Iraqi Refugees need U.S. help, advocates say

By Michael Ruhl, University of New Mexico – Talk Radio News Service

America must invest more time, money, and human resources to help those displaced by the ongoing Iraq War, according to human rights advocates from the Washington, D.C.-based Refugees International.

The presence of 2.6 million displaced Iraqis persons is overwhelming to neighboring Middle East countries and is “undermining” to the social fabric of Iraq, said Ken Bacon, President of Refugees International, at a speech made today at the National Press Club.

President Barack Obama talked about displacement with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki during his surprise visit to Iraq on Tuesday.

Bacon is happy at what is being seen as a distinct change from the “little attention” that the Bush Administration paid to Iraqi displacement.

It is estimated that since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, 2.6 million Iraqi’s have lost their homes and have fled other parts of the country. An additional 2 million have fled to neighboring countries, including Syria, Jordan and Egypt.

Bacon said that greater American and international support in receiving refugees and providing financial-aid can help stop the crisis.

Displacement of that many people “affects the whole region”, said Bacon, which results in educated citizens and specialized workers fleeing the country.

There are only 18,000 practicing doctors in Iraq, down from 32,000 doctors in 2002. There are more Iraqi doctors in Jordan than in Iraq’s capitol city of Baghdad, Bacon said.

Last year Democratic Senators Robert Casey (PA) and Benjamin Cardin (MD) introduced a bill to increase aid to Iraqi refugees and allow more of them to enter the United States. Since the FY2010 Budget has been approved by Congress, any appropriated funds to help Iraqi citizens would have to come through additional legislation, Bacon said.

A spokesman for Senator Cardin said it has not been decided yet if similar legislation would be introduced in this Congress.

Refugee International’s Field Report on the Iraqi refugee situation said that the Iraqi government is trying to keep more of its citizens from fleeing their homeland. It is feared by the Iraqi government that the existence of so many refugees tarnishes the image of overall security within the country.

The report also said Iraq violated international refugee laws in 2007 by asking Syria not to accept any more Iraqi refugees.

Many refugees have fears of returning home, the report says, because many of those that returned already have been killed.

Kristele Younes, an advocate with Refugees International, says that security is a major issue in Iraqi neighborhoods, with each little borough acting as its own walled off “fiefdom”.

Younes said that the United Nations is trying to place a tourniquet on the flow of persons out of the country by the end of the year, but significant challenges remain in Iraq, including budgetary shortcomings due to low oil prices, corruption within the government and sectarianism.

The Refugees International’s report on Iraq can be found here.

Causes of crisis

A Zogby poll sponsored by the organization Judicial Watch found that 81.7 percent of Americans believe that political corruption was a major factor that lead up to the current financial crises. According to Thomas Fitton, Judicial Watch’s President, the evidence suggests those 81.7 percent are correct.

“American’s seem to get what the problem is, but because ‘everyone’ is involved, you wont hear a peep about it from the city’s establishment,” said Fitton, speaking at a Judicial Watch panel discussion on the causes of the financial crisis.

“Arguably, the financial crisis is part of the biggest government corruption scandal in our nation’s history, and it doesn’t get much bigger than Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac...the companies took care of both political parties.”

Editor of the Real Clear Markets website John Tamny said that deregulation was not the cause of the crisis, as some democratic leaders are suggesting.

“If you look at the biggest freeze so far in this mortgage meltdown, it’s been of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac If we ignore first of all the fact that both parties to varying degrees were literally horizontal in bed with these guys, the idea that they didn’t have oversight of their activities is laughable,” said Tamny.

Instead, Tamny attributes the origin of the crisis to the weak dollar.

“Real estate is very commodity like, and just how commodities always do well when the dollar is weak, so does real estate. And with housing making big gains upwards in nominal terms in recent years, Americans logically chased this performance and piled into the housing sector.”

This housing boom resulted in people purchasing risky mortgages under the belief that if they found out they could no longer afford it, they would be able to sell it easily in the empowered real estate market. Eventually, the housing market turned sour, and the housing investments followed.

Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute Alan Reynolds found blaming the recession that is taking place worldwide on U.S. housing to be a ‘bit of a stretch’, and claimed that a spike in oil prices had a role in the crisis, pointing to nine occurrences when oil prices tripled, only to be followed by periods of recession. Reynolds expressed skepticism to a government solution.

“Recessions happen. If energy prices get too high, they have to come down. If home prices get too high, they need to come down. If homebuilders build too many houses, they have to stop building for a while until they get the inventory down..if the governments really knew how to stop, prevent, alleviate recessions, why do we still have recessions?”
John Berlau, Director of the Center for Entrepreneurship said that the initial emphasis the government put on housing in the finance system was not as helpful as originally believed, and instead suggested that they should have focused on getting the poor to save and invest.

