International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies Volume 5 Issue 2

CONTENTS Introduction 171–184 Introduction: Displacement past and present PHILIP MARFLEET Articles 185–197 Safe haven or limbo? Iraqi refugees in Egypt SARA SADEK 199–213 Changing fortunes: Iraqi refugees in Turkey DIDEM DANIS ¸ 215–229 Iraqis in exile: Migratory networks as a coping strategy MOHAMED KAMEL DORAÏ 231–245 Displacement and statecraft in Iraq: Recent trends, older roots ALI ALI 247–262 Iraqi refugees in a Damascus suburb: Carriers of sectarian conflict? ERLEND PAASCHE

263–275 Lessons learned: Palestinian refugees from Baghdad to Damascus TAHIR ZAMAN 277–292 Displacement and denial: IDPs in today’s Iraq PHILIP MARFLEET Reviews 293–297 Wiping the state clean: Cultural destruction as intrinsic to the US project of transforming Iraq Cultural Cleansing in Iraq: Why Museums were Looted, Libraries Burned and Academics Murdered, Raymond W. Baker, Shereen T. Ismael and Tareq Y. Ismael (eds) (2010) 297–299 Izdihâr Al-‘Iraq Taht al-Hukm al-Malakî (1921–1958): Dirâsah Târîkhiyyah, Siyâsiyyah, Ijtimâ‘iyyah Moqâranah, Ma’mûn Amîn Zaki (2011)

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IJCIS 5 (2) pp. 171–184 Intellect Limited 2011

International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies Volume 5 Number 2 © 2011 Intellect Ltd Introduction. English language. doi: 10.1386/ijcis.5.2.171_7

PHILIP MARFLEET University of East London, UK

Introduction: Displacement past and present 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

Iraq is a state profoundly affected by displacement. For years the Ba’thist regime used population movement as an instrument of rule, compelling millions of people to migrate within the state and forcing many others to become exiles. Since 2003 further migrations have produced a new generation of both Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) and of refugees – and a cumulative total of forced migrants that places Iraq among a small group of states in which displacement past and present is a significant element in the life of the entire society.1 This Special Issue examines the human dimensions of Iraq’s displacements. It considers who has been affected; where, when and how they have travelled to new locations; and how they address problems of life under unfamiliar circumstances. It adopts a migrant-centred perspective, using insights from the multi-disciplinary fields of Migration Studies and Refugee Studies. It also addresses some key historical matters: why has Iraq been so profoundly affected by forced migration? Is it an ‘exceptional’ case? What can be learned from placing Iraq in a comparative context? Most of the articles that follow address the circumstances of refugees: people outside their country of origin who have sought (or are seeking) safety and security.2 This reflects a recent increase in focused research on Iraqis living in the main ‘destination’ states for forced migrants: Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Egypt. Here much valuable work has been undertaken by research institutes and local academics, and especially by young researchers, whose work is well represented in this issue.3 They have faced major problems, however. Almost without exception, Iraqi refugees are urban refugees. For decades, organizations such as the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner

1. Others include Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Burma, Colombia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Palestine, Somalia, Sri Lanka, Sudan and Zimbabwe (see IDMC 2011). 2. In order to make a claim for refugee status or other forms of protection, persons must be outside the state of which they are a citizen. See the United Nations Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, Geneva, 1951. Here the term refugee is used to describe all those outside Iraq who have claimed protection or who wish to do so. 3. There has been only one substantial publication dealing with mass displacement in Iraq (see Sassoon 2009).

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4. See debates about this policy addressed in Marfleet (2007a).

for Refugees (UNHCR) have viewed refugees worldwide as people located in camps in rural settings. Here they could be enumerated, assisted and managed. These refugees were viewed as largely passive – as people whose circumstances required forms of administration in which they were treated as objects of humanitarian policy.4 During the 1980s, mass displacement worldwide produced new patterns of migration, leading increasing numbers of refugees to cities in which, according to UNHCR, they were anomalous figures. They were said to be ‘self-settled’ or ‘spontaneous’ refugees – people who had chosen to place themselves outside the reach of international organizations charged with their care. They were also said to be difficult to locate and to count, and to have independent and sometimes subversive agendas (UNHCR 1997). They were largely ignored by governments and international agencies, with the result that for many years they faced chronic problems of marginalization. Lacking legal rights, and access to work and education, many urban refugees were thrust to the margin of the wider society. Today it is clear that most refugees worldwide are indeed urban refugees – a fact belatedly recognized by UNHCR (2009b). Most remain at the margin of ‘host’ societies under circumstances that pose many difficulties for researchers. The governments of Syria, Jordan and Lebanon have declined to sign the United Nations Convention relating to the Status of Refugees (the Geneva Convention) and its Protocol, which provide for some migrants to make claims for asylum. Each has accepted Iraqis solely as ‘guests’ or ‘visitors’, whose presence may be tolerated but who have no stable legal status. In Egypt, the other leading destination state, the government is a signatory to the Convention but has passed all refugee matters to the UNHCR, which rules on applications for refugee status. Almost without exception, the Iraqis live in large cities – the majority in Damascus, Amman, Beirut and Cairo – where some are ‘invisible’ to local authorities. They may move unnoticed (including across international borders) and may be sustained by diasporic networks that elude the view of states and international bodies. One outcome is that obtaining basic data about these populations is difficult: statistics are often contested and social research that aims to gain a wider picture of refugee lives may be challenging, especially when migrants live under authoritarian regimes in which they are expected to maintain a low profile. Given the scale of the Iraqi exodus after 2003, little was known until recently about the circumstances, experiences and aspirations of those involved. There has now been a rapid advance in research, especially through study of community networks and collection and analysis of refugee testimony. Research on ‘internal’ displacement – forced migration within Iraq – is much less advanced. Indeed, it has hardly begun. This is a reflection of continuing insecurity in Iraq and the dangers involved in investigating highly charged issues that bear upon matters of inequality, social justice, communal relations and state power. The fate of IDPs in Iraq is an issue of major importance, as recognized by UN-Habitat, the United Nations agency that addresses urban settlement. In a recent report it noted a huge increase in urban poverty in Iraq associated with immiseration of displaced people (UN-Habitat 2010). Such is the scale and pace of impoverishment in Iraq’s cities that the country has fallen far behind countries notorious for urban deprivation, such as India and Bangladesh, where there have been sustained efforts at improving city life. Iraq’s cities are in decline, with millions of people – especially internal migrants – pushed to the margin of society. Internal displacement has given rise to all manner of humanitarian problems: it is also raising profound questions about Iraq’s development agenda.

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MIGRATION NETWORKS Researchers and agencies dealing with forced migration have often expended much effort addressing matters of definition. Who is a refugee? Who is an IDP? What are their distinctive characteristics? Who falls within the provisions of international law, especially the Geneva Convention? These questions are associated with the close interest expressed by states in people who cross (or wish to cross) international frontiers and with states’ concerns – sometimes obsessions – with exclusion. Since the early 1990s, both states and international agencies have worked to contain some large groups of displaced people within their country of origin, largely in order that they cannot make claims for asylum. This policy was indeed pioneered in Iraq, where a ‘safe haven’ was established in 1991 in territory North of the 36th parallel, with the primary aim of inhibiting movements to neighbouring Turkey (see Danı¸s in this issue). This approach has often been accompanied by assumptions that migrants who cannot leave their state should be characterized differently from those who do.5 There is enough information on internal displacement in Iraq to demonstrate that forced migration does not establish such fundamental differences: all those affected are involuntary migrants, among whom some cross international borders (becoming ‘refugees’) and some choose not to, or are not able to do so. It is also clear that some displaced Iraqis cross territorial borders and return to Iraq, while some engage in multiple journeys within and outside Iraq, moving through complex migration networks established long before the recent migration crisis. In a series of innovative studies, Chatelard (2002a, 2002b, 2002c, 2005a, 2009,) has demonstrated that for generations Iraqis have moved to and from cities of the Arab East for reasons of commerce, work, education, study and pilgrimage, establishing distinct communities in cities such as Amman, Damascus and Aleppo, and developing complex networks that link them to Iraq and to Iraqis elsewhere in the Middle East and further afield. Like other people from this region, including Syrians and Palestinians, Iraqis have been remarkably mobile – and their mobility is enhanced by globalized means of communication and travel. These historic patterns of movement have helped to shape the character of recent involuntary migrations: they have indeed facilitated the journeys of people seeking security. At the same time, the unprecedented scale of recent movements is an expression of intense pressure placed on people within Iraq who have been compelled to engage in unwanted journeys. Some have left their homes with the aim of moving directly to another state; others have moved within their neighbourhoods, cities or governorates, or to another part of Iraq. Among the latter many have subsequently crossed Iraq’s borders, ‘becoming’ refugees. Their experiences of displacement, and their individual and collective identities as social actors, have not changed however. To this extent, distinctions between refugees and IDPs are not meaningful and serve only to obscure the general features of Iraq’s migration crisis.

5. For an interesting – and frank – discussion of the problems that arise, see UNHCR (1995), see also Marfleet (2006).

WHO, WHERE, WHEN? Statistics on forced migration are invariably contentious. A wide range of political actors have interests – often competing interests – in determining headline numbers. They may wish to minimize the scale of displacement in order to emphasize social/political stability and positive change; equally, they

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6. The survey was funded by the Norwegian government and by the United Nations population fund, UNFPA. 7. This calculation was derided by Iraqis living in Cairo, who insisted that many Iraqis remained ‘invisible’ to the authorities and to academic researchers. (Comments from Iraqi refugees at the launch of the report in Cairo, November 2009, and personal discussions with refugee welfare workers in Cairo, also November 2009.) 8. Palestinian refugees are not included in these global statistics.

may wish to maximize numbers in order to demonstrate that problems are intense and that specific interventions are required. Some states, officials, political parties or non-governmental organizations (NGOs) may also wish to acquire resources from governments and agencies in the form of aid for displaced people and mobilize statistics that serve these ends. In the case of Iraqi refugees in Jordan the Norwegian research institute Fafo observes that ‘Many conjectures have been put forward […] figures as high as one million or about 18 per cent of the total population [of Jordan] have been aired’ (2007: 1). In fact, it suggested that in 2007 Jordan accommodated about half of this number, some 450,000–500,000 Iraqis.6 In Egypt, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs proposed in 2008 that there were between 70,000 and 150,000 Iraqi refugees (Al- Ahram Weekly 2008). Six months later a survey conducted by the American University in Cairo and the government’s Information and Decision Support Center (IDSC) found that there were only 16,853 Iraqis in Egypt Fargues et al 2008: 25).7 UNHCR has recognized that its own early estimates were inflated. In 2009 the agency noted: In the early days of the [Iraqi refugee] operation, when UNHCR was eager to publicize the crisis, UNHCR (as well as the media and many other members of the refugee and human rights advocacy communities) readily endorsed the estimates provided by the government [sic] of Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. But as the UNHCR outreach campaign accelerated, it became clear the number of refugees registered by the organisation was significantly lower … and yet … UNHCR has continued to cite the much higher official estimates. (2009c: 48) Revised UNHCR figures suggest that at the end of 2009 there were 1.8 million Iraqi refugees, making Iraq the second largest source country for refugees worldwide: only Afghanistan ‘produced’ more refugees (2009d: 23).8 The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) calculates that in 2010 there were 2.8 million people displaced within Iraq. This was made up of 1.2 million people displaced between 1968 and 2003; 200,000 displaced between 2003 and 2005; and some 1.5 million displaced since intensification of the conflict that followed the Samarra bombing of February 2006 (IDMC 2010). The aggregate displaced population within and from Iraq in 2009–2010 was some 4.6 million people; when returnees are included (350,000 in late 2009 – IDMC 2010) the total of those recorded as having experienced displacement reaches some five million – or one in six of the Iraqi population. If early estimates displaced were inflated, it is almost certain that the current figures underestimate the totals of those displaced, especially of IDPs. People who wished to be recognized as IDPs after 2006 were required by the Iraqi government to register, a process that was voluntary and required documentation that many people lacked, with the result that some have never appeared in official statistics. In addition, many Iraqis have engaged in unregistered temporary movements, and displacements of individuals and of fractions of families have also gone unrecorded. It is likely that the total of people who have experienced displacement considerably exceeds five million. It is also clear that, although Iraq’s provinces and regions have been affected unevenly, each and every area of the country has been involved. Displacement has been a national phenomenon with a systemic nature (see Marfleet in this issue). This is unusual by world standards. When compared with other states such as Sudan, Colombia,

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Sri Lanka and Burma, in which there have recently been very large population movements – and where displacement is associated with particular regions – Iraq stands out as a society in which the impacts have been both wider and deeper. This raises important questions about Iraqi history and about the recent processes of political change.

LIVES IN DISPLACEMENT Although research on Iraq’s displacements is still limited, there have been several reports that address the numbers, matters of legal status and protection, general welfare, prospects for return and issues of local and regional security (including Fafo 2007; Amnesty International 2008; ICG 2008; Leenders 2008; MEI 2008; UNHCR 2009a; Brookings Institution 2010).9 These reflect the interest of governments, agencies and NGOs in institutional and policy matters. Migrants have a low profile – an expression of general problems in migration research, which also affect scholarly work. Black (2001: 67) identifies difficulties with what he calls ‘refugee policy studies’ – academic research influenced by ‘particular political or bureaucratic interests’. There are several dangers for researchers. One is that their work focuses on narrow outcomes, especially on the collection of empirical data that can be processed by states and other bodies in the context of preconceived categories and strategic assumptions about migration policy. There is often scant attention to conceptual matters, including methodological questions, and the quality of data, especially that obtained from migrants viewed solely as the object of study. Those involved run the risk of disregarding theoretical concerns and of developing agendas that do not benefit from general conceptual advances in the social sciences. Black suggests that the enterprise may fail even in its own terms: it produces work that is undertheorized, time-limited and geographically specific: ‘fundamentally unsuited even to the task of influencing the policy world’ (2001: 67). These problems become more important during crises like that of recent years in Iraq, where the policy ‘script’ is influenced strongly by political actors, which include powerful states and their armed forces. A particular problem is the absence from most such work of migrants as social actors – people who play a key role in shaping both patterns of migration and migration networks. The Special Issue attempts to address this problem. It recognizes the role of state bodies, agencies and NGOs in migration crises – they are indeed key features of the environment in which displacement takes place. At the same time, a theme of the articles that follow is an interest in migrants as subjects – people under duress but who remain social agents, with all that this implies. Their experiences are of intrinsic value for understanding migration as a human experience – and in analyses of complex socio-political crises like those that have so often affected Iraq. This approach is in part an outcome of discussion among researchers who, since 2008, have collaborated on a series of inter-related projects on displacements in and from Iraq. Didem Danı¸s, Kemal Dorai, Sara Sadek and Philip Marfleet were part of a team that examined the circumstances and experiences of Iraqi refugees in four Middle Eastern cities.10 Together with others they undertook intensive research in 2008–2009 in Amman, Damascus, Istanbul and Cairo as part of a project led by Geraldine Chatelard (Institut Français du Proche Orient [IFPO]) and Philip Marfleet (University of East London [UEL]) and followed by an extended workshop held in Damascus in May 2009. This research group also participated in discussions at a January 2010 conference

9. The list of academic studies is much more limited (see Marfleet 2007b; Sassoon 2009). 10. Research conducted in 2008–2009 in Amman, Damascus, Istanbul and Cairo as part of a project led by Geraldine Chatelard (IFPO) and Philip Marfleet (University of East London),and supported by the University of Oxford.

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11. Future of Iraq: Social, Economic and Political Issues in Question, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies/Japan Centre for Middle East Studies, Beirut.

in Beirut on contemporary Iraq organized by Tokyo University of Foreign Studies/Japan Centre for Middle East Studies and attended by numerous Iraqi colleagues.11 Among the key issues under investigation were processes of decision making among the migrants. Why did people leave Iraq? What prompted departure? Were those involved able to make choices about timing, routes and destinations? Who was involved in decision making and what informed their discussions? What did it mean make to choices under extreme constraint? In rich data gathered from refugee families across the region it became clear that most displaced people had indeed engaged in decision making about the security of their families and sometimes of the wider community. They participated as social actors in complex strategizing that aimed both to avoid danger and to achieve safety and security. In the case of these refugees, displacement had not been a one-dimensional journey to a specific destination. Often it had initially involved multiple adjustments to daily life, to expectations and aspirations and to the decisions of others, so that cumulative pressures lay behind journeys that eventually produced displacement ‘proper’ (in the sense of movement to another distinct place of residence). It was also clear that movements to neighbouring states had not concluded the displacement experience. Many testimonies showed that refugees continued to move within migration networks, or intended to do so, and that the act of leaving Iraq had stimulated increased mobility. Displacement was, above all, a process in which the majority of those involved were active participants, notwithstanding their predicaments. This project also demonstrated that very large numbers of people displaced after 2003 have now lived outside Iraq for several years and do not anticipate return under current circumstances. Some fear that they face the same fate as Palestinians: long-term displacement affecting the generations to come. Many have attempted to move on to third countries, including those offering prospects of resettlement. Numbers accepted on these ‘quota’ programmes are limited, however, and refugees face the challenge of an uncertain future in states where they remain in limbo – or must move on by other, more risky means, including through irregular migration networks.

CONTENTS This issue contains articles that cover both a wide range of topics and a wide geographical spread, addressing refugee life in Syria, Egypt and Turkey, and displacements within Iraq. •

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Kemal Dorai examines the circumstances of Iraqi refugees in Syria. He addresses migrants’ predicaments and their responses, in particular, their creative use of kin and community networks in facilitating onward migration. Sara Sadek assesses the challenges facing Iraqis in Cairo, where they have joined a large population of forced migrants from the conflict zones of Africa. Relatively privileged in relation to other refugees, they nonetheless face increasing pressure and an uncertain future. Didem Danı¸s examines an issue rarely addressed in the literature on Iraqi migrants – their reception in Turkey, a state long averse to granting asylum rights. She considers a complex history of movements to Iraq and how recent arrivals are mobilizing communal networks for support and onward movement.

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Ali Ali considers both pressures to leave Iraq and circumstances in exile, linking these by examining the testimonies of refugees in Damascus who reflect upon those who threatened them, why they were targeted and how they have survived repression. Erlend Paasche also examines refugee lives in Damascus, considering migrants’ views of conflict in Iraq and the extent to which experiences of displacement affect assessments of communal relations and Iraqi identity. Tahir Zaman addresses the problems of Palestinian refugees from Iraq – a community that has experienced repeated displacements. Drawing on testimony from Palestinians now in Syria, he examines how community networks manage new problems of exile. Philip Marfleet examines Iraq’s internal displacements, asking why they have a systemic national character and why they have produced new communities of vulnerable urban poor.

‘SYSTEMIC’ CRISIS These analyses shed light on diverse aspects of Iraq’s recent displacements. They are only part, however, of what should be sustained efforts to examine the Iraqi crisis, its implications for contemporary Iraqi society and for understanding displacements worldwide. A theme of refugee narratives from Iraq is the cumulative impact of insecurity on people deeply attached to their neighbourhoods and communities. Some migrants left abruptly in response to direct threats; many, however, testify to the relentless pressures that eventually compelled them to leave. Unlike displacements associated with economic or environmental crisis, with episodes of state repression or civil conflict, the post-2003 migrations in Iraq developed slowly. Few Iraqis left their homes during the two years that followed the invasion: most were displaced by the invasion forces, notably during successive battles at Falluja in 2004 (Marfleet 2007b). The pace of migration increased in 2005 and accelerated to unprecedented levels after the Samarra incident of February 2006. At this point it became a national phenomenon – a systemic displacement affecting every region of Iraq. A comment is required on why Iraq has been affected in this way. Stansfield (2007: 204) observes that in the years after invasion in 2003, ‘new rules’ came into place for Iraqi political life: ‘These new rules are those of communalization, identity based politics, chauvinism, religious exclusivism and ethnically based nationalism’. Such arrangements differed sharply from earlier approaches – ‘old rules’ – which had been based on collective agendas for development led by ‘a vibrant and largely secular, non-communal middle class’ (Stansfield 2007: 202). It is uncertain whether the new ‘rules’ will become permanent but the process of putting them in place has profoundly affected Iraqi society. It is indeed the process of change that is central to understanding the scale of mass displacement in Iraq today. Although the literature on the history of displacement is sparse, it is increasingly clear that during periods of construction and reconstruction of nation states forced migrations occur with regularity – that they are part of the process of state making. Since the early modern era, the nation state has been the principal means by which authority has been exercised over both territory and population. As the modern state emerged in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, control over new territorial borders became

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12. The modern state as a nation state is to be distinguished from other state formations such as city states, empires and local power structures such as principalities, kingdoms and the fiefdoms of the European feudal era. 13. In the case of Britain, this initially involved members of religious minorities, notably Protestant dissenters. Later it included political radicals and ‘criminals’ (Marfleet 2007b).

an issue of critical importance.12 Frontiers were established on land and at sea, and were defended and contested vis-à-vis external forces; at the same time, ‘internal’ borders were maintained using both legal-bureaucratic and sociocultural means of inclusion/exclusion. The latter were associated with discourses of belonging and markers of affiliation including language, religion, ‘race’ and ethnicity. These were integral to the construction of the state itself – to elaboration of ideas about belonging including notions of the national collective, nationalism and national identity. Those who held power in the new states focused intently on external ‘Others’ in the form of rival states; at the same time, and as part of the same process, they identified internal enemies said to threaten or even subvert the national collective. Among the outcomes was mass displacement on an unprecedented scale. In the earliest centralized states, those that emerged in Spain and Portugal, millions of Jews and Muslims were expelled as part of campaigns to assert the legitimacy of a unified catholic monarchy. For the first time, ethnoreligious affiliation was integral to the assertion of national identity. Those in power were, in effect, undertaking projects of social engineering through which they attempted to make the cultural character of the nation consistent with their own agendas for state control. Population movements that involved ejection from the territory of the state (and hence an assertion of control vis-àvis borders both internal and external) occurred with increasing frequency. They were an aspect of ‘statecraft’ – means by which emerging political authorities began ‘to acquire the characteristics of a modern centralizing state’ (Soguk 1999: 71). In the case of France, consolidation of the state involved ejection of another large religious minority – Calvinists, also known as Huguenots. They were the first migrants to be seen widely as réfugiés – people in search of sanctuary. Soguk (1999: 52) comments that expulsion from France and their reception elsewhere ‘stabilize[d] various territorialized relations, institutions, and identities that afford the state its reason for being’. Such movements were often associated with colonial ventures, so that people expelled from Europe or who fled as refugees were made to serve projects of conquest.13 Vast numbers of people were transported, deported and exiled as the process of making colonies became intimately associated with mass displacements from Europe and within the ‘colonial world’. Everywhere people were moved into alignment with new frontiers, internal and external. By the nineteenth century, European powers had become powerful imperial actors, creating new states at will and often with the use of extreme violence. French settlement of North Africa, for example, established colons that involved extensive land seizures. The military commander in Algeria, Marshal Soult, observed: ‘we cannot wait: it is absolutely imperative that we make colons and construct villages, summon all energies to sanction, consolidate and simplify the occupation we achieve by arms’ (Clegg 1971: 24). Hundreds of thousands of people were moved forcibly within Algeria and similar numbers were imported to join the colons. By 1912, there were 781,000 Europeans in Algeria (Behr 1961: 27). At the same time, movements for independence from the old empires were producing nationalist movements with agendas that mirrored those in Europe. In the Balkans, Ottoman power declined quickly after 1850 and movements for national independence proliferated. During a long series of conflicts with Ottoman armies there were huge population displacements. Chatty (2010: 73) describes ‘massive dispossession and forced migration of peoples […] the characteristic mark of nationalism’. Here the formation of new states was to be accomplished

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primarily by means of mass expulsion: in an era of high nationalism the state was viewed as a direct expression of national character. In this modification of earlier patterns of change internal borders were to be established as part of the founding agenda of the state or as the basis for its reconstruction. Lord Curzon was later to refer to the ‘unmixing of peoples’ that accompanied destabilization and break-up of empire (Marrus 1985: 41). As the Ottoman Empire began to fragment, the diverse sociocultural communities it had incubated for centuries were dispersed. In place of the empire were states of an increasingly mono-ethnic character into which linguistic and confessional groups were reallocated on the basis that their presence was consistent with the new agenda for belonging. The most striking example was that of Turkey. For centuries the Ottoman Empire had sustained a mosaic of ethno-religious communities in Anatolia; over a few years during and after the First World War nationalism transformed the region. In the East, there were displacements of Kurds and Assyrians and a murderous mass assault on the Armenians; in the West, population ‘exchanges’ with Greece re-allocated some two million people across new borders. An independent Turkish state, established in 1922, focused intently on the construction of a new national culture, making Turkish language compulsory and asserting novel ‘Turkish’ values, with the aim that citizens would ‘become Turkish, in language, culture and thought’ (Chatty 2010: 101). Here, statecraft established new internal borders identifying Turks vis-à-vis non-national ‘Others’ and prompting further mass migrations as part of the process by which the state itself came into being, turkism, like all ethnonationalisms, both included and vigorously excluded.

