iraqi people from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein. Most Iraqis did not suspect that the price would be hundreds of innocent people killed every week, millions displaced and made refugees, collapsed infrastructures, shattered lives, growing impoverishment, and loss of sovereignty.

 

An Iraqi woman refugee recently told a Western reporter: ““We were promised a kind of heaven on earth. But we’ve been given a real hell.”

 

Prof. Adel Safty is Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Siberian Academy of Public Administration, Russia. His latest book, Leadership and Democracy, is published in New York.

 

---