Berlau said that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were essentially hybrids of government and private industry which had dangerous consequences.

“Fannie and Freddie were kind of the worst of both worlds. They could lobby like the private sector could do, but they were also built by congress and had built in government support where they had a 2 billion dollar line of credit...that made investors think, and it turned out rightly, that if anything happened they would be bailed out by the government.”

Witnesses of mass corruption

"Based on the cases that I have personally investigated, I believe that at least $18 billion has been lost due to waste and corruption in Iraq, more than half of which is American tax payer money," said Former Chief Investigator (Baghdad) of the Iraqi Commission on Public Integrity Salam Adhoob during a hearing on corruption and waste in Iraq.

"Of this $18 I billion believe at least $4 billion has been lost due to corruption and criminal acts in the Ministry of Defense alone."

Adhoob went on to explain the extent of the corruption in the al-Maliki government, citing instances in which senior members of the Ministry, including the Defense Minister and Defense Secretary General, would establish poorly funded front companies through relatives which they would then award billion dollar contracts. These deals apparently brought very few results

"The front company charged $4.5 million for helicopters that cost only $1.5 million dollars...the company never delivered the M-18 helicopters. Helicopters were not the only military equipment not delivered by these front companies. Despite having been paid in full the two companies delivered only a small percentage of weapons and other military equipment that had been ordered by the Ministry of Defense," said Adhoob.

CPI investigators later found out that the front companies diverted a substantial amount of their profits to fund to al-Qaeda. Adhoob stated that nobody involved in the Defense Ministry has yet faced any legal consequences.

The committee also addressed accusations of corruption among U.S. officials and corporations.

"One of the biggest U.S. contractors, the Parsons Corporation, was paid $31 million to build an Iraqi prison in Diyala, Iraq. Iraqi contractors got paid an additional $9 million...the prison was supposed to house 3,600 inmates, but it was never finished, and today it sits abandoned," said Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.)

An anonymous witness later stated that the Minister of Justice specifically told an U.S. government officials that the Iraqi government did not want this prison built since it was too close to the Iranian border. The U.S. ignored this request and contracted it anyways.

There is doubt over how corruption and waste will be confronted in the future. The current head of CPI announced that an amnesty law passed by the Iraqi Parliament will block the investigation of 700 cases of alleged corruption in Baghdad alone.

Department of State “indirectly contributed to and has allowed corruption" in Iraq

In the Democratic Policy Committee hearing “Have Bush Administration Reconstruction and Anti-Corruption Failures Undermined the U.S. Mission in Iraq?” Chairman Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) said the U.S. government had contributed to the culture of corruption in Iraq, and that corruption involved both Iraqi and American money. This was the fourteenth in a series of oversight hearings to examine contracting fraud, waste, and abuse in Iraq.

Dorgan described the testimony provided in March to the Senate Appropriations Committee by Judge Radhi al Radhi, who had been the head of the Commission of Public Integrity (CPI), which Dorgan said is an anti-corruption committee established after the U.S. invasion of Iraq. He said Radhi estimated that corruption resulted in the loss of $18 billion in government funds, most of which had been U.S. taxpayer dollars.

Judge Arthur Brennan, former State Department Official who had served in Iraq in 2007 as the Director of the Office of Accountability and Transparency (OAT) at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, said that the OAT team discovered that the Department of State “indirectly contributed to and has allowed corruption to fester at the highest levels of the Iraqi Government.” He also said that “In a sense, the Department of State has contributed to the killing and maiming of U.S. soldiers; the deaths of thousands of Iraqi civilians; the bolstering of illegal militias, insurgents and al-Qaida, and the enrichment and empowerment of the thieves controlling some of the Iraqi ministries.”

Brennan said the State Department never responded to an OAT report on the level of corruption in the 31 Iraqi ministries, and that to his knowledge, the State Department has never seen an audit of any Iraqi agency or ministry. He said “many of the ministries are controlled by criminals and guarded by armed thugs,” creating a dangerous situation for investigators.

James Mattil, who had been Chief of Staff for the Office of Accountability and Transparency, said OAT was under-staffed and had no operating budget, and that “there was no transparency even with the office of transparency.” He said “corruption and its consequences are the fuel that sustains the insurgency, providing the money, the people and the motivation to fight Americans in Iraq.” He respectfully disagreed with Ambassador Crocker’s conclusion that “Iraq’s leaders have the will to tackle the country’s pressing problems.” He said Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki is fighting Iraq’s anti-corruption agencies, not corruption, and provided an example where a new CPI commissioner was appointed who three weeks earlier had been arrested and jailed on corruption charges.