IRAQ During the First World War European powers reached (mostly clandestine) agreements to dissect Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire, producing a number of new states including Iraq. This was part of the process of state making that had already swept the Balkans and the eastern Mediterranean, simultaneously dispersing and compressing peoples and cultures of a complex region. At the same time it was an expression of European agendas. These included expectations of further expansion and settlement: according to one British politician, a new state of Iraq was to be ‘populated and cultivated by flourishing Indian colonies transported from the banks of the Indus’ – a vision that reflected colonial histories in which mass population movements were a matter of routine (Townshend 2010: 369). Such projects were becoming less feasible, however, and the main issue for British strategists in Iraq was to patrol new territorial borders and to establish a stable central authority. As British troops entered Mesopotamia, large numbers of Kurds, Armenians and Assyrians were being displaced within and from Anatolia, with significant movements of the former and the latter into regions the British wished to bring under their control. Meanwhile, British forces entered Kurdish territory as if it was a frontier region of their Indian Raj. Resistance here and in central and southern Iraq led to a large increase in the British garrison and – a unique development – mobilization of several squadrons of aircraft used to bombard areas in which the military aimed to clear ‘rebel’ populations. Conflict continued throughout the 1920s, including major confrontations with both Kurdish militias and Turkish government forces, producing renewed displacements, notably of Assyrian communities. This is the context in which Britain imposed a monarchy and an administration based on indirect rule, using patronage

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and co-optation to draw selected dignitaries and client networks around the colonial authorities. Baghdad became ‘the centre of gravity’ of the new state (Tripp 2000: 50); elsewhere those excluded from the networks of privilege were frequently involved in resistance, prompting British military intervention and further displacements such as that associated with the Kurdish uprising of the late 1920s. During this phase of ‘state making’, Iraq was highly unstable. There were numerous population movements as people continued to move across new borders, the central government struggled to impose authority, unfavoured groups resisted and the Kurds attempted to secure independence. The migrations eventually subsided. By the 1940s, economic change and urbanization were changing the political environment. Movements animated from below challenged patronage and the colonial order. Radical nationalism, pan-Arabism and communism had their influence on activist networks that engaged people of all regions and ethno-religious affiliations. A political culture was emerging that had both a national and a popular character uncongenial to those who held power (Batatu 1978). When the monarchy fell in 1958, Iraq advanced towards further radical change. The episode was short-lived, however, and when the Ba’th Party gained power in 1968 it reasserted the agendas of the colonial state. Concentrating power at the centre, it used the old networks of patronage to encourage specific communal loyalties. The colonial agenda had favoured Sunni Arab privilege; the Ba’thist state formalized sectarian advantage. It identified a host of internal enemies and targeted these repeatedly over the next twenty years, especially during the war with Iran. Millions of Kurds and later Shi’as from the South and East were moved forcibly in punitive campaigns, as mass displacement became an instrument of rule. Even these developments did not produce systemic displacement, however. Many areas of Iraq were untouched by migration until, after the invasion of 2003, the occupation authorities set out to reshape the state. ‘De-Ba’thification’ aimed to atomize the core of the old order and the national culture associated with it. The former ruling party was banned, and the armed forces and a series of ministries were disbanded. Those in command of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) watched passively as the physical and human resources of the state were looted (Baker et al. 2009). They declared for a new order but also set out to build on the structures of the old, conceding partial autonomy to the Kurds while maintaining centralized control over the rest of Iraq. The ‘new rules’ made contending parties compete for the old national resources; now, however, they did so by means of communalization, identity politics, chauvinism and religious exclusivism. The CPA made political appointments on the basis of sectarian affiliation and openly channelled funds and influence through ethno-religious channels. In a memorable phrase, Herring and Rangwala (2006: 152) comment that political leaders were compelled to become ‘sectarian entrepreneurs’, mobilizing support on the basis of reinvigorated communal consciousness. At a time of deep economic crisis, millions of people struggling to survive were drawn into the orbit of partisan organizations with which they earlier had no affiliation but that now provided access to vital resources and appeared to offer physical security (see Ali in this issue). The new parties were rewarded for creating sectarian militias, staking out political territories, patrolling communal border lines and engaging in projects of social engineering that had been introduced by the colonial powers, used by the Ba’th Party as instruments of control, and now entrenched by the CPA as principles of political life. The International

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Crisis Group (2006: i) commented on ‘a post-war free-for-all’ during which ‘sectarianism took wings’. Ethnic cleansing was undertaken on an unprecedented scale. Involuntary migration across the country and its borders echoed the tragedies of the late nineteenth century, when millions of people were displaced during state making conflicts in the Balkans. They paralleled events during and after the First World War when communities were expelled en masse in Anatolia as an independent Turkish state came into being. On this occasion, however, there was no entirely novel state formation. Rather, those in authority attempted to reshape the political system in ways that affected all its component parts, generalizing ethno-religious antipathies so that all communities were ‘Other’, alien and threatening. The scale of displacement was proportional to the character of the project. At the moment of invasion in 2003, comments Hiro (2004), US strategists had declared a ‘Year Zero’, treating Iraq as a laboratory in which they could experiment with plans for radical economic reform and political restructuring. The history of the modern state suggests that mass exclusion – integral to processes of ‘state making’ – was likely to follow. In a state such as Iraq, constructed on the basis of a specific colonial architecture, systemic mass movement was a certainty.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT Many thanks are due to a host of colleagues with whom I have been able to collaborate in research on displacements in and from Iraq, especially Geraldine Chatelard, Dawn Chatty, Didem Danı¸s, Kemal Dorai, Sara Sadek, Intissar al-Farttoosi Ekraam al-Gazzali, Senay Ozden, Erik Mohns, Thomas Sommer-Houdeville, Ali Ali and Tahir Zaman. Thanks are also due to colleagues of the Centre for Forced Migration and Refugee Studies at The American University in Cairo; Institut Français du Proche Orient in both Damascus and Amman; the Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford; and to officers and staff of Saint Andrew’s Refugee Services, in Cairo. Special thanks are due to Tareq Ismael, Jacqui Ismael, Kamil Mahdi, Keiko Sakai, William Haddad, Ibrahim Aoudé, Anne Alexander and colleagues associated with this Journal and with the International Association for Contemporary Iraqi Studies.

REFERENCES Al-Ahram Weekly (2008), ‘Trapped between Egypt and Iraq’, 10–16 April 2008. Al-Khalidi, A., Hoffman, S. and Tanner, V. (2007), Iraqi Refugees in the Syrian Arab Republic: A Field-Based Snapshot, Washington, DC: Brookings-Bern. Ali, A. (2011), ‘Displacement and statecraft in Iraq: Recent trends, older roots’, International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies, 5: 2, pp. – . Amnesty International (2008), Iraq, Rhetoric and Reality: The Iraqi Refugee Crisis, London: Amnesty International. Baker, R., Ismael, S. and Ismael, T. (2009), Cultural Cleansing in Iraq: Why Museums Were Looted, Libraries Burned and Academics Murdered, London: Pluto. Batatu, H (1978), The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq: A Study of Iraq’s Old Landed and Commercial Classes and of its Communists, Ba‘thists and Free Officers, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Behr, E. (1961), The Algerian Problem, London: Penguin. Black, R. (2001), ‘Fifty years of refugee studies: From theory to policy’, International Migration Review, 35: 1, pp. 57–78.

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Blackburn, R. (1997), The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern 1492–1800, London: Verso. Brookings Institution (2010), Resolving Iraqi Displacement: Humanitarian and Development Perspectives, Washington: Brookings. Chatelard, G. (2002a), ‘Jordan as a transit country: Semi-protectionist immigration policies and their effects on Iraqi forced migrants’, New Issues in Refugee Research, No. 61, UNHCR, Geneva. —— (2002b), ‘Iraqi forced migrants in Jordan: Conditions, religious networks and the smuggling process’, Working Paper No. 49, Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, Florence: EUI. —— (2002c), ‘Incentives to transit: policy responses to influxes of Iraqi forced migrants in Jordan’, Working Paper No 50, Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, EUI: Florence. —— (2005a), ‘Un système en reconfiguration. L’émigration des Irakiens de la guerre du Golfe à la guerre d’Irak (1990–2003)’, [‘A system in reconfiguration : The emigration of Iraqis from the Gulf War to the Iraq War’] in H. Jaber and F. Métral (eds), Monde en mouvements. Migrants et migrations au Moyen-Orient au tournant du XXième siècle, [World in Movement. Migrants and migrations of the Middle East at the turn of the 20th century] Beirut: IFPO, pp. 113–155. —— (2009a), ‘Migration from Iraq between the gulf and the Iraq wars (1990– 2003): Historical and sociospacial dimensions’, Working Paper No. 09–68, Oxford: Centre on Migration, Policy and Society. Chatelard, G., Washington, K. and El-Abed, O. (2009), ‘Protection, mobility and livelihood challenges of displaced Iraqis in urban settings in Jordan’, Geneva: International Catholic Migration Commission. Chatty, D. (2010), Displacement and Dispossession in the Modern Middle East, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clegg, I. (1971), Workers Self Management in Algeria, London: Allen Lane. Cottret, B. (1991), The Huguenots in England, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dani¸s, D. (2011), ‘Changing fortunes: Iraqi refugees in Turkey’, International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies, 5: 2, pp. – . Fafo (2007), ‘Iraqis in Jordan 2007: Their number and characteristics’, http:// www.fafo.no/ais/middeast/jordan/IJ.pdf. Accessed 1 March 2011. Fargues, P., El-Masry, S., Sadek, S. and Shaban, A. (2008), Iraqis in Egypt: A Statistical Survey in 2008, Cairo: Centre for Migration and Refugee Studies, The American University in Cairo. Harper, A. (2008), ‘Iraq’s refugees: Ignored and unwanted’, International Review of the Red Cross, 90: 869, March, pp. 169–190. Herring, E. and Rangwala, G. (2006), Iraq in Fragments: The Occupation and Its Legacy, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Hiro, D. (2004), Secrets and Lies: Operation ‘Iraqi Freedom’ and After, New York: Nation. Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) (2010), Little New Displacement but Around 2.8 Million Iraqis Remain Internally Displaced. Iraq: A Profile of the Internal Displacement Situation, Oslo: IDMC. —— (2011), ‘Global statistics’, http://www.internal-displacement. org/8025708F004CE90B/(httpPages)/22FB1D4E2B196DAA802570BB005E7 87C?OpenDocument&count=1000. Accessed 1 March 2011. International Rescue Committee (IRC) (2009), In Dire Straits: Iraqi Refugees in the United States, New York: IRC.

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International Crisis Group (ICG) Group (2006), The Next Iraqi War? Sectarianism and Civil Conflict, ICG: Brussels. —— (2008), ‘Failed responsibility: Iraqi refugees in Syria, Jordan and Lebanon’, Middle East Report No. 77, ICG: Brussels. —— (2009a), ‘Iraq and the Kurds: Trouble along the trigger line’, Middle East Report No. 88, ICG, Brussels, http://www.crisisgroup.org/ en/regions/middle-east-north-africa/iraq-syria-lebanon/iraq/088iraq-and-the-kurds-trouble-along-the-trigger-line.aspx. Accessed 15 June 2011. —— (2009b), ‘Iraq’s new battlefront: The struggle over Ninewa’, Middle East Report No. 90, ICG, Brussels, http://www.crisisgroup.org/en/ regions/middle-east-north-africa/iraq-syria-lebanon/iraq/090-iraqs-newbattlefront-the-struggle-over-ninewa.aspx. Accessed 15 June 2011. —— (2011), ‘Iraq and the Kurds: Confronting withdrawal fears’, Middle East Report No. 102, Brussels: ICG. http://www.crisisgroup.org/~/media/ Files/Middle%20East%20North%20Africa/Iraq%20Syria%20Lebanon/ Iraq/103%20Iraq%20and%20the%20Kurds%20%20Confronting%20 Withdrawal%20Fears.ashx. Accessed 15 June 2011. Ismael, T. and Fuller, M. (2008), ‘The disintegration of Iraq: The manufacturing and politicization of sectarianism’, International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies, 2: 3, pp. 443–474. Leenders, R. E. C. (2008), ‘L’adieu aux armes: la politique des réfugiés irakiens et son impact sécuritaire sur la région’ [‘A farewell to arms: The politics of the Iraqi refugee crisis and its security impact on the region’], MaghrebMachrek, 198, pp. 93–122. Marfleet, P. (2006), Refugees in a Global Era, Basingstoke: Palgrave. —— (2007a), ‘“Hidden”/“forgotten”: Predicaments of the urban refugee’, Refuge, 23: 2, pp. 36–45. —— (2007b), ‘Iraq’s refugees: “Exit” from the state’, International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies, 3: 1, pp. 397–419. Marfleet, P. (2011), ‘Displacement and denial: IDPs in today’s Iraq’, International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies, 5: 2, pp. – . Marrus, M. R. (1985), The Unwanted: European Refugees in the Twentieth Century, Oxford: Oxford University Press. McDowell, C. (1996), A Tamil Asylum Diaspora: Sri Lankan Migration, Settlement and Politics in Switzerland, Providence, RI: Berghahn. Middle East Institute (MEI) (2008), Iraq’s Refugee and IDP Crisis: Human Toll and Implications, Viewpoints Special Edition, Middle East Institute, Washington, DC. http://www.mideasti.org/files/iraqs-refugee-and-IDPcrisis.pdf. Accessed 15 June 2011. Sassoon, J. (2009), The Iraqi Refugees: A New Crisis in the Middle East, London: IB Tauris. Soguk, N. (1999), States and Strangers: Refugees and Displacements of Statecraft, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Stansfield, G. (2007), Iraq: People, History, Politics, Cambridge: Polity Press. Tavernise, S. (2005), ‘Sectarian hatred pulls apart Iraq’s mixed towns’, New York Times, November, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/20/international/middleeast/20sectarian.html?hp&ex=1132462800&en=c8e4f36647d88 4a9&ei=5094&partner=homepage. Accessed 1 March 2011. Townshend, C. (2010), When God Made Hell: The British Invasion of Mesopotamia and the Creation of Iraq, 1914–1921, London: Faber & Faber. Tripp, C. (2000), A History of Iraq, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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UN-Habitat (2010), State of the World’s Cities 2010/2011, Nairobi: UN-Habitat/ Earthscan. UNHCR (1995), The State of the World’s Refugees, Geneva: UNHCR. —— (1997), UNHCR’s Policy and Practice Regarding Urban Refugees: A Discussion Paper, Geneva: UNHCR. —— (2007), Governorate Assessment Report, Sulaymaniyah Governorate September 2007, Geneva: UNHCR. —— (2008a), ‘Statistics on displaced Iraqis around the world’, http://www.unhcr. org/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/home/opendoc.pdf?tbl=SUBSITES&id=470387fc2. Accessed 15 June 2011. —— (2008b), ‘Iraqis still at the top of the asylum seeker table, despite drop’, http://www.unhcr.org.uk/press/PR20October08.htm. Accessed 15 June 2011. —— (2009a), UNHCR Statistical Yearbook 2009, Geneva: UNHCR. —— (2009b), ‘UNHCR policy on refugee protection and solutions in urban areas’, September, http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/docid/4ab8e7f72.html. Accessed 15 June 2011. —— (2009c), ‘Surviving in the city. A review of UNHCR’s operations for Iraqi refugees in urban areas of Jordan, Lebanon and Syria’, http://www.unhcr. org/4a69ad639.html %5b28. Accessed 15 June 2011. —— (2009d), UNHCR Iraq Monthly Statistical Update on Return, Geneva: UNHCR. —— (2011), 2011 UNHCR Country Operations Profile – Iraq, Geneva: UNHCR, http://www.unhcr.org/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/page?page=49e486426. Accessed 15 June 2011.

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS Philip Marfleet is Professor of Migration and Refugee Studies at the University of East London, UK, where he is also a Director of the Centre for Research on Migration, Refugees and Belonging. He is the author of numerous publications on forced migration, including Refugees in a Global Era (Palgrave, 2006); ‘Iraq’s refugees: War and the strategy of exit’, in International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies, Volume 1, Number 3 (2007); ‘Cleansing of minds’, in R. Baker and T. Ismael (eds), Cultural Cleansing in Iraq (Pluto, 2009); and with Dawn Chatty, ‘Iraq’s refugees – Beyond ‘tolerance’”, Forced Migration Policy Briefings No. 5 (Refugee Studies Centre, 2009). He is also the editor, with Rabab El-Mahdi, of Egypt – the Moment of Change (Zed, 2009). Contact: School of Law and Social Sciences, University of East London, Docklands Campus, University Way, London E16 2RD, UK. E-mail: [email protected]

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IJCIS 5 (2) pp. 185–197 Intellect Limited 2011

International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies Volume 5 Number 2 © 2011 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/ijcis.5.2.185_1

SARA SADEK University of York, UK

Safe haven or limbo? Iraqi refugees in Egypt 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

ABSTRACT

KEYWORDS

After 2005 many Iraqi families sought refuge in Egypt, fleeing the repercussions of the US-led war on Iraq, including the spread of sectarian violence. In comparison with Iraqis in other Arab states, those in Egypt have received little attention. Using refugee narratives, this article aims to shed light on the journeys of some Iraqi families to Egypt. It also discusses the status of Iraqis in the context of the broader refugee regime operating in Egypt and the complex relations between Iraqis and Egyptians today.

Iraqi diaspora refugee testimonies sectarian militia violence United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Refugee Status Determination (RSD) local integration

Egypt is host to large numbers of refugees from 38 countries, mainly in Africa and the Middle East. Most are from Sudan, Somalia, Eritrea, Ethiopia and Iraq (UNHCR 2010). In addition, Egypt hosts a large group of Palestinian refugees who are ‘invisible’, both in terms of their formal status and in most literature on migrants in Egypt.1 Unlike other countries in the Middle East, Egypt is a signatory to the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees and the 1967 Protocol of the African Unity (OAU). Egypt has made reservations, however, to clauses relating to personal status, rationing, public relief, education, labour legislation and social security: these deprive all refugee groups of access to public goods and services. With a few emergency exceptions, the Egyptian government’s response to refugees wishing to enter its territory could be described as passive. Despite restrictive measures, refugees manage to enter: in effect, officials turn a blind eye and, once within Egyptian borders, they cease being a concern for local policy-makers. According to an agreement between the

1. There are an estimated 75,000 Palestinians in Egypt, although they do not have formal status as refugees and their identity as Palestinians is not acknowledged (see Dajani 1986; Al-Abed 2009).

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2. This figure has also been contested, notably by Iraqi refugees, who suggest that many compatriots in Egypt remain ‘invisible’ to researchers.

government and the UNHCR, the latter is responsible for performing Refugee Status Determination (RSD) for refugees who approach the agency for registration. Upon assessing their cases, UNHCR is responsible for granting them protection until a ‘durable solution’ is available: either voluntary repatriation to the home country, local integration in the country of asylum (Egypt in this case) or resettlement to a third country. Refugees have long been perceived by policy-makers, local communities and sometimes themselves as temporary residents or ‘guests’ (the latter in the case of Palestinians and Iraqis based on the notions of a common Arab identity). The government has reacted negatively towards refugee groups it believes may endanger national security. In 2005, security forces violently dismantled a three-month sit-in of between 1800 and 2500 Sudanese refugees in Cairo, leading to a high number of casualties (Azzam 2006: 5). In recent years the government has also been responsible for shooting groups of African refugees attempting to leave Egypt for Israel in search of better conditions. The official response towards some refugee groups such as Eritreans and Palestinians has often been marked by deportation – either arbitrary or associated with overstaying or absence of residence permits. In general terms, the government refrains from showing any signs of rejection or support for Iraqi refugees in Egypt. It has intervened, however, most notably in the case of attempts to build a Shi’a mosque in 6 October City where most Iraqis live. Citing security concerns, the authorities forbade the project, detaining its organizers (Minnick 2009: 84). They also inhibited the formation of an Iraqi organization in Cairo, rejecting an application made by Iraqi community leaders to the Ministry of Solidarity on ‘grounds of security’ (discussion with community leaders, March 2009). To cope with the economic conditions in Egypt, most refugee groups have adopted strategies ranging from internal and external assistance (notably from remittances) to income-generating activities in the informal sector (Al-Sharmani 2003: 18; Al-Abed 2009: 120; Fargues et al. 2008: 54; Grabska 2005: 48;). Limited assistance from UNHCR has been obtained by some refugees but has proved increasingly unreliable (Grabska 2005: 48). Some refugee groups have resorted to unorthodox means of survival, including formation of male youth networks commonly referred to as ‘gangs’ (Forcier 2010: 16). Some have resorted to prostitution or have attempted to leave Egypt for Israel – a risky journey that has resulted in many deaths (Human Rights Watch 2008: 16).

IRAQI DISPLACEMENT TO EGYPT ‘If I had stayed one more day in Iraq, I would have been killed’. The number of Iraqi refugees in Egypt is disputed. A figure of 100,000 or more is often quoted in the local media. Typical is a report in Al-Ahram Weekly in 2008: writing of ‘little Baghdad on the Banks of the Nile’, it comments: ‘Though the exact number of Iraqis seeking refuge in Egypt is unknown, the Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs estimates that the actual number lies somewhere between 70,000 and 150,000’ (Al-Ahram Weekly 2008). UNHCR estimates, however, that between January 2010 and December 2011 numbers varied between 7000 and 9200 (UNHCR 2010). This ignores Iraqis not registered with the agency or whose files have been closed on the basis that they intend to return to Iraq (some families who have other means of obtaining residence permits resort to closing their UNHCR files to be able to exit and re-enter Egypt freely). In 2008, a study conducted by the Centre for Migration and Refugee Studies estimated numbers at some around 17,000 (Fargues et Al. 2008: 25).2

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Safe haven or limbo? Iraqi refugees in Egypt

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Unlike other refugee movements to Egypt, the Iraqi displacement has involved mainly nuclear families: only in rare cases have refugees arrived unaccompanied. Most have travelled directly to Egypt or transited through neighbouring countries in which they boarded flights for Cairo: few used the option of travelling overland through Jordan and reaching Egypt by sea. Baghdad was the main place of origin (Fargues et Al. 2008: 41); in the Iraqi capital many families had lived in Karada, Sharia Filastin, Zayouna and Athameya. Most were of middle-class status, fleeing general instability and insecurity. Their testimonies reveal that family members who were part of the previous Ba’thist regime, or who had cooperated with US forces and organizations were most often targeted by militia groups in Iraq. Those who had visited the United States for work purposesor who appeared to interact with American troops by interpreting, selling products or providing other services had often been threatened directly by attempted shootings; in many cases members of their family had been kidnapped or received threatening calls or letters. During research in Cairo in 2008–2009, I obtained many refugee testimonies that described intense pressures upon families in Iraq:3 •

•

•

•

3. During research conducted in 2008 as part of a project with Oxford University, the University of East London and Institut Francais du Proche Orient, I interviewed Iraq refugees living in Cairo and Alexandria.

I was shot on my way to an area in Southern Baghdad known to be the premises for al-Qaeda, the car was completely damaged but I was safe thanks to God. Then my daughter received a phone call from someone telling her ‘We know with whom your father works (the American troops) … and we will kill him’. (Mohsen) Militias accused me of being an agent and a traitor because I worked with the Americans. I was never an agent or a traitor; I was only a mediator between the Americans and the Iraqis … However, I faced a lot of problems as a result of this (working with the American troops). In 2005 my brother was kidnapped as a hostage so that I would go to them (militias) in person. They also bombed my second brother’s house. My only aim was to help in the development of Iraq but I only brought troubles to myself and my family. I was later kidnapped myself as well as my youngest son. For this reason I decided to take my wife and children and leave to Egypt in 2005. (Hussein) I was the head of a military district in the previous regime – 316 people were working for me. After the regime fell, and the Americans came, I could not leave these people (employees) without incomes …. So I had to put the administration into action again …. There was an American whom I worked with …. I did not work with the Americans in general but they were the only source of income for us. So these young people who carry the weapons (militias) did not understand the difference between working with the Americans and mutually benefiting from them. I was benefiting from them without wanting it …. (Helmi) I am a military man. After 2003, I had no source of income so I was appointed by one of my friends living in Amman to run his company in Iraq by handling all administrative affairs. I was kidnapped several times – so were my elder and youngest sons. I was targeted for two reasons: first being a member in the army of the previous regime and second because I ran a business company and was always targeted by kidnappers for money. So I decided to leave Iraq because we were living in constant fear …. Kidnapping became a profession for many of the people after 2003, they would kidnap you or one of your family members making you lose all your money by paying ransoms and you might not even receive your son but

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receive only his dead body to take revenge from you. Why? Because you used to work in the army. Yes we were officers but normal officers like the Egyptian officers who now work for the government, having no authority in the regime’s policies. (Malik)

.

After the 2006 bombing in Samara, sectarian tensions in Iraq intensified. Refugees in Egypt testify that some families were targeted because of marriages across religion or sect, or because they lived in districts inhabited mainly by people of different ethno-religious groups. They experienced kidnapping and harassment of individuals or entire families. In February 2004, I was taking a taxi home with my youngest son. On our way, the driver was stopped by another man who asked to go to Karada …. The driver suddenly stopped and the other man pointed a gun to my head, he asked me to give him all the money I had and the jewellery … I did … at that time in Iraq robbery was very common. Then he told me he wanted to take my son too and asked me to leave the car quietly …. My son was eight years old at that time … I couldn’t have left him … I screamed and took all the beating … I threatened to scream louder since we were approaching the area where my husband works …. While the car was moving, he threw us out of the car …. My other two sons faced problems with our neighbour’s children who wanted them to convert to Islam, my sons used to tell them not to talk about religion because we all worship the same God. Then they started harassing my sons during football games and my sons would defend themselves. One day a Muslim boy got a Kalashnikov to kill my sons. I heard the neighbours screaming on the street, I went to see what was going on and was alarmed to see one of my sons about to be killed …. Then the eldest brother of the boy came and took away the Kalashnikov. After that day this Muslim boy in particular continuously harassed my sons on the street. I had to send them to my brother’s house for six months away from these boys. Yet these boys used to tell my sons’ friends that if they (my sons) thought of coming back to the area, they would be killed immediately. I suffered from daily harassment from the same Muslim family after the incident of my sons. I have never had any problems with Muslims, but this family in particular was very barbaric. But I was helpless because their relatives live on the same street and if I ever objected (I feared) I would be attacked by their relatives. (Amal) •

I am a Sunni Muslim. My husband’s stepmother was a fanatic Shi’a. Even when she had friends coming over, she would not introduce me to them. The woman would hurt me …. There were many pressures on us so we moved to a Sunni area but because my husband is a Shi’ia, he was also not tolerated in the area. Because I was married to a Shi’ia they (her family) also hated me. After 2003 marrying a Muslim of a different sect was as if you are doing something forbidden in Islam …. We found threats on the car window in the form of a letter saying ‘Leave the area, you kafarah (blasphemers)’ …. We then decided to leave ….Our Shi’ia neighbours refused to leave with us. But after two to three months we heard that these people (attackers) stabbed them and their three children and burnt the house while they were in it …. (Heba)

Some Iraqis fleeing to Egypt assumed that they were being targeted because of threats or actual harm to family members, work colleagues or individuals

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with similar religious or professional profiles. This affected their concern about their own safety, leading them to leave Iraq: •

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I was an employee at a national bank … with certain benefits … I applied for a higher position in the bank and got it. Four days later I was kidnapped after work by people dressed like soldiers of the national army …. They told me they needed some information… and I would be returned back after answering their questions …. So I went with them. They then tied my hands and put a rope on my eyes and put me in the back of the car. They were called the Militias of the Mahdi Army. Why did they take me? Because I am a Sunni Muslim and they wanted to get rid of all of us …. I also had a colleague who used to work with me in the bank but then left it to work in business. His name revealed that he is a Sunni and from a Sunni family that is hated by the Shia’a militias. He got killed. I was lucky to only be kidnapped and after paying a ransom they set me free. Immediately after, I started the arrangements to leave Iraq. (Omar) The main reason for our departure was our fear of militias which rose to attack officers of the previous regime and the ones who participated in the Iran-Iraq war in particular. They killed many officers I knew until they managed to leave me a letter of threat in one of my residences. I was threatened directly by name. They knew me well. So I had to leave immediately. (Muthana) It (violence) all started after 2006, and you must have heard about burning churches. A priest who used to live nearby was kidnapped and tortured. The Muslims in Iraq are not strictly conservative but they started getting veiled …. Even the Christians would feel that they were being watched and recognized as Christians so we started to become afraid. We heard for example that they (militias) took a Christian woman and shaved her hair because she is not veiled and another one was asked why she is not veiled and when she replied that she is Christian, they told her to wear the veil like the Muslims …. The husband of my aunt has been kidnapped and tortured and he went then to Syria to do some (medical) operations there because he got shot in his brain and he lost lots of blood. Another relative died in a car explosion. It was just his third working day with the Americans …. Another relative was working with the Americans and was shot and he is now between life and death. (Ferial) A doctor who was a colleague of mine was kidnapped and his family paid a ransom to set him free but they (militias) did not let him go even though. Also one of my neighbours was kidnapped and shot at but thanks to God they only removed a kidney and he managed to live. So there are many incidences. I also have a friend who too was a doctor and got killed, may he rest in peace. (Khaled)

Most Iraqis fleeing to Egypt say that they were threatened by militias and terrorist groups; others decided to leave Iraq due to general insecurity. They might not have necessarily been directly targeted but left to seek better security conditions. These decisions were affected by media reports and the incidence of violence in their neighbourhoods. •

We heard so many cases of someone being kidnapped or killed. In the news we would hear about how many people got killed, which gave us an insecure feeling. My son used to go to school on foot and comes back the

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same way …. You cannot anticipate what could happen to your children and if something happened what will you do? There is not even a 1 per cent guarantee that you will be fine or even alive the following day. (Tarek) We had to get veiled. They would stop us while driving and see who is veiled and who is not. I started to hate going out. They (terrorist groups) used to tell us that Holy Mary was veiled so why don’t you cover your hair too! (Sandra) I came to Egypt in 2006. We used to watch in the media how some groups used to kidnap and rape young women on their way to school or university – more than one person used to rape one woman. Then they would cut their heads and throw them in the river. We had only one daughter and we used to spend sleepless nights and weeks thinking about the possibility of this happening to our daughter. (Somaya)

Iraqis fleeing to Egypt either directly or through another transit country have often changed residences in Iraq for safety reasons, eventually leaving the country. Some parents have sent their children to other relatives to protect them; some families moved altogether and still experienced threats, even in their new residences. Families tend to move together either directly to Egypt or to a transit country. In some cases, those most at risk left first, the rest of the family remaining to sort out financial and travel arrangements. My research shows that the decision to leave Iraq was supported by extended family members, although the actual decision was taken by the heads of households and their spouses. In rare cases, relatives, employers or friends recommended targeted families to leave in order to protect their own safety or the general safety of relatives and friends.

CHOOSING EGYPT AS A DESTINATION In refugee movements, accessibility is a key factor affecting the choice of routes and destinations for asylum. Equally important is the displaced family’s or individual’s access to funds to facilitate the flight. A hierarchy of destinations is often based on networks and financial resources (Van Hear 2004: 3). Social networks play an integral role in the pre-flight, flight and post-flight experiences of refugees travelling to countries of the first or the final destination, providing funds and information for the trip and influencing processes of adaptation and settlement (Douglas et al. 1993: 3). In the case of Iraqis seeking security in Egypt, the role of such networks is not entirely clear. Some of my informants said that due to the high level of threat in Iraq they left promptly by the most direct land routes to Syria. In some cases, families planned to seek asylum in Syria; in others, it was chosen as a transit destination from which further journeys might be initiated. Some refugees in Egypt said that during their stay in Syria they did not feel safe; they also observed that Jordan was very expensive, concluding that they should move on to Egypt. Iraqis in Egypt often praise the provision of public services in Syria, especially education, although Syria is less of a preference for those with connections to the former Ba’thist regime and for individuals who fled militias of the Shi’a organizations. Those who managed to travel to Egypt had sufficient money to afford the return air ticket required by the Egyptian authorities in order to obtain an expensive tourist visa. Exchange of knowledge on countries of asylum has often occurred through Internet connections: I was informed of

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websites administered by Iraqis that provide information on the prices, public services and security concerns in countries that might be a destination for refugees. Perceptions of the speed with which international agencies assess cases for resettlement was also a factor in shaping decisions encouraging families to make their decisions about destinations. More significant, however, was the influence of earlier patterns of migration. The experiences of a family member or a friend who had visited, worked or studied in Egypt, or links with Egyptians migrants who had worked in Iraq, had a profound impact on the choice of Egypt as a destination. Egyptians who had lived and worked in Iraq often played the role of facilitator for Iraqis’ journeys to Egypt, providing advice and arranging accommodation for the refugees. •

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Actually, we love Egypt and we preferred to come to it for many reasons. First, I had an Egyptian friend who was working with me in Iraq before I left … we have known Egyptians … for years because they used to work in Iraq during the 1980s. Second, Egypt is very stable in comparison to Syria …. I preferred not to live in Syria because it is not politically stable in addition to hosting a large number of Iraqis. In comparison to Jordan, Egypt is very cheap …. My friend told me it was very cheap in Egypt … that was few years ago before the prices went up …. So I decided to come to Egypt, a country that is quite far from Iraq and politically stable and we really love Egyptians and have got used to them. (Malik) I chose Egypt because it is the largest Arab country, with a strong security system. Lots of the previous members of Iraqi Intelligence came to Egypt because it provided protection for them. (Mohsen) We love Egypt, my husband obtained his university degree from Alexandria University so he lived in Egypt for a few years when he was young. But I have to say it has really changed from what we expected! (Somaya) We inquired about prices in Egypt online and found out that it is cheaper than in Syria and Jordan in terms of education and rental prices. The other thing is that universities in Egypt are in English. (Safaa) We have never been to Egypt before. It is the farthest from Iraq – I wanted to go as far as possible. I didn’t want to go to a bordering country that would send me back to Iraq. (Narges)

In Iraq, many families planning to leave collected essential documents including birth certificates and education-related documents belonging to their children. Even under volatile security conditions, educated Iraqis were keen to ensure that their children would be able to pursue schooling in Egypt. Additionally, to fund the flight and the expenses in Egypt, families made arrangements to ensure receipt of remittances from rents and from pensions. Some had to sell properties, explaining that they feared they would be unable to access their income in Iraq from Egypt. Many informants said that their flight to Egypt was perceived as transitory: they had anticipated resettlement or return to Iraq. Many later found themselves in difficulty – running out of funds and effectively marooned in Egypt.

LIFE IN EGYPT Researchers have noted a tendency for Iraqi refugees to cluster in urban areas in Syria, Lebanon and Jordan (Dorai 2010: 1; Chatelard 2010: 60). Those who moved to Egypt between 2005 and 2007 also concentrated in residential satellite

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cities and in central urban areas in Cairo, Giza and Alexandria governorates. The three largest clusters of Iraqis are in 6 October satellite city in Giza, and Rehab City and Nasr City in Cairo. Other areas with a noticeable Iraqi presence are Haram in Giza and Asafra in Alexandria. The choice of location was often based on recommendations by other family members or friends who had moved to Egypt earlier. Some families had no relatives or friends in Egypt but heard of specific neighbourhoods in which Iraqis were renting. Proximity of private universities and schools was the main reason given by informants in 6 October City. Some said that the satellite cities were relatively spacious areas, which resembled residential neighbourhoods in Iraq, unlike inner-city areas in Egypt, which they found less attractive. The location of UNHCR’s regional office in 6 October City could have also been an attraction for some Iraqis registered with the agency. Both 6 October City and Rehab City now have many small businesses and shops under Iraqi ownership, which serve both Iraqi and Egyptian residents. There is considerable mistrust among and between Iraqi refugees – not based on sectarian or religious difference but rather on professional and political affiliation. Members of the Ba’thist regime have maintained close ties in Egypt. Similarly, individuals who helped US troops in interpreting or other work are in close contact. Other refugees, who do not have such links, seem to be most mistrustful of other Iraqis and often confine their relations with the Iraqi community. •

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There is a saying that the birds of the same feather fly together. So if you were in Europe and you met an Arab you may feel that you want to talk to them. You do not know who those people are or what they have done. So it’s the same for us. If I mingle with Iraqis I still do not know who they are because they are not my friends, but the situation here (in Egypt) made us feel we want to be together. However, I live in an apartment, sharing the building with many Iraqi neighbours. I and my wife choose very few of them to be our friends and as for the others – we only greet them. (Ali) The bad system of Saddam made us mistrustful towards each other …. You never know to whom people you meet belong. They could be part of the national security, militias or any other (organisation). So people do not trust each other. (Amr)

The main areas of residence include Iraqis of varying backgrounds; within them there are also concentrations of refugees with similar socio-economic, professional and political backgrounds. The Sheikh Zayed area near 6 October City hosts more affluent Iraqis, who often own their own properties; in the Seventh District there are middle-class Iraqis who can afford to rent substantial flats; and in the Sixth District, Iraqis live in poor conditions like those of those of the mass of African refugee communities. Rehab City, a private residential area with its own services and security system, is inhabited by Ba’thists and those who served in the Iraq forces under the Saddam regime. Nasr City, to the north-east of Cairo, is a very large middle-class area with a mixture of Iraqis; Heliopolis, North of the city centre, is an old residential area with a concentration of Egyptian Christians and to which Iraqi Christians have also been attracted. A smaller Iraq population has chosen to live in Alexandria, drawn by the relatively low rental prices. The Egyptian government has deferred to UNHCR for the RSD of all refugees (with the exception of Palestinians). Iraqis wishing to benefit from

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protection or other social services provided by UNHCR must register with the agency. UNHCR Cairo has granted prima facie refugee status to Iraqi asylum seekers from central and southern Iraq, who also receive a yellow card upon registration, securing them temporary protection. Those who were members of the Ba’th regime are excluded from the automatic status category until they have attended an RSD interview: this has discouraged many Ba’thists from approaching UNHCR and they have used other means to secure residence permits. Many Iraqis living in Egypt have residence permits obtained through registration as an investor or through their children’s enrolment at school. Iraqis are expected to renew permits every six months. In 2008, the Egyptian government imposed restrictions on visa entry, inhibiting family reunion. Some Iraqis paid bribes or faked documents to facilitate entry of their relatives. Iraqis often register with UNHCR primarily to be considered for resettlement to a third country. However, resettlement is granted by UNHCR only in cases fulfilling one of several criteria. Applicants should be a survivor of severe trauma; a member of a minority group; a woman or an older person at risk; an unaccompanied minor; a dependent of resettled individuals; severely ill; a ‘high-profile’ case; a previous associate of multinational and coalition forces and foreign institutions in Iraq; stateless; or at risk of refoulement (UNHCR 2007: 4–5). Due to the large number of Iraqis seeking resettlement, the fulfilment of various criteria does not guarantee successful resettlement. In 2008, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) started a Direct Access Programme, providing resettlement to the United States for Iraqis and family members who could prove through official documentation that they were affiliated with or working at American institutions or with the American forces after 2003 (Egypt, IOM 2008). Some Iraqis with complex cases often find themselves eligible for both resettlement programmes, but because they have been members of military or intelligence agencies of the former regime, their cases are often prolonged. Intense frustration about such procedures is common among Iraqis in Egypt. • •

If I was told about the prolonged situation in Egypt to get resettled, I might have thought to go to another country and not come to Egypt. (Narges) The (UNHCR) offices in Syria and Amman are more efficient in processing resettlement than the one in Egypt. All Iraqis who have a valid reason to leave Iraq to one of those countries have already been resettled. (Sandra)

SOCIO-ECONOMIC CONDITIONS •

I tried working but there is no work in Egypt. I mean there is but it is difficult. You would work for 12 hours to get 500 EGP [Egyptian pounds], which might only cover the rent. I pay 600 EGP per month for rent, which is very cheap, You cannot easily find an apartment with less than 1,000 EGP … I have two daughters in school and have just managed to pay 100 EGP … I am waiting to receive money from … (an Iraqi celebrity living in Egypt) but nothing yet … I went to the UN to get refunded but they said they do not do that (cover tuition fees) anymore. But how come? I have spent the money already. We depended on them and got our children to school … I don’t know what to do now. Also my wife has very bad skin irritation because of her psychological state and we do not receive any

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medical care from Caritas [a charity]. She has been on painkillers for a long time. (Mansour) There is no option … we cannot choose … our decision to go back is because we do not have enough money to stay in Egypt. We planned our finances until the end of this academic year and if the UNHCR cannot help us, we will have to go back to Iraq. (Sherif)

Three layers of stakeholders affect the lives of Iraqi refugees in Egypt: the government, international organizations and non-governmental organizations (Sadek 2009b: 42–43). The government has not adopted any official policy in relation to Iraqis: it has no formal public stance. Refugees therefore turn to other service providers. As the implementing partners of UNHCR, both Caritas and Catholic Relief Services (CRS) provide medical and educational support for destitute families. The criteria for those in need of such services are often criticized by Iraqi refugees; complex procedures for access often discourage Iraqis from approaching the charities, especially residents of neighbourhoods and cities that are distant from the offices of service providers. In 2008, a legal aid office was established at St. Andrew’s Refugee Services, operating under the umbrella of St. Andrew’s Church in central Cairo. The main aim was to provide legal assistance for Iraqi refugees eligible for resettlement either under UNHCR’s or IOM’s criteria. The office also provides other services and has served as a social outlet for some Iraqi refugees. The Egyptian Foundation for Refugee Rights (EFRR) also provides legal assistance to refugees including Iraqis, representing them in local courts and providing awareness training on refugee rights. Some Iraqis, especially those accepted for resettlement, also use Student Action for Refugees (STAR) – a student organization under the auspices of The American University in Cairo (AUC) – to enrol in English language classes. There are no Iraqi community organizations, due to government restrictions and concern about religious and political conflict, which might result in refugee self-organization. Under Egypt’s Emergency Law, large gatherings are banned without governmental approval. Most Iraqis living in Egypt are inactive in formal economic terms, relying on savings and remittances for survival. Links with the Iraqi diaspora have been a vital coping mechanism (Sadek 2009b: 44). The direction of remittances in the case of Iraqi refugees comes from Iraq as an oil-producing country rather than resettlement countries, as in the case of most of the refugee communities living in Egypt (Chatelard 2009: 13; Sadek 2009b: 44). Some families have managed to establish businesses in Egypt using capital available on arrival. The majority, however, do not contribute to the labour market either formally or informally. As mentioned, Egypt has entered reservations related to refugees accessing public services and employment and so all refugees seeking work formally in Egypt are treated as foreigners. In some cases, and to ensure the success of businesses, Iraqis have taken on Egyptian partners, although this is not a favoured strategy.

RELATIONS WITH EGYPTIANS •

We know the traits of Egyptians very well … we dealt with many of them in Iraq. There were eight million Egyptians working in Iraq in the 1980s … they are easy to deal with …. Yes they may abuse you for money but they are simple. When I first came here, someone tried to enter our apartment.

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We asked who it was so he left. We called the police but nothing happened. So we went to another apartment that was not furnished but again a burglar tried to enter. So we reported again to the police. (Omar) Neither the Syrians, nor the Jordanians came to work in Iraq …. But when six or seven million Egyptians worked in Iraq, we treated them very well. Thus we expected the same from them. Egyptians should feel obligated towards the Iraqis. I hear many say that Egypt was build because of Iraq …. Here even taxi drivers, when they know that you are Iraqi, will not take the money from you. (Helmi) There is no support given to Iraqi refugees by an Arab country like Egypt (as provided by) … European countries, which give real support to refugees seeking asylum within its borders. Arab countries are not providing necessary support. We are perceived as wealthy but many of the Iraqis I know are running out of income. We have no source of income and our savings are ending. I heard the flights to Baghdad are fully booked for the coming months because of families running out of money and planning to go back when it is still unsafe. What can we do? (Yasser)

4. See, for example, comments about the loyalties of Shi’a Arabs made by President Mubarak to the satellite television channel Al-Arabiyya, 8 April 2006.

The 1973 war between Israel and the Arab states was followed by economic changes that led many Egyptians to migrate to the Gulf states and to Iraq. In the 1980s, male labour was needed in Iraq to compensate for the labour force lost during the Iran–Iraq war. These movements produced specific mutual perceptions among Iraqis and Egyptians, including assumptions among some Iraqis of cultural superiority vis-à-vis the latter – as people who had migrated to take up various subordinate roles, especially in agriculture and construction. The visa restrictions imposed by the Egyptian government on recent Iraqi migrants have been seen by some refugees as a sign of ungratefulness among Egyptians. The fact that refugees are denied access to Egypt’s public services and to the labour market is considered discriminatory treatment for nationals of a country that provided the same services widely for Egyptian migrants. Iraqis who transited in Syria or who are connected to other Iraqis seeking asylum in Syria often make unfavourable comparisons between the response of the Syrian and the Egyptian governments to the refugee crisis. Meanwhile some consumption patterns among Iraqis have led Egyptians to see them as wealthy, notably in relatively expensive areas in Egypt in which Iraqis have bought or rented, leading to real or imagined increases in prices of properties, goods and services. Despite the awareness of conflicts in Iraq, Egyptians’ perceptions of Iraqis blur images of asylum seekers and of wealthy migrants seeking better security conditions in Egypt. While Iraqi families refer to the situation in Egypt as generally secure, some Iraqis of Shi’a background have concealed their identities. They fear that as Egypt is a primarily Sunni Muslim country unfamiliar with Shi’a traditions and in which there have been a number of official statements unfavourable to the latter,4 they would be wise to maintain a low profile. Accounts of being asked about religious/sectarian affiliation by Egyptian taxi drivers, shop keepers and neighbours are very common among Iraqis in Egypt. •

I was once asked by a taxi driver what my sect was. When I told him Shi’ia he did not respond in a nice way and said bad things about the Shi’ia Muslims. So I did not let him drop me off at our apartment, so that he would not know where we live. (Safaa)

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CONCLUSION ‘We never expected to stay that long in Egypt!’ Egypt has been a safe haven for many Iraqi refugees who fled conflict including sectarian violence and economic collapse. Many Iraqi families believe that their decision to leave Iraq saved lives – but when most took the decision to leave they planned to stay in Egypt for a short time until arrangements were made for resettlement in a third country or return to a more stable Iraq. Now they face a challenging situation. Some have made the difficult decision to return because of depletion of their financial resources; others have managed to ensure incoming funds to help sustain their livelihoods in Egypt. While there are still prospects for more affluent Iraqi families, the future for the less privileged remains much less certain.

REFERENCES Al-Abed, O. (2009), ‘Unprotected: Palestinians in Egypt since 1948’, Institute for Palestine Studies, Beirut, Washington DC and International Development Research Centre, Ottawa, Canada. Al-Ahram Weekly (2008), ‘Trapped between Egypt and Iraq: The plight of Iraqi refugees in Egypt is compounded by a lack of access to education or to work’, Al-Ahram Weekly, 10–16 April Issue No 892. Al-Sharmani, M. (2003), ‘Livelihood and identity constructions of Somali refugees in Cairo’, Working Paper No. 2, Forced Migration and Refugee Studies Program, The American University in Cairo, Cairo. Azzam, F. (2006), ‘A tragedy of failure and false expectations: Report on the events surrounding three-month-sit-in and forced removal of Sudanese refugees in Cairo’, The Forced Migration and Refugee Studies Program, The American University in Cairo, Cairo. Chatelard, G (2009), ‘What visibility conceals, re-embedding refugee migration from Iraq’, in Dawn Chanty (ed.), Dispossession and Displacement: Forced-Migration in the Middle East and Africa, (Proceedings of conference), London: British Academy, pp. 2–21. —— (2010), ‘Cross-border mobility of Iraqi refugees’, Forced Migration Review, 34 , pp. 61–62. Dajani, M. A. (1986), ‘The institutionalization of Palestinian identity in Egypt’, Cairo Papers in Social Science, 9, Monograph 3, Fall. Douglas, T; Aranco J; Hugo G; Kouaouci A; Pellergrino A; Taylor E (1993), ‘Theories of international migration: A review and appraisal’, Population and Development Review, 19: 3, pp. 431–466. Dorai, K. (2010), ‘Palestinian and Iraqi refugees and urban change in Lebanon and Syria’, http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/46/86/19/PDF/MEI_ Dorai.pdf. Accessed 13 January 2011. Fargues, P., El Masry, S., Sadek, S. and Shaban, A. (2008), ‘Iraqis in Egypt: A statistical survey in 2008’, Centre for Migration and Refugee Studies and Institute of Decision-Making and Support Centre, Cairo, Egypt. Forcier, N. (2010), ‘Divided at the margins: A study of young southern Sudanese refugee men in Cairo, Egypt’, Centre for Migration and Refugee Studies, The American University in Cairo, Cairo. Grabska, K. (2006), ‘Marginalisation in urban spaces of the global south: Urban refugees in Cairo’, Journal of Refugee Studies, 19: 3, pp. 287–307. —— (2005), ‘Living on the margins: The analysis of the livelihood strategies of Sudanese refugees with closed files in Egypt’, working paper, The

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Forced Migration and Refugee Studies Program, The American University in Cairo, Cairo. Human Rights Watch (2008), ‘Sinai perils risks to migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers in Egypt and Israel’, Human Rights Watch, USA. International Organization for Migration (IOM) (2008), ‘Refugee resettlement program for Iraqis in Jordan, Egypt and Iraq with U.S. affiliations’, Fact Sheet: Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration, Washington, DC, http://www.egypt.iom.int/Index_ExpandedUSRefugeeResttlProg.htm Minnick, E. (2009), ‘Between return and resettlement: The formation of Iraqi refugee “communities” in Cairo and Amman’, thesis presented to the Center for Migration and Refugee studies of the American University in Cairo, Cairo. Sadek, S. (2009a), ‘Iraqi “temporary guests” in neighbouring countries’, On the Move: Migration Challenges in the Indian Ocean Littoral, Regional Voice: Transnational Challenges Project, Henry L. Stimson, USA. —— (2009b), ‘The Iraqi community in Cairo: Transnational and local challenges’, Migration and the Mashreq, Volume II, Migration and the Arab World Series, Middle East Institute, American University, USA. UNHCR (2007), ‘Resettlement of Iraqi refugees’, Working Group on Resettlement, http://www.unhcr.org/45f80f9d2.pdf, Accessed 20 December 2010. —— (2010), ‘UNHCR Egypt fact sheet’, http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/ pdfid/4d1c37c32.pdf, Accessed 22 December 2010. Van Hear, N. (2004), ‘I went as far as my money would take me: Conflict, forced migration and class’, Centre on Migration, Policy and Society, Working Paper No. 6, Oxford: University of Oxford.

SUGGESTED CITATION Sadek, S. (2011), ‘Safe haven or limbo? Iraqi refugees in Egypt’, International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies 5: 2, pp. 185–197, doi: 10.1386/ ijcis.5.2.185_1

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS Sara Sadek is a doctoral candidate at the University of York, UK. She has worked on a series of projects researching Iraqi refugees in Cairo, including a major survey undertaken by the Center for Forced Migration and Refugee Studies at The American University in Cairo (AUC). She has also worked as a researcher and consultant in collaboration with universities and institutions in the United Kingdom, France, Jordan, Syria and Yemen. She has a B.A. in Political Science from AUC and an M.A. in Refugee Studies from the University of East London. Contact: Egyptian Foundation for Refugee Rights (EFRR), 7 Mohamed Fareed Street, 5th Floor, Apt 9, Bab El Louk, Tahrir, Cairo 11511, Egypt. E-mail: [email protected]

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IJCIS 5 (2) pp. 199–213 Intellect Limited 2011

International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies Volume 5 Number 2 © 2011 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/ijcis.5.2.199_1

DIDEM DANIS¸ Galatasaray University

Changing fortunes: Iraqi refugees in Turkey 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

ABSTRACT

KEYWORDS

This article deals with changing conditions for Iraqis in Turkey. It examines the evolution of Iraqi migration, issues of reception and onward movement from Turkey. Research conducted among Iraqis in Istanbul is used to illustrate the recent changes in the patterns of movement, especially among Iraqis for whom Turkey is a transit country and who utilize communal networks as a key resource in a difficult environment.

Iraqi refugees social networks communalism migration strategies irregular migrants cyclical migrants Turkey

IRAQI EMIGRATION TO TURKEY Nearly 500,000 Iraqis entered Turkey after the Gulf War of 1991. Soon after the US attack, two uprisings broke out in Iraq and were repressed violently. The consequence was an abrupt exodus: large numbers of the Shi’as and Kurds fled to neighbouring countries. From March to April 1991 many Kurds and smaller numbers of Iraqi Turkmen and Christians arrived in Turkey. This was not the first flight from Iraq to Turkey, however. At the end of the Iran–Iraq war, some 100,000 Iraqi Kurds – afraid of a massacre similar to the events of Halabja in March 1988 – sought refuge in Turkey. When hundreds of thousands of Iraqis began to cross the Turkish border in 1991, there were already some 30,000 refugees remaining from the 1988 incident (Kaynak 1992: 47).1 In 1991 the Turkish authorities were unprepared for such a massive and abrupt refugee movement and were reluctant to open the borders. This attitude was related to both a limited refugee reception capacity and to aspects of Turkey’s internal Kurdish problem (Kiris¸ ci 1993: 1994). Obstruction at the

1. Figures on asylum seekers are not very reliable since they are given differently in various references. The Turkish minister of Foreign Affairs at the period announced that the number of Iraqis seeking asylum in Turkey reached 62,920 (Cumhuriyet, 6 September 1988). Three days before the declaration of

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the minister, the newspaper stated that the number of asylum seekers in Turkey was around 120,000 (Cumhuriyet, 4 September 1988). Later Turkish authorities declared that there were 117,000 asylum seekers, of whom 51,542 were accommodated in camps in the border zone (Kaynak 1992: 45–47). Overall, after the analysis of various figures in different references, we can estimate that the number of Iraqi asylum seekers in Turkey was around 100,000 in 1988. 2. See the work by Al-Ali for telling examples of severe impoverishment caused by these embargoes and their impacts on the everyday experiences of Iraqi women (2007). 3. Data were collected in April–May 2009 and September–November 2009 in Istanbul; we interviewed twenty displaced Iraqis of various legal statuses and of various ethnic and religious backgrounds, as well as officials of organizations in contact with Iraqis.

frontier did not last long, however, largely as a result of international pressure. Iraqis entered Turkey and were placed in temporary camps near the border. On the suggestion of the Turkish president, Turgut Özal, the United States and Britain created a ‘safe haven’ in Iraq in territory North of the 36th parallel and Iraqi refugees were soon transferred to Iraq. The safe-haven strategy was later adopted elsewhere, notably in Sri Lanka and the Balkans, as a means of addressing major refugee movements (UNHCR 1995). Iraqi migration to Turkey continued at a reduced pace during the 1990s, prompted mainly by severe social and economic impacts of international sanctions on Iraq. Air strikes undertaken during the Gulf War had caused massive damage to infrastructure; on 6 August 1990 the UN Security Council then imposed a ban on commerce with Iraq (Resolution 661), with the exception of the transfer of goods for medical and humanitarian purposes.2 Continuing migration from Iraq between 1991 and 2003 was associated with these pressures and with a mood of deep discontent, especially among youth. Lafourcade (2001) notes the impact on a younger generation of their parents’ nostalgia for the 1970s, when Iraq was seen to have been stable and prosperous. More important as a factor inducing departure was a loss of faith in collective well-being. Increasing doubt about a unified and prosperous society, spurred by feelings of national humiliation, pushed some Iraqis to search for individual survival strategies. Lafourcade (2001: 89) describes their feelings as a ‘desire for abroad’. The Iraqi authorities, unable to address people’s problems, opted to increase oppression. Meanwhile in the North rival Kurdish groups were engaged in repeated clashes. The movement of people out of Iraq was limited by problems of exit and difficulties with entry into states in which they hoped to find security. Chatelard (2005: 120) refers to ‘constraints on movement’ – controls exercised by the Iraqi government on the movement of information, capital and people, together with strict immigration policies in countries favoured by Iraqis for asylum claims. These could not stop the impulse for departure, however. According to Chatelard (2005: 123), between 1990 and late 2002, no less than 1.5 million Iraqis ‘permanently left their country’.

LIFE UNDER OCCUPATION Iraqi migration gained pace and took on a new shape after the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003. A reduction in state-imposed constraints on exit, such as simplification of procedures to obtain passports, facilitated emigration. Movements of Shi’as and Kurds, who had been the main participants in migrations before 2003, slowed as these populations perceived new prospects in the post-Ba’thist environment. A fall in emigration immediately after the invasion was also related to negative attitudes among western governments to Iraqi applications for asylum. For the United States, in particular, Iraq was a country progressing towards peace and democracy and there was no need to leave the country. A reduction in emigration in 2003–2004 was accompanied by some return movements of refugees who had left in the 1970s and 1980s (Marfleet 2007). The head of the Iraqi Turks Culture and Solidarity Association (IYKYD) in Istanbul comments: Migration [to Turkey] continued until 2003. In 2003 returns started. People were going back with great hopes. And the ones who stayed were waiting a few more years for improvement of the situation. (Interview on 11 November 2009)3

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

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Iraqis who continued to emigrate immediately after occupation were those disappointed by the new order in Iraq and who faced continuing hardships. Turkmen and Assyro-Chaldaean Christians, who faced atrocities and whose conditions of life worsened with changing power relations, continued to emigrate through social networks developed during the long decades of migration. On the other hand, the Kurdish exodus slowed down because of optimism that the Kurdish fortunes were likely to improve greatly under the new circumstances. The hopes of most Iraqis soon faded. After 2005 violence and insecurity became general in the southern and central areas of the country. Iraqis interviewed in November 2009 in Istanbul typically asserted that each day in Iraq brought more difficulties and dangers. A complaint frequently was that ‘Before there was only one Saddam, but now there are a thousand of him’.

4. For the findings of a collective research conducted by Opinion Research Business (ORB) and Independent Institute for Administration and Civil Society Studies (IIACSS), see Susman (2007). According to Iraq Body Count, the period from March 2006 to March 2007 had been ‘by far the worst year for violence against civilians in Iraq since the invasion’ (Iraq Body Count 2007).

There was no security after 2003. You did not know from which side you would be attacked. The government itself was a gang. We could not go to the police when we had a problem. It was not clear which side the police were on. You can only rely on yourself and on your relatives in Iraq ... The last threat came to me via my brother. They told my brother that I should leave Iraq or I would be killed. Then I left. As a matter of fact, I always had the idea of leaving. How can a government which is unable to protect itself protect its citizens? (Iraqi asylum seeker, aged 38, interview in Istanbul, 17 November 2009) Despite the hardships experienced in Iraq between 2003 and 2006, and continuing migration, asylum applications from Iraqis were suspended at UNHCR offices in Turkey. This was justified by widespread claims in western states that, following the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, Iraq was embracing peace and democracy. In fact, conditions in Iraq were deteriorating daily and suspension of refugee status determination did not inhibit efforts to leave. The number of Iraqis arriving in Turkey, as in other neighbouring countries, increased steadily as can be seen in Table 5. Between March 2003 and February 2008, more than a million people died in Iraq.4 For the Iraqis I interviewed in Istanbul, the main problems were general disorder and fear associated with threats of violence. They experienced these dangers more intensely than compatriots who had left the country earlier: •

•

Now there are many groups in Iraq. We don’t know who is who. They put a gun to your head. They can be people of the Ba’ath, of the mafia or al-Qa’ida. What is important for me is not who they are but being threatened by them. Everything changed the moment they held the gun to my head, all my life went away from my hands ... I took my passport, I prepared the documents and I left the country in 15 days. Meanwhile I put my wife, my mother and my child into the house of a trustworthy family. We left behind our house, all our belongings. In two weeks I left behind all my life and I quit. (Iraqi Christian male asylum seeker, age 40, interview on 9 May 2009) We made the decision [to leave Iraq] in under one week. We did not bring any belongings with us. We would not be able to stay there longer. If we stayed we knew that we would be killed. (Iraqi Sunni Arab woman, age 43, interview on 12 November 2009)

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5. For host governments, it is becoming increasingly widespread to confer a ‘humanitarian protection’ instead of a full refugee status, since the latter compels them to present better social and economic services. 6. Prima facie status is also known as group determination of refugee status. It means the recognition of refugee status on the basis of the readily apparent, objective circumstances in the country of origin that gives rise to large-scale influx. It provides protection from refoulement and basic humanitarian treatment for those in need of it.

•

They broke the glass of my barber’s shop. Then I received a letter of threat. In the letter, they were threatening to kill me if I stayed there. I decided to leave because I was worried for my daughters … After me, my maternal aunt, my mother and my brother got in here. (Iraqi Sunni Arab man, age 40, interview on 9 November 2009)

Antonio Guterres, general secretary of the UNHCR, has suggested that two million Iraqis left their country between 2003 and 2007 (UNHCR 2007a). Few were granted formal refugee status and UNHCR resettled only 1500 Iraqis between 2003 and 2006, a tiny proportion of those in need of immediate relocation in a place of security (Younes and Garcia 2007). In 2005, the overall recognition rate of Iraqis as refugees by the UNHCR was a mere 7.3 per cent (increasing to 30.3 per cent on the basis of other types of recognition) (UNHCR 2006a: 52).5 The UNHCR’s Return Advisory and Position on International Protection Needs of Iraqis outside Iraq, published in December 2006, finally recognized the problems of general insecurity across Iraq and in particular of bombings, killings and sectarian tensions in central and southern governorates. It proposed that asylum claims from Iraqis originating from these regions should not be rejected. The UNHCR recommended: ‘No Iraqi from southern or central Iraq should be forcibly returned to Iraq until there is substantial improvement in the security and human rights situation in the country’ (UNHCR 2006b, 2007b). Following the Return Advisory, UNHCR decided to provide international protection for Iraqis fleeing their country (with the exception of three governorates under the control of the Kurdish Regional Government) and who were unable or unwilling to return, declaring that they were ‘persons of concern to UNHCR as prima facie refugees’.6 This decision in effect acknowledged that efforts to stabilize Iraq following the overthrow of Saddam Hussein had failed. It was eventually reflected in policy changes in a number of states,

Iranians

Iraqis

Others

(%)

(%)

(%)

General rate of recognition

Total number of the recognized

(%) 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007

52 56 59 57 70 72 79 75 67 90 88

25 30 18 27 34 38 – – – – 100

24 30 31 28 56 35 45 31 36 39 72

35 40 43 49 61 63 76 69 59 79 85

File 578 891 841 1186 1287 1344 1600 934 736 1051 3588

Persons – 2230 1903 2726 2867 2885 3300 1748 1368 1878 7121

Source: Danıs¸ D. and Bayraktar D. (2010: 12)

Table 1: Recognition rate of non-European asylum seekers in Turkey during 1997–2007.

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

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notably in the United States, where the authorities had granted refugee status to only 466 Iraqis between 2003 and 2007.7 After 2007, US policy changed, officials declaring that the United States would resettle Iraqis and announcing an initial quota of 7000. During the 2008 fiscal year some 13,800 Iraqi refugees were admitted; over the course of two years to 2009 a total of 19,910 were admitted (U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services 2009). The combined effect was an increase in applications for asylum by Iraqis worldwide – and notably in Turkey. Most important, almost all claims in Turkey by Iraqis whose asylum files had been suspended between 2003 and 2006 were recognized as legitimate and in 2007 the recognition rate for the Iraqis applying for refugee status increased to 100 per cent.

COMMUNALISM The Geneva Convention of 1951 defines a refugee as a person who has a wellfounded fear of being persecuted, ‘for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality, and is unable to or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country’ (UNHCR 2011). Today this definition is widely considered to require revision in a world in which economic and political pressures are often combined and new types of refugeehood have emerged. This is clear in the case of Iraqis. One outcome of the Iraq crisis after 2003 was reinforcement of communalist networks (Danıs¸ 2008a). Here ‘communalist’ suggests an extensive social network nourished by ties of kinship, of being from the same place of origin, of the same ethnic or sectarian affiliation. These networks are of prime importance in the context of generalized violence. During the years of international sanctions, when the Ba’th regime proved incapable of providing adequate assistance to Iraqi citizens, people used familial and social relations to support basic needs. More recently these ties have embraced nepotism, stigmatization of ‘others’, mistrust and hostility among groups. One of my Iraqi informants in Istanbul argued that communalist ties have pros and cons:

7. According to the New York Times, ‘more than 30,000 Iraqis have been resettled in the United States since the 2003 invasion as refugees or with special visas for those who worked closely with the American government’ (Semple 2009). Among them some 1500 have been granted asylum. Sweden has received between 40,000 and 80,000 Iraqis since 2003. In 2007 the number of Iraqi refugees in Sweden was some 18,000 but the Swedish government began to adopt a stricter asylum policy in 2008 (Labott 2007; Jordan 2008).

[In Iraq] all the parties are communalist. If you talk about politics, if you approach some groups then you become the enemy of others … When there was gossip about me that I would marry an American citizen, because of my relatives, I received death threats; it happens in Iraq. People accuse you of being American, an American spy or a Christian. (Iraqi male asylum seeker, age 38, interview in Istanbul, 17 November 2009) The pace of Iraqi emigration began to diminish after 2008. According to some researchers, this was related to the communalist agenda – the fulfilment of projects initiated by sectarian armed groups. Certain neighbourhoods that were once ‘mixed’ became homogeneous zones inhabited only by one group. Here, a decline in violence came at the cost of fragmentation of Iraqi society (Al-Tikriti 2008). Communalist relations became a means of support not only for those who remained in Iraq but also for exiles who wanted to establish a new life away from their homeland, for Iraqi exiles determined their migration strategies according, in part, to their social capacities based on ethnic, religious or kinship ties. One result has been that different ethnic and religious groups have different patterns of migration.

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IRAQIS IN TURKEY Migration from Iraq to Turkey has been limited in comparison with movements to Syria or Jordan. According to a report published by UNHCR (2007), there were only 10,000 displaced Iraqis in Turkey. This is certainly an underestimate (see below) but reflects the influence of factors such as geographical distance, language differences (most Iraqis do not speak Turkish), the high cost of living in Turkey and the low number of humanitarian organizations working on refugee assistance – all disincentives for Iraqis contemplating exit. Most important, however, have been difficulties in obtaining residence permits. Iraqis consider Turkey primarily as a transit country – a place to stay temporarily in order to move to a third country. They do not have entitlements to permanent refugee status in Turkey: a geographical limitation clause in the 1951 Geneva Convention and the fact that a Settlement Law allows only foreigners of Turkish origin to obtain Turkish citizenship present major legal obstacles to permanent settlement, so that Iraqis perceive Turkey as a stepping stone to security in other states. With the exception of Iraqi Turkmen, who receive a more positive reception, Iraqis do not expect to stay permanently in the country. Legal structures keep them either in irregularity or push them to obtain temporary status, which means that they must live in expectation of departure. There are four groups of Iraqis in Turkey: irregular migrants, asylum seekers, cyclical migrants and residence permit-holders.

1. Irregular migrants Iraqis have been the largest group of irregular migrants arrested by Turkish security forces. Almost 100,000 Iraqis constituted half of all those apprehended from Middle East and Asian countries and a fifth of all cases in Turkey between 1995 and 2004 (Apap et al. 2005: 34). According to information provided by the Foreigners’ Bureau, 96 per cent of Iraqis apprehended by Turkish Security Forces between 1995 and 2000 were arrested because of ‘illegal entry, exit or stay in Turkey’ (EGM 2001: 33). A continuous increase in the numbers of Iraqis arrested by security forces until 2001 was followed by a sudden decrease in 2003, when only 3757 Iraqis were apprehended (Danıs¸2008b). This decline was not peculiar to Turkey; Iraqi emigration in general had declined due to the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime and to general expectations in Iraq of a better future. Thus, in 2003, Iraqis lost for their top ranking in the hierarchy of irregular migrants and fell to the third position behind Moldovans and Pakistanis. Despite increasing violence in Iraq, the number of irregular migrants has continued to decline.

2. Asylum seekers Since the 1990s Iraqis and Iranians have constituted the two largest asylum seeker groups in Turkey. The totals have never been high – until 2002, Iraqi applications in Turkey amounted to only 3000 to 4000 cases each year (I˙çduygu 2003: 23). Given the size of the total out-migration from Iraq, this is a low figure and this can partially be explained by the geographical limitation that Turkey maintains on the 1951 Geneva Convention (Kiris¸ci 2000). Asylum procedures in Turkey are based on the Convention, ratified by the Turkish government with geographical and temporal limitations: i.e. restrictions on the government’s commitments in relation to ‘events occurring in Europe before

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

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1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

Country

1

Number of people arrested

Afghanistan Bangladesh Pakistan Iran Iraq Syria North Africa Former Soviet Republics1 Central Asia2 Albania Bulgaria Romania Turkey Others

28,911 13,418 28,442 22,199 99,402 5018 9397 100,018 6473 3988 9111 19,067 24,419 107,986

Total

477,849

8. For a terse account of debates relating to the temporal and spatial limitations of the Convention see Marfleet (2006).

Former Soviet republics: Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia.

2

Central Asian countries: Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan. Source: Apap et al. (2005: 34).

Table 2: Breakdown of irregular migrants arrested by Turkish security forces between 1995 and June 2004 by their nationalities.

January 1, 1951’ (the original wording of the Convention, which has caused much controversy).8 According to this limitation, the Turkish state’s legal obligations concerning refugees are applied only to persons who seek asylum as a result of events in Europe, so that non-Europeans cannot obtain permanent refugee protection in Turkey. In 1994, the government implemented a new regulation in view of developments that had seen Turkey become one of the most commonly used transit routes for migrants from Africa and Asia. Despite this, and the demands of the European Union, Turkey continues to maintain the geographical limitation. The number of Iraqi irregular migrants arrested by police forces was for many years much higher than for Iraqis who made official asylum applications – according to official sources, some 80,000 Iraqis were arrested between 1995 and 2001, while there were some 20,000 Iraqis seeking asylum in the same period, as seen in the table above. This wide discrepancy indicates the strong disinclination of Iraqis to enter asylum procedures, which were unlikely to produce positive outcomes. Another factor discouraging Iraqis from seeking asylum was the suspension of Iraqi cases in UNHCR offices between 2003 and 2006. After the invasion of 2003 many western countries postponed the processing of cases until a political resolution could be achieved in Iraq. According to the UNHCR, in early 2006 only 2200 Iraqi asylum-seekers (people who had entered procedures for refugee status determination) were present in Turkey (Danıs¸and Bayraktar 2010: 19). The situation changed only in

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Iran

Iraq

Others

Total

1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005

1803 935 1552 1484 2206 4221 4185 3708 2815 3310 2064 1047

2475 2890 2691 3028 4895 2635 2160 1933 1128 366 954 1717

179 152 192 129 229 435 664 1034 388 604 916 1150

4457 3977 4435 4641 7330 7309 7019 6675 4331 4280 3934 3914

Total

29,330

26,872

6072

62,302

Source: Compiled from UNHCR statistics (UNHCR 2005).

Table 3: Asylum demands in Turkey from 1995 to 2005. March 2007, when US officials announced a new policy for Iraqis. Even though the Americans’ initial quota of 7000 refugees was far from satisfactory, it encouraged other states holding Iraqi files to adopt a more flexible approach. With the UNHCR decision of 2006 Iraqis were finally accepted widely as refugees. This nonetheless limited de facto refugee status to central and southern governorates; when the policy was revised in 2009, five cities including the major centres of Kirkuk and Salahadin were included in the central provinces. Here there were high levels of conflict associated with tensions between Kurdish militias, local non-Kurdish organizations and Iraqi national forces, producing a series of displacements on a broad front described by the International Crisis Group as ‘a new trigger line’ (ICG 2009a, 2009b). One result was a significant increase in the number of Iraqis applying to the UNHCR Turkey bureau: by April 2009, 8315 Iraqis were registered (see table 4 below). At the same time, the composition of the Iraqi migration population in Turkey began to change. The combined effect of new conflicts in Iraq and the increased number of Iraqis

File

Person

Afghanistan Iran Iraq Somali Others

1199 2375 4113 714 907

3206 4186 8315 1244 1250

Total

9308

18,201

Source: UNHCR (2010).

Table 4: UNHCR-Turkey active work load, April 2009.

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

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accepted in the United States brought more Muslim refugees. Chaldaeans, with 60 per cent of the total, still made up the bulk of Iraqi asylum seekers registered by international organizations in Turkey but there was now a significant increase in the number of Sunni and Shi’a Arabs. UNHCR recommendations of 2007 led to a new era for Iraqi refugees in Turkey. There soon emerged a division of work between international institutions, civil society organizations and Turkish authorities in the management of Iraqis’ applications for asylum. This included the UNHCR office in Ankara and Istanbul, the Human Resource Development Foundation (IKGV), the International Catholic Immigration Commission (ICMC) and the International Organisation for Migration (IOM). Although state administration of migrant affairs is located in Ankara, Istanbul has become a hub for NGOs that provide legal and social support. These include Caritas, Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly, Amnesty International, the Asylum Seekers and Migrants Solidarity Association (SGDD), the Chaldean Assyrian Solidarity Association (KADER) and associations founded by Iraqi Turks, such as the Iraqi Turks Culture and Solidarity Association (ITKYD). One result of more efficient bureaucratic processes is that Iraqi refugees now remain in Turkey for much shorter periods. While in Turkey, they are placed officially in ‘satellite cities’ – Anatolian towns assigned by the Interior Ministry for temporary residence of registered asylum seekers and refugees.

3. Cyclical migrants/‘suitcase traders’ While the overall size of irregular migration of Iraqis to Turkey seemed to decline after 2003, there has been a remarkable increase in the number of persons officially entering the country. This sudden upsurge is related to the liberalization of the passport regime in Iraq and has had implications for increasing economic transactions between Turkey and Iraq. After the 1991 Gulf War, when departures from Iraq soared due to worsening economic conditions, Ba’thist leaders looked for new policies to inhibit emigration. One of the methods was to oblige professionals, mainly doctors and engineers, to deposit a large sum of money in Iraq to pay for tourist visas with the aim of ensuring their return (Hiro 2003: 15). After 2003, procedures for obtaining visas were simplified and guarantee payments were removed. Consequently, while the number of Iraqis who entered Turkey before 2003 was less than 20,000 annually, it increased to 111,000 in 2004 and to 250,000 in 2008. Changing commercial relations between Iraq and Turkey have also been important. The Iraqi market, which was abandoned since 1991 as a result of the instability in the country, has become a significant target for Turkish businessmen. After 2003, while Turkish entrepreneurs resumed business in Iraq, Iraqi merchants began to participate in greater numbers in bavul ticareti (a Turkish expression that literally means ‘suitcase trade’ denoting exportation of Turkish goods). This economic activity started in the early 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The appetite for consumption in the Soviet bloc, repressed for so long under communist regimes, was met by traders who shuttled between their countries and Turkey. Due to the frequency of their movements they were often described as ‘cyclical migrants’. The production and trade of goods in the market areas of Istanbul such as Laleli, Osmanbey and Merter attracted shuttle traders from states of the former Soviet Union, the Middle East and North Africa (Aslan and Pérouse 2003). Iraqi Turkmen played an important role in these exchanges. Thanks to their linguist assets – knowledge of Turkish

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1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008

15,473 3859 12,664 12,085 15,045 14,381 13,558 17,574 18,277 17,591 20,759 16,378 15,765 24,727 111,475 107,968 123,118 180,217 250,130

Source: Danıs¸ and Bayraktar (2010: 23).

Table 5: Iraqis entering Turkey during 1990–2008.

and Arabic – they were soon among an important group at work in Laleli and Osmanbey. According to my informants in Istanbul, commerce with Iraq started in 1996–1997, although international sanctions at first restricted trade. Since 2003, there has been a boom in business with Iraq, facilitated by easier access to passports in Iraq and a radical reduction in controls on imports and exports. ‘Suitcase’ trading has increased the number of Iraqi cyclical migrants entering Turkey by legal channels. This commercial activity relies on the presence of legal residents, who are mostly made up of Turkmen.

4. Legal residents Iraqis in this group are exclusively Turkmen who had once been migrants but have acquired long-term residence permits or Turkish citizenship. They are naturalized thanks to the 1934 Law of Settlement, which was revised in 2006, with minor changes. It states that only persons of ‘Turkish descent and culture’ have the right to settle in Turkey. Until the 1990s there was a long tradition of Turkmen migration to Turkey for educational purposes. Most Turkmen studying in Turkey did not intend to remain there – but serious political and social problems in Iraq after the Gulf War led many to do so. Soydas¸lık/ethnic brotherhood provided Turkmen easy access to Turkish citizenship and their educational credentials and their families’ financial support (most came from relatively well-off Iraqi families) facilitated adjustment to Turkish society. There are no official data about the size of this group but an indication is provided by discussions associated with out-of-country voting in the Iraqi parliamentary election of January 2005, for which more than 280,000 expatriates were registered in fourteen countries. Only

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4178 Iraqis were registered to vote in Turkey – a figure hotly debated in Turkish newspapers. According to Turkish media estimates there were at least 40,000 Iraqi Turkmen in the country. The former head of ITKYD has repudiated this estimation, claiming that the correct figure is 7000 to 10,000 in Turkey, of whom 5000 to 7000 are in Istanbul (Danıs¸et al. 2009: 508–10). Turkmen migration has continued because of the incessant oppression and violence faced by their communities in Iraq (Duman 2010). The welcoming attitude towards Turkmen in Turkey has begun to change, however. Even though the Settlement Law facilitates residence and citizenship procedures for Turkmen, in practice, it has become increasingly more difficult to obtain legal documentation. This is associated with the changes in Turkey’s foreign policy towards Iraq, where the presence of Turkmen has become an important tool for Turkish authorities in their efforts to express concern about coercion of minorities. As the government in Ankara has prioritized the well-being of the Turkish population in Iraq it has been more reluctant to allow Turkmen to settle in Turkey. This pattern is also consistent with the greater reluctance of the Turkish government to accommodate other ‘ethnic brothers’ such as ethnic Turks from the Balkans and central Asia (Danıs¸ and Parla 2009).

WHY ISTANBUL? For Iraqi Turkmen the existence of historical cultural and commercial links, and the presence of Turkmen associations and of relatives and acquaintances in Istanbul, draw them to Turkey and assist them in processes of integration (Bayraktar 2008). For other Iraqis migration to Turkey presents many problems – of language and culture, and in terms of expense, as travel to Turkish cities is much more costly than to Damascus or Amman. Why then do increased numbers of Iraqis move to Turkey? A key issue is the widespread belief among Iraqis that applications for refugee status and family reunification are more rapidly and more favourably processed in Turkey. In the words of a UNHCR official, those reaching Turkey are seen ‘as (having) passed a kind of natural screening’. This belief is probably related to acceptance rates that reached 100 per cent after 2007. Officials to whom I spoke during research also observed that Iraqis who came to Turkey after this date were ‘above the rest in the economic sense’ and ‘people who can meet certain guarantees’, with the result that they achieved acceptance more readily than those applying elsewhere. In my interviews I observed that applicants reaching Turkey, and especially those reaching Istanbul, were indeed of higher socio-economic status than those travelling from Iraq to some other destinations in the Middle East. With tickets for air travel from Baghdad to Istanbul priced at $700 to $800, the costs for a family are substantial and those who leave Iraq by this means have some assets or at least have means of mobilizing resources. Viewed from this angle, Istanbul functions as a filter for western countries that wish to choose people who are economically and socially ‘appropriate’ for consideration as refugees. Istanbul has also been an important destination for Iraqis wishing to apply for family reunification programmes, notably those operated by Australia and Canada. Before 2007, when asylum applications from Iraq were suspended, reunification was one of the few means by which Iraqis could settle legally in the West and was used systematically, especially by Iraqi Christians. A further important factor for choosing Istanbul is the development there of extensive social networks supporting Iraqi migrants. For decades Iraqis who moved to

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Istanbul established solidarity networks involving relatives and friends. Even those who stayed briefly in Istanbul engaged in dissemination of information that assisted new arrivals and facilitated further migration. Such networks have been influenced strongly by ethnic and religious affiliation, so that ethno-religious fragmentation that begins in Iraq continues in the process of migration. Certain neighbourhoods in Istanbul are identified with specific Iraqi communities. In the Fatih-Aksaray area there is a concentration of Iraqi Turkmen; here too are the offices of five Turkmen associations. Kurtulus¸Harbiye is favoured by Iraqi Christians; the Catholic charity Caritas, which provides legal assistance for refugees, has its office in the area. A central quarter, Kurtulus¸-Harbiye, has a cosmopolitan character: here there are also other non-Muslim groups, cheap accommodation and the opportunity to remain ‘invisible’ to the authorities. Many residents are Kurds displaced from southeastern Anatolia whose presence creates a familiar social environment for the Iraqis. Osmanbey-S¸is¸li is the location for export-oriented textile shops; here young Turkmen work in the stores as sales people for Arab customers, living nearby in areas such as Feriköy and S¸is¸li.

CONCLUSION Patterns of Iraqi migration to Turkey have been complex. They reflect the changing circumstances in Iraq, in the international environment in which refugees move and in Turkey – including changes in Turkish domestic and foreign policy. Unlike most other states of the Middle East in which Iraqis seek security, Turkey has not provided a regime of ‘tolerance’ under which Iraqis are accepted, albeit as ‘guests’ or ‘visitors’. Many Iraqis have been apprehended as illegal migrants and relatively few have entered asylum procedures. But changes in international policy vis-à-vis Iraq, especially those undertaken in the United States, have prompted greater interest in Turkey as a transit country. As more Iraqis enter Turkey, patterns of communalist support are becoming more evident, as solidarity networks develop to serve specific migrant interests. It is increasingly clear that ethnic affiliations associated with conflict in Iraq are also operating to provide solidarity and support for those who find themselves in exile.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This article is based on research conducted in the framework of collective work on Iraqi migration patterns coordinated by Geraldine Chatelard and Philip Marfleet. I would like to express my gratitude to the research coordinators and also to my assistants Damla Bayraktar, Emin Salihi and Gül Çatır. The research was supported by ORSAM (Center for Middle Eastern Strategic Studies), and this article draws on a report published by the same institute in 2010, under the title Away From Iraq: Post 2003 Iraqi Migration to Neighboring Countries and to Turkey. We had a chance to exchange our ideas thanks to Tokyo University of Foreign Studies (TUFS), who sponsored the panel at the conference of Future of Iraq: Social, Economic and Political Issues in Question that took place in 16–17 January 2010 in Beirut. I am grateful to all these institutions that made possible the realization of this research. Finally I would like to express my gratitude to Philip Marfleet, who did thorough and rigorous editing of the article.

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—— (2010), ‘UNHCR-Turkey active work load’, http://www.unhcr.org.tr/ MEP/index.aspx?pageId=242. Accessed December 2010. —— (2011), ‘Convention and protocol relating to the status of refugees’, http://www.unhcr.org/protect/PROTECTION/3b66c2aa10.pdf. Accessed March 2011. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (2009), ‘Iraqi refugee processing fact sheet’, http://www.uscis.gov/portal/site/uscis/menuitem.5af9bb95919 f35e66f614176543f6d1a/?vgnextchannel=68439c7755cb9010VgnVCM1000 0045f3d6a1RCRD&vgnextoid=df4c47c9de5ba110VgnVCM1000004718190 aRCRD. Accessed December 2010. Younes, K. and Garcia, S. (2007), ‘Settle the most vulnerable’, Refugees International, (accessed on December 2009) http://www.refugeesinternational.org/policy/field-report/iraqi-refugees-resettle-most-vulnerable.

SUGGESTED CITATION Danis¸ , D. (2011), ‘Changing fortunes: Iraqi refugees in Turkey’, International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies 5: 2, pp. 199–213, doi: 10.1386/ ijcis.5.2.213_1

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS Didem Danıs¸ teaches sociology at Galatasaray University, Istanbul. She received her doctorate from Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Paris, having researched social networks of Iraqi transit migrants in Istanbul. Her two main research areas are international migration and urban sociology. Recent publications include ‘Integration in Limbo: Iraqi, Afghan and Maghrebi Migrants in Istanbul’(2009) and Beyond Integration: Migration and Modes of Migrancy from Turkey to France’ (2008). Contact: Galataray University, Sociology Department, Ciragan Cad. No.36, 34357 Ortakoy, Istanbul Turkey. E-mail: [email protected]

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IJCIS 5 (2) pp. 215–229 Intellect Limited 2011

International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies Volume 5 Number 2 © 2011 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/ijcis.5.2.215_1

MOHAMED KAMEL DORAÏ Migrinter, National Centre for Scientific Research, France

Iraqis in exile: Migratory networks as a coping strategy 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

ABSTRACT

KEYWORDS

The largest concentration of Iraqi refugees is in Syria. Here they are treated officially as ‘guests’, having no formal legal status. Facing increasingly difficult circumstances, increasing numbers of refugees attempt to move to third countries. Using research undertaken in Syria and Sweden, this article examines the pressures that lead them to undertake new journeys and the means by which they mobilize kin and religious networks.

religious networks kinship networks restrictive asylum policies transnationalism familial disruption local integration

Since 1991 Iraqis have been emigrating en masse from their homeland to neighbouring countries and further abroad. The fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003 accelerated the outflow of refugees, mainly due to insecurity and the rise of sectarian violence. Both the departure context in Iraq and the emigration process in transit and receiving states have led to the development of family-based and/or religious-based networks. At the same time, sectarian violence has deeply changed the geography of Baghdad, where the majority of refugees originate, leading to forms of religious homogeneity of certain neighbourhoods. This has contributed to the reinforcement of a sectarian-based emigration process. Religious networks have played a key role in emigration since the events in Iraq in 1991 (Chatelard 2003; Dani¸s 2006) and even before

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in relation to economic migration during the 1970s. For many Iraqis, the use of transnational networks is linked to problems of access to local resources both in the country of origin and in transit countries, due to generalized violence in Iraq or socio-legal restrictions in the latter. Sectarian violence, parallel to the rising sectarian divisions of the post-2003 Iraqi social and political spheres, has contributed to the development of religious-based networks as a key resource for migrants. Restrictive asylum policies in most European countries also contribute to the development of strategies that aim to circumvent these restrictions. Iraqi refugee families are typically scattered across a number of countries; family and community networks may be dislocated but at the same time they may preserve intra-familial cohesion. Due to the massive exodus, Iraqi families and Iraqi communities have to reorganize in exile. Recent geographical scattering of some families and groups in different countries, and in different locations in the same country, has generated ruptures in the networks. The gap between households with strong local and/or transnational connections and those who do not have access to resources and mobility is increasing with the duration of exile. This article is based on fieldwork in Damascus and Beirut and preliminary fieldwork in Stockholm. After presenting an overview of Iraqis in Syria, I examine the role of religious-based networks – mainly those of Assyrians and Chaldaeans – as part of the emigration process and consider interactions with family networks. Since the beginning of the twentieth century Syria has hosted refugee groups such as Armenians, Palestinians and more recently Lebanese escaping the war of 2006. Like most of the countries in the region, Syria is not a signatory to the1951 Convention or the 1967 Protocol, and there is no specific memorandum of understanding between UNHCR and the Syrian authorities. The recent migration of Iraqis to Syria has its own specificities: there was no mass exodus in one or two waves, such as in the Palestinian case in 1948, but a growing influx of individuals and families crossing borders with Iraq. From 2003 Syria had an open-door policy towards Iraqis, whom the government views as Arab citizens and whom it has not attempted to expel. In October 2007 measures to restrict entry of Iraqi refugees were implemented, however. Refugees have access, with some restrictions, to public education and health services. All are located in urban areas – no refugee camps exist, except for those accommodating a few hundred Palestinians from Iraq, who have been settled in three sites on the Iraqi border. One of them, Al Tanf, closed in February 2010, while Al Hol camp in Syria still holds more than 400 Palestinians (UNHCR 2010). A UNHCR report of 2003 recalls the situation of Iraqis in Syria before 2003: The Iraqi refugees in the Syrian Arab Republic are mostly of Arab ethnicity, 70% are Shias originating from the southern part of Iraq, around 15% are Sunnis and the remainder are Kurds, Assyrians from Baghdad and Basrah, Turkomen from the Khanaquin region and Yazidis from the Sinjar area. Some 2,400 Iraqis have been granted or are being considered for refugee status by UNHCR. Furthermore, there are around 60,000–70,000 Iraqis who have never approached UNHCR or have been denied refugee status through the UNHCR refugee status determination process and continue to reside illegally in the country, tolerated by the Syrian authorities. Most Iraqis in Syria are concentrated in the Saida Zeineb quarter in Damascus located near prominent Shia shrines. (2003: 6)

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Since 2003, the situation has changed dramatically and Iraqis are now located in most Damascus suburbs and in neighbouring cities.

GROWING IRAQI PRESENCE IN SYRIA Some attempts to restrict the entry of Iraqis in Syria have been implemented periodically. In 2007, the duration of the visa granted to the Iraqi citizens at the border was reduced to one month renewable (having previously been three months renewable). Since 11 September 2007 Iraqis wishing to enter Syria have been required to apply for visas, the measure being postponed and finally implemented on 1 October 2007. Only Iraqis entering the country for commercial, transport, scientific and education purposes have obtained visas since the implementation of this procedure (UNHCR 2007a; UN News Center 2007). Some Iraqis have crossed Syria to travel to Lebanon but the number of Iraqis there remains low due to the strict entry regulation and the Lebanese government’s policy of detaining illegal migrants. According to a report of the Frontiers Association in Beirut: As Lebanon does not share borders with Iraq, there was no massive rush of Iraqis on the Lebanese borders. Most Iraqis pass through Syria before arriving in Lebanon […]. At the end of 2005, the Lebanese General Security granted visas for Iraqis at all border points if Iraqis could provide the following: a return non-refundable ticket, a hotel reservation or the address and phone number of a person in Lebanon, and US$2,000 in cash or in a bank account. Hence, Iraqis who fulfilled these conditions were admitted to Lebanon on temporary basis. Many Iraqis were unable to meet these conditions mostly because of financial reasons. As a result, most Iraqis are forced to enter Lebanon illegally in unsafe smuggling conditions and remain in illegality for the period of their stay. […] Even those who were granted entry visa face difficulties when they wish to prolong their stay in Lebanon. (2006: 19) Living costs, difficulties obtaining residency rights and political instability in Lebanon are the main elements that explain the relatively low Iraqi emigration from Syria. Recently arrived Iraqis from northern Iraq, mainly from the Mosul region, have arrived in Beirut and they arrived directly by plane from northern Iraq, avoiding passage across Syria. Karen Jacobsen comments that, ‘[t]he hidden, marginalized nature of urban refugees makes it difficult to make accurate estimates, and each “authoritative” source has its own agenda and set of reasons for the number it puts out’ (2006: 275). It is difficult to evaluate the foreign population living in Syria. The Syrian census of population of 2004 indicated an Arab non-Syrian population of 88,566 people – Palestinians are not included – (Syrian Population Census 2004). Arab nationals can reside without requiring a residency permit: they obtain a three-month visa when entering Syria; when it expires they may extend for another three months but must then leave Syria and cross the border again to obtain a new three-month visa. Syrian authorities, and the UNHCR and other international organizations, estimate the number of Iraqis in Syria at 1.2 to 1.4 million, an estimation which seems to be very high. As the vast majority do not hold a residency

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Source : UNHCR 2010.

Figure 1: Iraqis registered at the UNHCR (1993–October 2010).

card but have tourist visas (in fact they are considered as ‘guests’), the actual number of Iraqis in Syria is hard to assess (International Crisis Group 2008: 16; Leenders 2008: 103). In December 2005 a survey undertaken by the UNHCR, WFP and the UNICEF estimated the number of Iraqis at 450,000 (UNHCR 2006: 1). The Syrian authorities have recognized since the beginning of the conflict in Iraq that irregular migration is very difficult to control, even if the number of people apprehended for illegal residence remains very low – around 300 individuals per year (Simon 2006: 34). In September 2007 Syrian authorities confirmed that they would not deport Iraqi refugees. Nevertheless, as shown in the table below, the number of Iraqis registered by the UNHCR in Syria reached some 230,000 in 2008, declining since 2009. This figure probably corresponds to the actual number of Iraqis in Syria. The strong disparity in the estimates of the Iraqi refugee population is partly a result of means of categorization of Iraqi residents as well as political and economic opportunities. While the UNHCR registers ‘refugees’, the Syrian authorities do not recognize this status; rather, the agency counts Iraqi citizens. Some Iraqis in Syria may not consider themselves as refugees and/or do not consider themselves in need of assistance; hence, they do not register at the UNHCR – but these cases seems to be limited. Asked why Iraqis ‘chose’ Syria as a host country, most of my informants provided one or more of the following explanations: that Syria was the only country accepting Iraqi refugees; that they already had family or close relations in Syria; that life in Syria was affordable (compared for example with the northern districts of Iraq); or that they could obtain access to school and partial access to the health system.

REFUGEE STUDIES AND NETWORK ANALYSIS Network analysis provides an interesting framework that goes beyond juridical approaches imposed by the term ‘refugee’ and its meanings in international law. The Iraqi experience is a good illustration of this. Nadje Al-Ali notes that

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the Iraqi diaspora has developed since the 1970s and should be understood in the context of a diverse migratory setting: Iraq is a case in point, presenting a continuum of economically driven migrants, especially under economic sanctions (1991–2003) which were part of a political crisis together with political refugees fleeing the persecution, torture and repression of the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein (1979–2003). This is in the context of a longer history of various forms of migration – for education, labour and from persecution well before the rise of the Ba’th. (2007: 139) A huge diversity of social, legal and economic statuses and personal backgrounds coexists inside the formal category ‘Iraqi refugee’. Early attempts to build a general theoretical model on refugee issues focused mainly on push factors (e.g. Kunz 1973, 1981). More recent studies have emphasized the role of international relations in the production of refugee flows (e.g. Loescher 1990; Weiner 1993). Little attention has been paid to the dynamics generated by the refugees themselves, however. The duration of exile and the different kinds of interaction with host societies have also generated varying forms of mobility. Richmond stresses that: […] the distinction between free and forced or voluntary and involuntary is a misleading one. All human behavior is constrained. Choices are not unlimited but are determined by the structuration process. However, degrees of freedom may vary. Individual and group autonomy and potency are situationally determined. It would be more appropriate to recognize a continuum at one end of which individuals and collectivities are proactive and at the other reactive. (1994: 55)

1. For a synthetic approach to network analysis related to migration see Ma Mung et al. (1998: 12). 2. Thomas Faist comments: ‘Social capital denotes the transactions between individuals and groups that facilitate social action, and the benefits derived from these mechanisms. It is primarily a local asset and can be transferred cross-nationally only under specific conditions’ (2000: 15). 3. ‘Le champ migratoire est, ici, défini comme l’ensemble de l’espace structuré par les flux migratoires et relationnels, espace parcouru, pratiqué, vécu par les populations migrantes’/‘The migratory field is defined as the whole space structured by migratory and relational flows, a space that is traveled through, frequented, lived by the migrant’s population’ (Simon 2000).

Network analysis of migration is a growing field of interest (Durand 1994; Fawcett 1989; Kritz and Zlotnik 1992; Massey et al. 1993).1 Thomas Faist (2000) observes that the analysis of migration in terms of migratory networks suffers from one main limitation: it does not tackle the question of the emergence of such networks. He considers that initially social capital2 is a factor that limits mobility; then, when migratory networks develop, it becomes a driving force of emigration. This analytical framework aids the understanding of Iraqi migratory dynamics from the Middle East to Europe. Since the 1970s many Iraqi refugees and migrants have emigrated to northern Europe. Forms of solidarity have developed in a transnational migratory field (Simon 2000),3 which supports and accelerates the emigration process. Faist notes that the installation of earlier migrants is a central element that permits the development of migratory networks because they ‘condense’ social capital (2000). Migration develops when social capital does not function only on a local scale, but also as a transnational transmission belt. Earlier Iraqi migrations helped to determine the present polarization of flows towards specific locations (such as Sweden, Australia, the United States, etc.), consolidating the central role of family networks. In recent years there has been growing interest in the relations between refugees and transnationalism (Shami 1996; Al-Ali et al. 2001; Black 2001; Koser 2002; Wahlbeck 2002). Studies of refugees’ transnational activities have contributed to analysis of the role of the state in shaping migrants’ networks, bringing the state back into most analyses. Black comments: ‘Focusing on the

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role played by refugees in transnational activities could help to dispel some of the more idealistic notions of transnationalism from below as a people-led process, which take advantage of processes of globalization and ease of travel in the modern world’ (2001: 66). For many Iraqis, the use of transnational networks is linked to their problems of access to local resources both in the departure country and in the transit countries (mainly Syria and Jordan) due to generalized violence in Iraq or socio-legal restrictions in transit countries. Sectarian violence, parallel to the rising sectarian divisions of the post-2003 Iraqi social and political spheres, has contributed to the development of religious-based networks as a resource. In addition, asylum policies in most of the European countries have encouraged the development of strategies that aim to circumvent restrictions on entry. Family and/or religious networks often appear as the only available resource to emigrate.

KINSHIP NETWORKS AND RELIGIOUS AFFILIATION Many authors have examined the relations between migratory networks and kinship, notably those concerning ‘economic’ migrants such as Algerians in France and family reunification in western countries (Montagne 1954; Choldin 1973; Katuszewski and Ogien 1981; Boyd 1989; Fawcett 1989). Some researchers in the Refugee Studies field have also pointed out the importance to host countries of family networks in processes of adaptation of forced migrants (e.g. Hansen 1981). In the Iraqi case, transnational migratory networks play a significant role in four principal fields: collection of the funds necessary to emigrate; ‘family reunification’ migration strategies; information flow between country of destination and country of departure; and adaptation of newcomers and/or the returnees. Minorities such as Christians or Mandaeans are over-represented in the registered refugee group, partly due to the efficiency of their migratory networks and the presence of diasporic links with western countries. As Van Hear notes, access to transnational networks and mobility becomes central in the development of coping strategies: Still other extended family may go abroad as labor migrants, asylum seekers, undocumented workers, or through other migratory channels to find work or incomes for themselves and the family. Such ‘strategies’, if they may be called this, may well be in place before displacement, but the portfolio of strategies is likely to be broader after displacement, sometimes of necessity, sometimes by new opportunities opening up. Access to social networks and mobility can be among refugees’ most important assets. (2006: 12) The earlier Iraqi presence in Syria may explain in part the pattern of movement of Christians or Shi’a Muslims, although my informants seem to rely more on kinship networks than on religious networks. The scale of movements since 2006 seems to have exceeded the network’s capacity to assist families and individuals. Nevertheless, pre-2003 migrants seem to have had an important impact on the geographical location of Iraqi religious groups in the Damascus urban area. Certain groups such as Assyrians try to reorganize themselves locally and to gather in certain neighbourhoods such as Jaramana, close to their church and other institutions. They try to recreate in exile forms of local solidarity that operate as a coping strategy.

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Following the Gulf War of 1991, Jordan was the main destination state for refugees from Iraq and a space of transit for more than 500,000 Iraqis who found refuge worldwide (Chatelard 2003). Today, Syria plays a similar role because of its flexible migratory policy, even if entry and residence policies have been tightened since October 2007. Among refugees, relations with Iraq remain strong, with many taxis, buses and trucks travelling between Damascus and Aleppo and the main Iraqi cities. The last episode of violence in autumn 2008 against the Christian Iraqis in Mosul led to the arrival of several hundred families in Syria. Solidarity networks play a significant role in the organization and the development of the Iraqi exodus, in both the country of departure and the host country. Their action is associated with various stages of the migratory process: they permit the mobilization of the funds necessary for the trip; they provide information on the country of destination; they facilitate adaptation of newcomers in the host country; they play a role in selection of the migrant from the departure country to fit the specific needs of host country; they help to circumvent legal constraints in the host countries; and they influence the destination location of migrants (Gurak and Caces 1992; Boyd 1989; Light 1993). Most families interviewed in Damascus have members of their close family settled abroad, countries cited most often being Australia, the United States, Sweden and Germany. Some family members receive remittances from close relatives who have been settled for a long time in their host country; many, however, arrived recently and are in the process of regularization or live solely on social welfare. This greatly limits their capacity to send money to help members of their family in Syria. Even when remittances are sent, they barely cover rental expenses: typically they amount to between US$100 and US$200 per month: this rarely allows a family to live.

4. A member of the Syriac Orthodox Church, of which there are small numbers in Iraq.

REFUGEE NARRATIVES I conducted interviews in Södertälje, Huddinge, Salem and in other neighbourhoods of Stockholm in June 2008 and April 2009. The situation in these areas, in which many Iraqis are concentrated, demonstrates the limited effectiveness of family- and community-based networks. On the one hand, thousands of Iraqis have managed to migrate to Sweden, where on arrival many have been supported by religious and/or family networks. On the other, most families are still scattered across different countries and family reunification seems difficult to achieve. The presence of Chaldaeans and Assyrians in Sweden since the mid-1970s, together with the development of religiousbased migrant organizations, contributes to the attractiveness of Sweden as a host country. Migration flows from northern Iraq have never stopped and continue to develop in response to the ongoing crisis in Iraq. Migratory itineraries of Iraqis are complex and comprise several stages. Refugees are compelled to adopt strategies of adaptation that address the difficulties they meet during their journey. Most family members have been separated over more or less long periods – some are still separated. A young Iraqi Syriac4 woman I met in April 2009 in Sednaya – a town 40 kilometres North of Damascus, is now living with her father-in-law and her two young children, having left Mosul a few weeks earlier. Her husband had left Iraq in 2005 and went to Sweden via Turkey. As she was pregnant with their second child she was not able to follow him but decided to wait for the opportunity for formal family reunification. But in October 2008 attacks against Iraqi Christians

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intensified and she had to leave Iraq hurriedly to find asylum in Syria, where she is waiting to join her husband in Sweden. There are many such narratives of family divided by war but also by the restrictive asylum policies of most of the main host countries. Certain families like that of this young Iraqi interviewed in Stockholm in April 2009 have been separated for several years because of the evolution of the Iraqi conflict and because of immigration rules that differentiate between minors and older children, with the result that families are split: I was born in Baghdad in 1978, my family is native of Dohuk in the North of Iraq. My father was a taxi driver. I have two sisters and two brothers. At the beginning of 1980s, members of my family left Iraq towards Germany, France and Canada, to avoid conscription and escape difficulties connected to the war. At the beginning of 1990s, my father wanted to leave, but he gave up when the situation improved in Bagdad, and we saw people in refugee camps in difficult situations. We were all young people in the family, my father thus decided to stay in Bagdad. I left Iraq during the summer 2006. I stayed one month in Syria, in Jaramana [a southern suburb of Damascus]. All my family lives today in Canada. My parents and my two younger brothers made a request of immigration for Canada since Iraq, they obtained the immigration in 2005. They went to Jordan to finish the procedure with the Canadian embassy and they left. My sister and I remained in Iraq, we were both adults at the time of the request, we were not thus accepted, and we had to make an individual request. We thus stayed in Bagdad. We made a request of family reunification, but it takes time. Meanwhile, we received threats in which we were asked to leave our house. I had a small store of photography, it was destroyed. One week later they attacked our house. We ran away towards Syria. We had relatives who were left to Damascus previously. They accommodated us a few nights then we rented an apartment in Jaramana. My parents helped us by sending us some money so that we can leave Syria. I appealed to a smuggler, and I was able to leave Syria with false papers. Each of us had to pay US$10,000 to leave. We stayed only one month in Syria. There are two main reasons why I decided to go to Sweden. First I had relatives already living there. Second, and this is the main reason, it is that here I could have quickly a resident’s permit. I did not want to stay without [a] paper. We have been welcomed here by our paternal cousins. They have lived in Sweden since the end of 1970s; others arrived during the 1990s. I settled down with my sister in Södertälje, in the south suburbs of Stockholm. We are now well enough here, even if our family is in Canada. It is here, I think, that I am going to make my life, we shall see later if I join them, but I learnt the language, I work and I am soon going to get married here. For all these reasons I do not think of leaving Sweden. Similar situations are found in Damascus, illustrated by the following examples that show the difficulty of reorganizing migratory networks when family links are disrupted: •

An Assyrian family that lives today in Damascus is in a very difficult economic and social situation. A young mother of two children left Iraq in 2006 after her husband, who was a photographer and possessed a

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•

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store, had to stop his activity. They share their apartment with the parents of her husband. Three of her brothers are in Australia. They first left Iraq for Turkey and then Greece to go from there to Australia, where they asked for asylum. Recently arrived in Australia, they are not able to send money to their family in Damascus. They are trying to cope with their own resettlement and furthermore they have to reimburse the expenses generated by their emigration journey. The family in Damascus has to pay a 10,000 Syrian pounds (US$200) rent a month. They manage thanks to the pension that the father-in-law of the interviewee, who resides in Syria, still receives and that is regularly sent to them from Iraq. Their family in Iraq also sends them basic food products, like rice, sent by taxis that connect Iraq to Damascus. Geographical dispersion of family members and the precariousness of their legal and economic situations results in the dislocation of family systems of solidarity. Strategies of survival have been established, with solidarity networks limited to meeting daily needs. A Chaldaean family, which also left Baghdad in 2006, lives today in part on money gathered from the sale of furniture and from savings brought from Iraq. Numerous members of their close family (uncle, aunt, cousin) have lived abroad (the United States, Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and Denmark) since the early 1980s and the start of the war with Iran. They maintain rather distant relations with family abroad and do not seek to contact them to ask for assistance. Of three children, two sons work in the construction sector for 6000 Syrian pounds (US$120) a month each; they have to pay 10,000 Syrian pounds (US$200) rent each month. Their major anxiety today is the end of savings brought from Iraq that allows them to pay for everyday life. Income earned by the two sons hardly covers the monthly rent of their apartment. At the beginning of March 2007, the brother of the woman interviewed left Baghdad with his wife and came to Syria to join them in their two-room apartment. Their emigration request to Australia was refused and they are now waiting for the implementation of the UNHCR resettlement programme. Another Assyrian family from Baghdad arrived in 2006 and is now settled in Damascus in a three-room apartment rented for 8000 Syrian pounds (US$160) a month. They had to stop work in Iraq because of security problems and decided to leave Baghdad. They live thanks to money sent to them by the father of the husband from Baghdad – around 15,000 Syrian pounds (US$300) a month. They did not find a job in Syria. The woman interviewed was doing embroidery at home but preferred to stop because earnings were too low. They left Iraq after having sold all their possessions there. They arrived in Damascus without any relatives or contact in the city and were steered towards Jaramana by other Iraqis whom they met accidentally in the street and by their taxi driver. They knew that they had some close family living in Damascus but they did not know where they were living, having totally lost contact since their departure from Iraq .While attending the Assyrian mass the husband recognized his sister-inlaw and was able to reactivate the contact. Later, while standing on their balcony, they recognized their former neighbours from Baghdad. They knew that their neighbours left for Damascus without knowing where they were actually living. They have close family in Sweden, Australia and in the United States, but all having left since 2003, they are not in contact at the moment.

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•

Their neighbours, also an Assyrian family who came from Baghdad in 2004, are living in a three-room apartment they rent for 7500 Syrian pounds (US$150) a month. They live thanks to the money brought from Baghdad and with income earned by the husband who works in a traditional fast-food job that he already had in Baghdad, for 250 Syrian pounds (US$5) a day. They have relatives in Australia but their request for emigration has been refused.

SYRIA, A STEP BEFORE RESETTLEMENT IN A THIRD COUNTRY For some Iraqis, Syria is only a step – a first country in which refugees find safety and try to pursue their itinerary towards a third country, where they can settle for the long term. This strategy of exile step by step is associated with the limited agendas of international organizations in Iraq, and the policy of neighbouring countries that do not offer permanent settlement, legal stay or access to employment. On arrival in Syria, refugees activate their family networks both locally and in the wider diaspora to obtain assistance and prepare for further movement. They settle down temporarily and precariously. Some try to emigrate illegally but most fail: many Iraqis lost large sums of money without being able to leave Syria. An Iraqi family interviewed in the suburb of Stockholm in April 2009 tells of their departure and the itinerary that led them to Sweden. We are now six in the family: myself, my wife and our four children who currently live in Sweden. I am 56 years old and my children are between 10 and 26 years. Our fifth child was killed in Baghdad in 2006 when he was 20 years old. We used to live between Baghdad and Mosul. I was employed in the oil sector, my wife was a teacher. In spite of the embargo and the war, our economic situation was good. I had a good position, we owned our house and we had a car. My older sons studied at the university. My son who was killed was a student at the University of Baghdad. After the arrival of the Americans in Iraq, the situation deteriorated, we lived many difficult moments because of the troubles and the fear. I had to move in various regions of Iraq for my work. I often went to Mosul and to Kirkuk. After 2003, it became risky to move because of the activity of the insurgents and the terrorist groups. These groups began to intimidate all the persons who worked for the State or for the Americans, especially the persons employed in key sectors such as the oil sector. They asked the employees to leave their work. We were working for Iraqi citizens and not for such-or-such a party or for the Americans. Nevertheless, I continued to work. At the end of 2005 and at the beginning of 2006, I received personal threats. As I am Christian I was perceived by those who where threatening me as being pro-American. We were afraid of moving in the city, even in our own neighbourhood. After the death of my son I decided that we should leave all for Syria. I had put my children under cover the while I was preparing the passports. We left at the end of 2006 and we stayed there a year and three months. We left for Syria, because it was the only country to have opened its doors to us, and especially for the persons who are not rich. It is very difficult to enter Turkey or Jordan. Besides, the country is not expensive compared with the nearby countries. And then it is rather easy to obtain a resident’s permit and to register his children in the school system. We had the

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impression we would be treated like Syrian citizens and not as foreigners. We settled down in Jaramana, where many Iraqis live and where the accommodation was relatively cheaper. We had close relatives who had left before us. They helped us to settle in Damascus. We also received some money from our family who lives in Canada and Australia. By leaving Iraq, we lost everything. First, we tried to emigrate illegally towards Europe but it did not work and we lost a lot of money. We thus stayed in Syria and we went to register at the UNHCR. We told them our story and we were rather quickly accepted to be resettled in Sweden. We would have preferred an English-speaking country to facilitate our integration in the labour market and especially that of our children who have already begun their university curriculum. We had made a request to emigrate to Canada where my sister has lived since the 1970s and to Australia where members of my family live – but we were refused. The Swedes noticed during our interview in Syria that we had many family members of my wife already in Sweden: I believe that it played in our favour.

5. ‘Operationally, UNHCR envisages submitting 20,000 Iraqi refugees for resettlement by December 31, 2007 […]. The figure of 20,000 compares with a total of 3,183 Iraqis resettled in the four year period 2003–2006’ (UNHCR 2007c: 1).

LIMITED ROLE OF RELIGIOUS NETWORKS Religious networks have only marginal effects in the present migration movement. Despite declarations from the Chaldaean church in Mosul asking Christians not to leave the country, violence against Christians in autumn 2008 led to the emigration of hundreds of Iraqis to Syria, Lebanon, Turkey and further abroad. Among my informants was a Chaldaean family that found asylum in the eastern suburbs of Beirut: they had tried to stay in Mosul as long as they could. The father had been working as a carpenter and despite waves of violence the family decided to stay because they were not targeted directly and also because they did not have the money to leave the country. In October 2008 they were directly threatened as Christians and decided to leave and seek refuge in villages around Mosul, where they have family members. After staying a while with their family they realized that it would be very difficult to find a job in this rural area. They then decided to spend the money they took with them to go to Beirut, having heard from a family member there that it was quite easy to find a job in Lebanon. They bought plane tickets from Erbil to Beirut. Upon arrival in Lebanon their relatives helped them to find an apartment and a job. They registered at the UNHCR to receive assistance and applied to be resettled in a third country. The Chaldaean church in Lebanon is a small organization: today it has more Iraqi refugees then Lebanese citizens in its parishes and provides very limited assistance to Iraqis. Possibilities for Iraqi refugees to emigrate to a third country are very limited and, with the growing Iraqi presence, the proportion of families managing to move on from Arab states is low. The UNHCR obtained a plan of resettlement allowing 20,000 Iraqis to emigrate towards western countries in 2007 – but this was to cover all Iraqi refugees in the Middle East and represents a fraction of those displaced in the region.5 A limited number of individuals re-emigrate to a second country like Lebanon, where one can find approximately 10,000 registered Iraqi refugees, or to Egypt, where more than 9000 registered Iraqi refugees are living in 2009 (Regional Response Plan for Iraqi Refugees, UNHCR 2010). A small number use diasporic networks and manage to emigrate by getting married to a partner who has obtained a residence permit in a western country and can bring his or her spouse through family reunification procedures. These practices are undertaken by

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only a minority of refugees, however. In the end, Syria appears as a dead end between return to Iraq (not a serious option for most refugees) or further migration to a third country – the clearly expressed wish of most of my informants.

CONCLUSION: LOCAL FORMS OF ‘INTEGRATION’, SHORT-TERM COPING STRATEGY OR PATH TOWARDS LONG-TERM SETTLEMENT? There are very important differences between Iraqi refugees, which are associated with their socio-economic status in Iraq, the religious groups to which they belong, their current places of residence and their standards of living. Religious and kin groups are more or less numerous, more or less organized and have varying degrees of connection to diasporic networks. Families are usually scattered: family and community networks are fragmented, although this can preserve intra-familial coherence. Families and communities are engaged in intensive efforts to reorganize themselves in exile. Many families are divided and live in several countries of exile in the Middle East and beyond. The period spent in Damascus does not constitute simply a waiting time but plays an important role in elaboration of the migratory project. Not all members of the same family have left Iraq at the same date. The family reunification process is formulated in Damascus, activating solidarity networks and facilitating settlement in the host country. Newcomers benefit by securing accommodation that they share with other members of their family and usually have less difficulty finding employment. They look forward to departure to a third country that will accept them, although the number of resettlements by the UNHCR remains rather low (around 22,600 between February 2007 and October 2010 – UNHCR 2010). Transnational migratory networks seem to play an important role for some groups like the Christians or the Mandaeans who emigrate in large numbers from Iraq – but my research suggests that in general their efficacy may be limited. Refugees with temporary status can stay for very long periods in host states, as in the case of some Iraqis in Jordan or for the Sudanese in Lebanon. But well-established refugees like Palestinians in Kuwait or in Libya can be expelled en masse during regional political crises. Migrants in the Middle East are often subject to a rapid change in their situation and strong local integration (through economic participation for example) does not always mean integration in the long term. In fact, economic participation can lead to empowerment of refugees in the sense that it provides them with means to undertake further migration. The Palestinian case in Lebanon shows that emigration (or resettlement) depends on access to resources. Most Iraqi migrants belong to groups with some connection to the diaspora and to local society in host states. Here local integration can be understood as part of an exit strategy and as a necessary stage before further migration.

REFERENCES Al-Ali, Nadje (2007), ‘Iraqi women in diasporic spaces: Political mobilization, gender and citizenship’, Revue des mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée, n° 117–118, pp. 137–153. Al-Ali, Nadje, Black, Richard and Koser, Khalid (2001), ‘Refugees and transnationalism: The experience of Bosnians and Eritreans in Europe’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 27: 4, pp. 615–34.

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Black, Richard (2001), ‘Fifty years of refugee studies: From theory to policy’, International Migration Review, 35: 1, pp. 57–78. Boyd, Monica (1989), ‘Family and personal networks in international migration: Recent developments and new agendas’, International Migration Review, 23: 87, pp. 638–69. Chatelard, Géraldine (2003), ‘Iraqi forced migrants in Jordan. Conditions, religious networks, and the smuggling process’, WIDER, Discussion Paper No. 2003/34, United Nations University, Helsinki. Choldin, Harvey M. (1973), ‘Kinship networks in the migration process’, International Migration Review, 7: 2, pp. 163–75. Dani¸s, Didem A. (2006), ‘Waiting on the purgatory, religious networks of Iraqi Christian transit migrants in Istanbul’, EUI Working Papers, RSCAS n 2006/25, http://cadmus.eui.eu/bitstream/handle/1814/6228/ RSCAS_2006_25.pdf?sequence=1. Accessed 7 March 2011. Durand, Marie-Françoise (1994), ‘Entre territoires et réseaux’ Between territories and networks, in Bertrand Badie and Catherine Withol de Wenden (eds), Le défi migratoire. Questions de relations internationales The migratory challenge. Questions of international relations, Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, pp. 141–57. Faist, Thomas (2000), The Volume and Dynamics of International Migration and Transnational Social Spaces, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Fawcett, James T. (1989), ‘Networks, linkages, and migration systems’, International Migration Review, 23: 3, pp. 671–80. Frontiers Association (2006), ‘Annual report. Refugee and migrant protection in Lebanon in 2006’, Frontiers Association, Beirut. Gurak, Douglas T. and Caces, Fe (1992), ‘Migration networks and the shaping of migration systems’, in Mary M. Kritz, Lin Lean Leam and Hania Zlotnik (eds), International Migration Systems. A Global Approach, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 150–76. Hansen, Art (1981), ‘Refugee dynamics: Angolans in Zambia 1966 to 1972’, International Migration Review, 15: 1/2, pp. 175–94. International Crisis Group (2008), ‘Failed responsibility: Iraqi refugees in Syria, Jordan and Lebanon’, Middle East Report No. 77, p. 16, http://www.crisisgroup.org/~/media/Files/Middle%20East%20North%20Africa/Iraq%20 Syria%20Lebanon/Iraq/ailed_responsibility___iraqi_refugees_in_syria__ jordan_and_lebanon.ashx. Accessed 7 March 2011. Jacobsen, K. (2006), ‘Editorial introduction. Refugees and asylum seekers in urban areas: A livelihoods perspective’, Journal of Refugee Studies, 19: 3, pp. 273–286. Katuszewski, Jacques and Ogien, Ruwen (1981), Réseaux d’immigrés. Ethnographie de nulle part Immigrants’ networks. Ethnography of nowhere, Paris: Les éditions ouvrières (coll. Politique et sociale). Koser, Khalid (2002), ‘From refugees to transnational communities?’, in Nadje Al-Ali and Khalid Koser (eds), New Approaches to Migration? Transnational Communities and the Transformation of Home, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 138–52. Kritz, Mary M. and Zlotnik, Hania (1992), ‘Global interactions: Migration systems, processes, and policies’, in Mary M. Kritz, Lin Lean Leam and Hania Zlotnik (eds), International Migration Systems. A Global Approach, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 177–89. Kunz, Egon F. (1973), ‘The refugee in flight: Kinetic models and forms of displacement’, International Migration Review, 7: 2, pp. 125–46.

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—— (1981), ‘Exile and resettlement: Refugee theory’, International Migration Review, 15,: 1/2, pp. 42–51. Leenders, R. (2008), ‘L’adieu aux armes: la politique des réfugiés irakiens et son impact sécuritaire sur la région’ A Farewell to Arms: the politics of Iraqi refugees and its security impact on the region, Maghreb-Machrek, 198, pp. 93–122. Light, Ivan (1993), ‘Migration networks and immigrant entrepreneurship’, in I. Light (ed.), Immigration and Intrepreneurship: Culture, Capital and Ethnic Networks, New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, pp. 25–49. Loescher, Gil (1990), ‘Introduction: Refugee issues in international relations’, in Gil Loescher and Laila Monahan (eds), Refugees in International Relations, Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 1–33. Ma Mung, E., Doraï, M. K., Loyer, F. and Hily, M. (1998), ‘La circulation migratoire’ Migratory circulation, Migrations études, 84, Décembre, p. 12. Marx, Emmanuel (1990), ‘The social world of refugees: A conceptual framework’, Journal of Refugee Studies, 3: 3, pp. 189–203. Massey, Douglas S. Joaquin Arango, Graeme Hugo, Ali Kouauci, Adela Pellegrino and Edward Taylor (1993), ‘Theories of international migration: A review and appraisal’, Population and Development Review, 19: 3, pp. 431–66. Montagne, Robert (1954), ‘Etude sociologique de la migration des travailleurs musulmans d’Algérie en France. Cahier liminaire’, in Robert Montagne (ed.), Etude sociologique de la migration des travailleurs musulmans d’Algérie en France, Cahier liminaire, Paris: Ministère de l’Intérieur, pp. 3–33. Richmond, Anthony H. (1994), Global Apartheid. Refugees, Racism, and the New World Order, Toronto, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Simon, Gildas (2000), ‘Le concept de champ migratoire’ The concept of migratory field, in Table ronde GEOFORUM: Champs migratoires et structures urbaines, Aix-en-Provence, 26–27 Mai 2000. Simon, Julien (2006), ‘Irregular transit migration in the mediterranean: Facts, figures and insights’, in N. Sørensen (ed.), Mediterranean Transit Migration, Copenhagen: Danish Institute for International Studies, pp. 25–65. Shami, Seteney (1996), ‘Transnationalism and refugee studies: Rethinking forced migration and identity in the Middle East’, Journal of Refugee Studies, 9: 1, pp. 3–26. Smith, Michael Peter (2002), ‘Preface’, in Nadje Al-Ali and Khalid Koser (eds), New Approaches to Migration? Transnational Communities and the Transformation of Home, London and New York: Routledge, pp. xi–xv. UN News Center (2007), ‘Iraqis prevented from entering Syria by new visa rules, UN refugee agency says’, 11 September, UN News Center. UNHCR (2003), Preliminary Repatriation and Reintegration Plan for Iraq, Geneva: UNHCR. —— (2006), Assessment on the Situation of Iraqi Refugees in Syria, Geneva: UNHCR. —— (2007a), Syria: UNHCR Advocating for Increased Bilateral Aid and ‘Humanitarian Visas’ for Iraqi Refugees, Geneva: UNHCR. —— (2007b), Syria Assures UN It Will Not Forcibly Deport Iraqi Refugees Under New Visa System, Geneva: UNHCR. —— (2007c), Resettlement of Iraqi Refugees, Geneva: UNHCR. —— (2010), UNHCR Syria Update, Geneva: UNHCR. Van Hear, Nicholas (2006), ‘Refugees in diaspora: From durable solutions to transnational relations’, Refuge, 23: 1, pp. 9–15.

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Wahlbeck, Östen (2002), ‘The concept of diaspora as an analytical tool in the study of refugee communities’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 28: 2, April, pp. 221–38. Weiner, Myron (1993), ‘Introduction: Security, stability and international migration’, in Myron Weiner (ed.), International Migration and Security, Boulder: Westview Press, pp. 1–35.

SUGGESTED CITATION Doraï, M. K. (2011), ‘Iraqis in exile: Migratory networks as a coping strategy’, International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies 5: 2, pp. 215–229, doi: 10.1386/ijcis.5.2.215_1

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS Mohamed Kamel Doraï is a researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) currently based at Migrinter, University of Poitiers (France) after four years at the French Institute for the Near East (IFPO) in Damascus. His work focuses on refugees in the Middle East, new migrations and geopolitical reorganization in the Middle East. He is the author of numerous publications on migration and refugee issues in the Middle East, including Les réfugiés palestiniens du Liban: Une géographie de l’exil (2006). Contact: 10 rue d’argent, 86000 Poitiers, France. E-mail: [email protected]

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IJCIS 5 (2) pp. 231–245 Intellect Limited 2011

International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies Volume 5 Number 2 © 2011 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/ijcis.5.2.231_1

ALI ALI University of East London

Displacement and statecraft in Iraq: Recent trends, older roots 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

ABSTRACT

KEYWORDS

This article discusses the relationship between state formation and refugees, linking statecraft – the ‘art’ of state building – and displacement in post-2003 Iraq. It uses the testimonies of displaced Iraqis now living in Syria to show how parties and militias in Iraq targeted specific groups, including religious minorities such as the Mandaeans. They created new forms of exclusion, forcing some communities to flee. In some cases, they compelled people to leave abruptly; in others, hostile forces gradually encroached upon the target groups. Some organizations had their origins in pre-2003 dynamics and were not the first in Iraq to use displacement as a means to implement a political design.

Iraq refugees statecraft militias sectarianism Mandaeans

REFUGEES AND STATECRAFT It is the aim of some political projects to prompt human displacement. Political movements or state authorities that wish to seize strategic resources, or are committed to exclusivist claims on territory, have often assaulted local populations in order to make resources available for commercial exploitation or to achieve ‘cleansing’. Less obvious as a driver of displacement is ‘statecraft’ – the ‘art’ of government.1 For centuries those engaged in the exercise of authority within nation states, or those who wish to enjoy such authority, have developed strategies associated with mass displacement. This is especially clear

1. See Soguk’s use of Foucault’s approaches to governmentality, states and statecraft in the context of mass displacement (1999).

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2. This article is based on field research conducted in Damascus in 2010 and 2011, examining decision-making processes among Iraqi refugees. Participants’ names have been changed. 3. For an account of both warnings and preparations for mass displacement see Marfleet (2007).

in periods when nation states are under construction, or during periods of instability, reorganization or reconstruction of the state. Such developments have been common in the Middle East. Repeated episodes of displacement have taken place over the past 150 years, related to imperial policies, colonial encounters and, in the mid-twentieth century, to struggles for national independence (Chatty 2010). In the case of Iraq they are evident from the first years of the British Mandate and have been a feature of modern Iraqi history (Chatelard 2011; Marfleet 2011). When a new order began taking shape after the invasion and occupation of 2003 a series of displacements began, eventually becoming a mass exodus. This article considers the experiences of some of those affected and examines the impacts of socio-political reconstruction on families and communities. It draws upon the testimonies of Iraqi refugees, including those of Sabean-Mandaean refugees living in Damascus.2 Changes involved in the construction or the reconfiguration of a nation state may entail abolition of an old regime. Zolberg comments that during the course of these events ‘entire social strata may come to be viewed as obstacles’ (1983: 30–31). This process typically entails ‘successive refoundings … each of which may result in a refugee-generating crisis’ (Zolberg 1983: 30–31). The aristocrats and clergy who fled France after the revolution of 1789 were refugees of this kind. Soguk (1999: 74) notes that their displacement was ‘symptomatic’ of statecraft. Power relations had been realigned under a new rubric, which provided for novel forms of eligibility and ineligibility. The revolution invented ‘the national citizen and the legally homogeneous national citizenry’; at the same time it also invented ‘the foreigner’ (Soguk 1999: 74). Essentially, to craft and empower the notions of national citizen, indispensable new forms of foreignness also had to be constructed. Thousands were displaced after the revolution, but this was part and parcel of the process of inventing the nation-state. The new France cast out those falling victim to the readjustments that produced the new category of ‘foreigner’. (Soguk 1999: 75–76) Numerous displacements from France involved people deemed to be incompatible with the new republican project. There have been many similar episodes: in the Middle East, the formation of new state entities from the debris of the Ottoman Empire produced a series of expulsions, notably those associated with the emergence and consolidation of the Turkish nation state. The case of Palestine can also be seen as an example of state-building on the basis of inclusions and exclusions that involved traumatic mass expulsion. Over the past 50 years, however, most displacements in the region have been associated with wars between states and with internal conflicts such as those that affected Turkey, Cyprus and Lebanon in the 1970s and 1980s, and Algeria in the 1990s. Recent events in Iraq reflect an older pattern of change – one in which those who challenge for power during a period of state re-formation engage in forms of political action that require mass exclusion.

INVASION AND OCCUPATION During the long build-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 there were many predictions that military conflict would produce a refugee crisis.3 In fact, few Iraqis moved as a result of war; rather, mass displacement was an outcome of

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processes initiated after the invasion by the United States and its appointees in the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). Within weeks of the invasion they had introduced radical reforms. For decades Iraq had been a one-party state; the Ba’ath was the only legal party and membership was crucial to career chances with the country’s biggest employers: the state bureaucracy; state agencies and welfare services, and state-owned corporations, commercial and industrial enterprises. CPA Order Number l, DeBa’athification of Iraqi Society, ‘disestablished’ the Ba’th Party, removing its senior members from all state bodies. CPA Order Number 2, Dissolution of Entities, dissolved the armed forces and many state bodies including the ministries of defence, military affairs and information, rendering some 350,000 people jobless without compensation (Marfleet 2007: 405). Vast numbers of Iraqis deemed to belong to the old order were instantly marginalized and entire communities reliant on income from the state were thrown into crisis. At the same time, a campaign of retribution received semi-formal backing from CPA officials, who gave a ‘green light’ to looting of state resources and to attacks on the intelligentsia of the Ba’thist era – members of professional, academic and technical networks including educators, doctors, engineers, journalists, writers and artists.

4. The Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) was also known as the Supreme Assembly for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. It changed its name in 2007 to the Supreme Islamic Council of Iraq and is therefore referred to in this article as The Supreme Council (SC). See ICG (2007) and Faleh Jabar (2003) for comprehensive details of the SC.

They were guilty by association for having worked within the apparatus of state, for having remained in Iraq through the years of sanctions and hardship, and for not having become exiles. Most important, they were deemed to be people of influence who did not have a place within the new order and who could be targeted with impunity .... Had they too become objects of contemporary statecraft – marginalised and excluded during reconstruction of the nation-state? (Marfleet 2010: 227) State properties including schools, colleges, technical institutes, university campuses, depots, ministries and military bases were looted openly, sometimes with US troops standing by (Chandrasekaran 2007). Thousands of people were attacked at their homes or workplaces; there were countless abductions, kidnappings and disappearances, many perpetrated by plainclothes gangs whose activities recalled the reign of terror favoured by Central American regimes in the 1970s and 1980s. Meanwhile the CPA pursued policies of abrupt economic change that made millions of people much more insecure (Klein 2004, 2007; Marfleet 2007). In 2004 widespread displacement began as both fear and insecurity spread rapidly. In 2005, as restructuring of the state gathered pace on the basis of ethno-religious agendas, which prompted the intensification of communalist hostilities, the crisis became systemic. Reconstruction of Iraq soon detached millions of people from their homes.

TARGETING THE OLD ORDER Among the first to take flight were those with senior positions in the former state. Belonging to the old order, they were seen as obstacles by those whom Chatelard (2011) refers to as ‘would-be state actors’. These aspired to control the emerging state and wished to shape its formation to their benefit. One of the most powerful groups was the Supreme Council (SC).4 It had suffered from a legitimacy deficit stemming in part from its close relationship with Iran, having been formed there during the Iran–Iraq war with the aim of

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5. Either from a university or a technical institute.

overthrowing the Ba’th regime and establishing an Islamic theocracy in Iraq. After the 2003 invasion it succeeded in convincing credulous US officials of its influence in Shi’a communities: Visser (2008: 32) comments on a startling success in ‘exploiting the predictions of western governments for an ethnosectarian reading of Iraqi society’. The SC took over a reformed Interior Ministry, its military arm the Badr Organization (formerly the Badr Corps, Faylaq Badr) assuming control of police commando units. There was soon a steep increase in killings of Sunni Iraqis that could not be explained as counter-insurgency. Men dressed in police or military uniforms carried out night raids in Sunni areas, seizing men later found in secret detention centres or in mortuaries, their bodies bearing evidence of torture. The Badr Brigades were widely suspected of carrying out these attacks. Meanwhile special police units believed by many Iraqis to be composed of Badr members became death squads implicated in attacks on people associated with the old regime (ICG 2006b: 3, 17–18). The International Crisis Group notes that ‘Assassinations multiplied of former regime elements, as well as of senior officers in the old army and pilots who had flown in the Iran-Iraq war’ (ICG 2007: 13). Shi’as were not immune if they were deemed to belong to the old order. One such man was Abu S., a director in the Ministry of Health in a southern Iraqi province. He had worked in the ministry for many years before assuming responsibility for managing a provincial blood bank and immunization scheme. In April 2004 the Badr militia attacked his home while he and his family were inside, using rifles and other light weapons. They escaped to a neighbour’s house, eventually moving to another location a few streets away. That house was subsequently attacked and the family had to stay with relatives elsewhere in the province but they too were threatened. A note was left at their home, saying ‘you are looking after wanted people’. Abu S. and his family moved to Baghdad to find safety (17 August 2010 interview). Sayf, also from the South of Iraq, worked as an assistant to a senior figure in the energy sector. He was a Ba’th Party member, as was his wife, who held a senior position in the Student Union closely associated with Uday Saddam Hussein. Both lost their jobs in 2003 because of de-Ba’athification: neither was compensated or given any form of pension but both hoped to remain in the country. When their house was attacked and burned, and in the light of attacks on other Ba’th members, Sayf left directly for Syria. His wife stayed in a safe house in his hometown until he was able to make a visit to Baghdad; there they met and left again for Syria where they have remained (13 July 2010 personal communication). Threats did not always come without a warning, nor were they aimed exclusively at those with high positions. Hassan, a Shi’a from Karbala, left Iraq for Syria believing that he was a victim of the Badr Brigades. He explained that Karbala was politically ‘one of the black provinces’ because of the uprisings there against Saddam Hussein in 1991. He had initially left Iraq before the invasion, returning in 2002. Before the fall [of Saddam’s regime], graduates of Tourism and Hotel Management5 would all go and work for the Iraqi intelligence services. But us, coming from the ‘black’ provinces, we weren’t allowed to work in the intelligence services at all. After the fall, people came with an agenda but without experience. So when someone comes to apply for a job and they see that he is a Tourism graduate, they’re sure he worked for the former regime. You can explain it to him, show him the evidence,

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that you left Iraq before the fall, that you are from this province, that you are from this family, that your brother and cousin were executed by the former regime, and then he’ll leave you alone. But he’ll get you in a different way. He won’t allow you to get a government job ... The threats come in different ways. Perhaps someone will come to you and ask if you belong to a certain political movement. If not, then you can’t get the post. Sign up for the post, and they’ll give you the position. After a while, maybe you’ll find a way to get the job, through a connection somehow. Then someone will come and tell you that the boss belongs to the so and so party. If you start working for him, he may do something to you and your family. Then comes the message ... I got a telephone call. They said ‘you’ve applied for this post and you’re a graduate of tourism. We can spread slander about you – that you used to work in a certain place,6 so forget about your degree’. I really was afraid. (25 October 2010 interview)

6. Referring to the intelligence services of the former regime, a dangerous association in Karbala after 2003. 7. This episode echoes forced migrations in the previous regime. It is common in the stories of Iraqis, who left before the fall of Saddam’s regime, to hear of a friend with contacts in the intelligence services who warns them of an imminent arrest in time to flee.

After hearing about this phone call, his father told him to leave immediately. He left for Baghdad to stay with his sister but the security situation there was becoming worse. By 3pm people would be hiding in their homes, so where would I be able to work? People from Baghdad were leaving. That was in 2004. So I had to leave ... I could see that my sister and her sons wanted to get away as well. Then the Sunni-Shi’a issue started and my sister said she was going to return to Kerbala ... Going to Damascus was the only way to safety. (25 October 2010 interview) Baghdad, however, was a particularly dangerous place. Sara, whose late father was a retired colonel in the Iraqi Air Force, also left Iraq in 2004. He had received elite pilot training in France and served in the Iran–Iraq war. He had also been a victim of regime violence when in the early 1990s he turned down a request to join the intelligence services and received third-degree burns as a result of a car bomb. In 2004, the family received threatening messages from the Badr Brigade. However, it was not until they were shown a hit list with her father’s name on it that they left the country: My father’s name was number three on the list. It was a list of I think over 50 persons who were working in the military. They said that he’d dropped bombs on Qom and Tehran in Iran ... This list was brought to us by some guy who knows them, who has some contacts within the militia. This guy said, ‘you have to leave, it’s serious. Your name is the third on this list. Look at it’. The ‘guy’ had married the daughter of a close friend of Sara’s mother and wanted to help her family by giving them time to flee the danger.7 After he saw the list her father telephoned three friends whose names he also recognized in order to warn them. The family soon left for Syria. In a typical story Sara relates the complexities of their departure and the tragedies associated with it. First, her father and brother went to her aunt’s home in Al Adhamiya, a Sunni neighbourhood off-limits to Shi’a militias. After six days, Sara and the

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family set off for Syria, her father learning that most of the people he knew on that list had indeed been killed. Later, he mysteriously disappeared on his way to Baghdad with a friend during a trip to complete paperwork relating to his pension (19 July 2010 interview). Dentists and medical professionals were in special danger. On 14 Ramadan Street in Baghdad there were a number of clinics. Dr H, a dentist, had an evening clinic there until 2006 when kidnappings and killings began to peak. Killings began in the afternoon, starting around 4 p.m. in the searing heat. The streets would be empty; hence it was a good time for attacks. Several of Dr H’s patients were killed and he saw a body close to his clinic. Later a man who worked as a laboratory technician was shot on the street: the assailants used silencers on their guns and did not take his valuable car, suggesting that the attack was an assassination. Dr H closed the clinic, losing a significant part of his income and turning to his daytime work with the government (12 August 2010 interview). These attacks were associated with efforts to purge the old order: medical professionals, for example, appear to have been targeted because of their status and because their training had been funded by the old regime. They were victims of a process in which those aspiring for influence in the state were pursued on the basis that they were enemies of a new order. As Zolberg noted, these processes have ambitious goals and can be protracted. First, individuals associated with the former regime are targets; later whole groups perceived as obstacles to the new order are identified as enemies. In the next section, I examine how mass displacement after 2003 was associated with dynamics that originated in an earlier period.

CONTINUITY AND SECTARIAN OPPORTUNITY The modern Iraqi state in its many forms has been ‘the main entity responsible for involuntary migration inside and outside the country’ (Chatelard 2011). In this sense there is continuity before and since the invasion of 2003. Direct intervention by US forces in 2004 produced major episodes of displacement, notably during battles at Falluja; subsequent mass displacement was, however, primarily an outcome of agendas pursued by would-be state actors. Mobilizing sectarian politics in their quest to acquire power, they directed violence ‘against the confessional, ethnic and class composition of entire urban and rural areas, displacing populations inside and outside the country, and forcing others to be immobilised’ (Chatelard 2011). Some secured powerful positions within the apparatus of state, becoming part of the architecture of the new Iraq; others were declared alien to the project of state-building, becoming objects of official hostility. The combined effect was a generalization of insecurity that produced huge population movements within Iraq and beyond its borders. The national political structures of the new order emerged from a profound crisis of displacement in which those who contested state power wilfully expelled people en masse: to this extent the new order had much in common with the Ba’thist regime, which for decades had used mass displacement as an instrument of rule. To understand the influence of communalist organizations that rose to prominence at this period we must consider earlier developments. Harling advises us neither to overstate nor to ignore the role of the American occupation: The invasion revealed, enabled, and exacerbated pre-existing phenomena more often than it generated them in and of itself … Some of the

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more dramatic recent developments in Iraq stemmed from undercurrents largely unnoticed during the former regime, which only accelerated as the post-invasion power structure evolved. (2010: 4–5)

8. For a detailed examination of the sanctions regime, its economic impact and the US’s role, see Gordon (2010).

The assault on the Iraqi state in 2003 was unprecedented in scale and intensity but the latter’s swift collapse was rooted in years of sanctions and international isolation. The sanctions regime was imposed under the authority of the United Nations after Iraq invaded Kuwait and remained in place until the invasion. It caused hundreds of thousands of deaths, destroyed the nation’s economy and its education and health care systems, and reduced a ‘sophisticated country’ to the level of ‘the poorest of the poor’ (Gordon 2010: 87).8 Policies of the United States were ‘extreme and harsh … going well beyond the mandate of the Security Council’s resolutions’ (Gordon 2010: 235). The US strategists had decided that Iraqis would bear the cost of American political dilemmas over how to deal with the regime in Baghdad. The Iraqi government was able to mitigate the effects of the embargo but was unable to avoid the human catastrophe (Gordon 2010: 127–30). Measures to increase food production, together with a national system of rationing, prevented famine and the regime encouraged expansion of private health care to compensate in part for the collapse of state provision. There was an emergency reconstruction programme to restore electricity, water and telecommunications services damaged in the 1991 bombing campaign (Gordon 2010: 130). However, these were not enough. The state was unable to deal effectively with the changed circumstances (Gordon 2010: 132–33). In 2003 the richest and militarily most powerful state worldwide invaded another state it had spent years enfeebling. Harling (2010: 2) speaks of a desolate post-invasion landscape in which state institutions had been thoroughly looted and in which there were no viable ‘internal’ political parties. When exiled politicians returned they discovered that they had no significant social base. Having failed to articulate an ideological vision in the diaspora during the 1990s they now faced a crisis of credibility. Jabar noted that Shi’a exile movements were already focused on what they saw as a window of opportunity offered by the invasion to ‘reshape the political order and ultimately Islamize power and/or redress communal grievances’ (2003: 18). In this situation, he warned, ‘a communal-based politics, or an Iranian type of fundamentalist-authoritarian rule would trigger Sunni fundamentalist responses, risk a communal cleavage and threaten secularism’ (2003: 21). Sectarian politics, endorsed by the occupation authorities, allowed former exiles to compensate for their status as outsiders (Harling 2010: 3). Eventually they were rewarded by control over key government resources, so that after the April 2005 national election (the first since the invasion) ‘sectarian logic began to dictate the staffing and work of new ministries. Most became party fiefdoms, first and foremost’ (ICG 2006b: 19).

TOWARDS MASS DISPLACEMENT Between 2003 and the election of April 2005 there were numerous suicide attacks in Shi’a areas, almost certainly the work of Sunni cells, notably Tandhim al-Qa’ida fi Bilad al-Rafidayn/al-Qa’ida’s Organization in Mesopotamia and Jaysh Ansar al-Sunna/Partisans of the Sunna Army (ICG 2006b: 2). Shi’a leaders argued publicly for restraint, urging support for electoral activity which

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9. The Baghdad quarters of Shu’la, Fadhila and Washash are similarly places where Sadrists have strong support.

they believed would shortly secure them a large majority. When the April 2005 poll brought victory for the Shi’a–Kurdish alliance, together with much wider access to institutions of the state, the picture changed dramatically, with a steep increase in killings of Sunnis involving death squads often believed to involve police or men in military uniform. There was promptly ‘an alarming descent into sectarian discourse and violence’ (ICG 2006b: 3). All sides used increasingly inflammatory rhetoric, attacking mosques, seizing individuals and groups based on real or imagined ethno-religious affiliation, and compelling mass exit from towns and neighbourhoods. Meanwhile in the poor Shi’a quarters of Baghdad other forces were at work that produced a different form of ‘internal’ opposition. Here Muqtada al-Sadr had succeeded in building the Jaysh al-Mahdi militia (JAM), also a key player in processes of displacement. Sadr City (formerly ‘Saddam City’ and ‘Revolution City’) had its origins in migrations to the capital of landless peasants from southern Iraq (Batatu 2004: 134); by 1986 it accounted for more than a quarter of the city’s population, many still living in Baghdad’s worst slums (Batatu 1986: 182–84). The public transport system did not extend to Saddam City, water was scarce and residents had very low standards of education. People of the area suffered particularly badly under the international embargo. Further migration from the South ensued in the 1990s thanks to the regime’s policy of draining the marshes, and new waves of rural migrants merged with previous ones (Harling 2010: 14–15).9 After 2003 it was renamed Sadr City, in honour of Muhammad Baqir As-Sadr and Muhammad Sadiq As-Sadr, both politically active Shi’a clerics murdered by Saddam’s regime in 1980 and 1999, respectively. The Ba’thists thought that Sadiq could become an accommodating Shi’a leader and from 1993 he was given regime support. He adopted a defiant stand, however, attacking the regime and the quietist clerical elite, and advocating a more vocal and militant approach against the injustices faced by Iraq’s impoverished Shi’as. With an ascetic lifestyle, and genuine eagerness to listen to the latters’ concerns, he stood out from the traditional clerical elite. He soon led an authentic social movement, bringing to the fore a deep split within Iraqi Shi’a politics (ICG 2006c: 3–6). Today’s Sadrists are the heirs to Sadiq. Muqtada was at first dismissed and excluded from the political process by US officials, who soon had to acknowledge the reality of the Sadrists’ strength after deadly clashes with his followers. The Sadr movement had deep roots but its material assets were scant. Unlike SC, it had not aligned with a foreign sponsor, receiving only limited support from Iran. Its followers, traditionally disenfranchised, saw Muqtada as a spokesman who contested their marginalization within the emerging political order (ICG 2006c: i). Some also benefited directly from their engagement with the JAM. Sadiq had centralized assets, redistributing them in clientelist fashion; Muqtada, with limited resources, operated a system that ‘allow[ed] his followers to take direct possession of whatever resources they can acquire – a far more fluid leadership style in which he directs less than he referees and adjudicates’ (ICG 2006c: 18–19). The JAM was undisciplined and difficult to manage, with Muqtada ‘unable to prevent a steady flow of dissent and disorder at all levels’ (IGC 2006c: 20). During the worst days of conflict in 2006 and 2007, JAM militiamen damaged the movement’s popular base with brutal acts of sectarian plunder and killing, seriously affecting its claims to be part of a nationalist movement. Its heavy involvement in the civil war became a valuable source of revenue: JAM profited from selling protection to merchants and from the assassination of Sunnis (ICG 2008a: 6). Many people were kidnapped or killed (or both) and the militia occupied and retained

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properties for its own purposes. Its activities contributed substantially to the generalization of fear and to mass displacement. The new sectarian-oriented setting left Iraq’s Sunnis devoid of credible political representation. The United States supported the SC and Kurdish political groups directly.10 The occupation took more antagonizing forms in predominantly Sunni areas, further marginalizing them. Sunni Arab political identity could only organize itself underground in radical opposition to the emerging political order. Many of Iraq’s despairing Sunni youth then joined these clandestine movements including Al Qa’ida, the Islamic Army of Iraq and other small groups (Harling 2010: 11–12; ICG 2006a: 2–3).11 ICG comments on the implications for displacement: Al-Qaeda in Iraq’s methods were excessively brutal, its goal being to fuel ever-intensifying sectarian strife, fear and instability. It systematically targeted Shiite civilians, killed police officers and other civil servants and even coerced Sunni civilians to the point where most were forced to flee. (ICG 2008b: 17) Al Qa’ida’s methods isolated them from the other Sunni groups. It desired continuous conflict and disorder, seeking to take the battle to apocalyptic levels. Other armed groups across ethno-religious communities had a different but also brutal rationale, seeking to acquire and hold key positions in the urban landscape. They combined a will to commit horrific acts against civilians with a sometimes ‘sophisticated understanding of the socio-economic factors at play’ to engage in systematic sectarian ‘cleansing’ (Harling 2010: 17–18). Meanwhile, they catered deftly to the needs of those displaced from other neighbourhoods.

THREAT OF MILITIAS Parties and militias with roots pre-dating the invasion became rival forces that, after 2003, created a climate in which millions found themselves under relentless pressure to flee. Here we see how the latent potentials of such groups were realized by the invasion and the environment created by occupation authorities. It was in this process that, to paraphrase Zolberg (1983: 30–31), entire social strata came to be viewed as obstacles to political change. For individuals targeted by the militias it became increasingly clear that they were being swept up by general offensives on ethno-religious communities. Dr H’s displacement, described above, came in phases. First, he was forced to close his evening clinic. Then there came encroachments on his neighbourhood by JAM. The doctor was a Sunni Arab living in a confessionally mixed middle-class neighbourhood close to Al Washash.12 He knew all the people on his street who used to celebrate collectively on special occasions. The local library was close to his home. After the invasion it became a husseiniya13 and in 2004 an office for Sadr’s movement. Soon armed patrols began as the Sadrists ‘guarded’ the neighborhood. People were seized and taken to the building where local residents believed that torture was practised. Eventually armed men entered his property, claiming that there was a sniper on the roof who had been shooting at them:

10. US Special Forces were also implicated in numerous sectarian attacks carried out by militias operating as part of state security agencies (Ismael and Fuller 2008). Both of the SC and Kurdish political groups espoused ‘victim narratives’: blame for their past suffering was apportioned to Iraq’s Sunni Arabs for their alleged collective support for Saddam’s regime (Harling 2010). 11. By 2006 the initially disparate groups became coherent and confident, united against the occupiers and Shia militias. Later, the bulk of the Sunni Arab insurgency eventually turned against al Qaida Iraq and personal and ideological rivalries put an end to the unity (ICG 2008b: 16). 12. The Sadrists had many supporters in Washash. 13. A Shi’a community centre and place of prayer. 14. Most of the houses in Baghdad are flatroofed.

I was angry and told them that they had no right to enter my garden. I went up to the roof14 and there were two young men, armed and

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wearing flak vests. I told them they shouldn’t be up there, it’s not their house. By the end of it there were five or six armed men outside my house. I was worried that something would happen to me later that evening so I tried to call my friend with a connection in the militia to see if he could sort it out, but I couldn’t reach him. I thought there could be a problem for me at any moment because of what had happened. For a while I started sleeping with a pistol under my pillow. (12 August 2010 interview) Some neighbors had already left the street. A Sunni family left for Amman and another for Falluja; their properties were confiscated because, according to militiamen, they belonged to ‘killers of people’. Dr H saw militiamen looting one of these buildings. He moved to a different quarter, while his wife and children went to stay with his parents. More local houses were seized by the militia secretly and swiftly. Dr H began selling furniture to friends and relatives, and the family left for Syria. He learned later that a Shi’a family now lives in part of the family home. (12 August 2010 interview) Such accounts of complex episodes of displacement in which increasingly more people were affected are related by many Iraqis now living abroad. The involvement of militia groups is a consistent feature of these narratives. After Sara and her family left for Syria, Al Qa’ida became the dominant player in her neighborhood: They [Al Qa’ida] occupied all the houses that were empty … It was evacuation, they took all the Shi’as out, or most of them. So they thought that my house was a Shia’s, they just took it. Even afterwards, they knew from my aunt that it was her brother’s house and he’s not [Shi’a]. They said, ‘so he’s in Syria? Forget it. … Even if they come, you’re not going to get the house back. It’s ours now, it belongs to God, it’s for serving God’s message’. (19 July 2010 interview) While militias were displacing members of ‘other’ groups, some would address the needs of their ‘own’ people by housing them in buildings they had emptied. There was little choice in the matter for the families involved. But as displacements became increasingly more common, Baghdadi residents began arranging their own exchanges. As Um S, a Shi’a lady, explained: Some people grasped what was going on. For example, there’s a part of Ghazaliya that’s all Shi’a because it’s close to Shu’la, and a part that’s all Sunni – the part where we lived. Some people started swapping houses. People understood each other’s situation. It wasn’t what people wanted. Not everyone agreed with what was going on. Our Sunni neighbours for example, they were really good people and didn’t like what was going on. They didn’t like the fact that Shi’as were having their houses forcefully taken from them. For example, Shi’as living in a Sunni area, if they’d been forced out of their home, they might go to a Sunni house in the Shi’a part of Ghazaliya and swap houses. They’d say ‘Look, we’re Shias we’ll stay in your house, you’re Sunnis, you stay in our house. We’ll protect your house, you protect ours.’ People would protect each other’s houses. A friend of my husband was living in the Shi’a part of Ghazaliya. He moved to a house in the Sunni part, which

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belonged to a Sh’ia man, and that man moved into his house in the Shi’a part. (10 August 2010 interview)

THE SABEAN-MANDAEANS Some Shi’as and Sunnis had options to move to different parts of the city in which armed groups claiming to represent them notionally provided protection. But Iraq’s Christians and Sabean-Mandaeans15 do not have armed groups to protect them16 and the latter’s beliefs forbid them to carry weapons. They could not rely on US forces or the Iraqi state – from 2005 largely in the hands of sectarian militias – to keep them safe. Traditionally Mandaeans were jewellers and goldsmiths who lived scattered across central and southern Iraq in settlements close to rivers where they could perform their distinctive rituals of baptism. As security collapsed, they were targeted by criminals and militias because of their trade in jewels and precious metals and by religious extremists who had labelled them ‘infidels’.17 These prejudices seem to have developed popular currency. Halim spoke of his grand daughter’s experience at school:

15. For a detailed study of the Mandaean religion, rituals and some of its people at home and in exile, see Jorunn J. Buckley (2002). 16. The Palestinians are a similarly unprotected group. For more details, see Zaman in this issue. 17. This is despite their mention in the Quran in three separate verses – in Al Baqara, Al Hajj and Al Maida – as people who believe in Allah.

The girls with her there pressured her to change her religion. They were her friends … There wasn’t any religious discrimination before, and then the same students started saying ‘why don’t you change your religion and become a Muslim? Why are you still Sabean?’ […] What was behind this? A student who says something like that, where does she get it from? … from her parents, or possibly her neighbors. So we took it seriously. (28 Jan 2011 interview) Kidnappings were rife in 2006 and after hearing of a friend’s ordeal, Halim began to think seriously about leaving. Events outpaced his thinking, however. As an English speaker, he was asked to interpret for an American priest who visited the Mandaean temple in Baghdad, unannounced and escorted by American soldiers. He showed them around the temple and explained Mandaean rituals. He did not know that he was being watched by unidentified armed men: They saw me shaking hands with the Americans, they saw me take them to the river (to show them the Baptism) and they saw me speaking with them. They considered that to be collaboration with the Americans … I was on my way home. They stopped my car and they threatened me. First they said, ‘You Sabeans are infidels, and this is a country of Islam. This state is Islamic. Leave! You are traitors, you collaborate with the Americans.’ I tried to explain to them why the Americans were there but they didn’t want to know. They said that we had been watched, our temple, inside and out. […] They said: ‘This is not your country’. (28 January 2011 interview) Halim quickly left for Syria with his family, where they remain. I spoke to Hadi, another prominent Iraqi Mandaean. He had been an active member of the Iraqi Minorities Council, a civil society organization advocating

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18. There were no schools that taught in Arabic either. He was also subject to mobility restrictions, needing special permission and a sponsor to enter and re-enter the Kurdish regions. A residency permit was compulsory and had to be renewed every three months. 19. A disturbing view with potentially serious consequences if widely held in the Kurdish political establishment in northern Iraq. It echoes earlier Turkish notions of there being no Kurds in Turkey, only ‘Mountain Turks’.

for the rights of religious and national minorities. Hadi received threatening phone calls each time he spoke about minority rights in Iraq on television. His son was kidnapped on his way to school and released two weeks later after paying a $50,000 ransom to JAM. A car bomb was detonated in front of Hadi’s gold and jewellery store, which has remained closed ever since. After the attempt on his life, Hadi’s advocacy activities were severely restricted. He was restricted in his mobility for safety reasons; he varied his travel routes and avoided unnecessary journeys. After most of the members of the Iraqi Minorities Council had received threats and some of their family members had also been kidnapped, he decided to leave for the Kurdish region in northern Iraq (3 December 2010 interview). Hadi had problems there too. He did not speak the language, and not being Kurdish, he suffered restrictions and discrimination.18 Asaayj officers – Kurdish political security – compelled him to sign an agreement to limit his civil society activities to the concerns of Sabean-Mandaeans. They explained that other groups, including Christians, were not minorities and were part of the Kurdish people.19 After three Mandaeans were killed in an armed robbery in Al Tawbchi, Baghdad, Hadi appeared on television again. He chastised the Iraqi government for its security failures and accused the police of complicity in the robbery. He also castigated Shi’a religious clerics for their silence about attacks against Sabean-Mandaeans in the country more generally. Violent telephone threats continued. He was told: This time, you will not escape your punishment. You are an infidel Sabean and you have slandered the Shi’a religious authorities. That is a red line and we will make you pay a high price … Don’t think that you are safe in Kurdistan, we can reach you and your family wherever you go. (3 December 2010) Asaayj officers visited him again, accusing him of breaching the agreement he had made. A complaint had been made about him from ‘one of their allies in Baghdad’. He was forbidden from speaking publicly about any issue and required to report daily to the Asaayj. Sensing danger, he decided to leave for Syria three months later with his wife and youngest son, unable to take his eldest son because of visa restrictions. Angered that he had left without their permission, Asaayj detained his eldest son until Hadi returned. Hadi was subsequently detained in an Asaayj prison for 58 days and not allowed to contact any family members. He was released and allowed to leave for Syria with his family thanks to the efforts of a Kurdish friend with connections in the Kurdish Regional Government (3 December 2010 interview). Even more disturbing was the armed robbery in Al Tawbchi that Hadi spoke about. Three Mandaeans were shot dead and two were seriously wounded after a large group of gunmen raided Qaysariya market in April 2009. Sheikh B, a Mandaean priest and relative of the victims, described the incident and how nearby police refused to help. His young nephew found a policeman a few streets away and told him what was happening. The policeman said: ‘We haven’t been given an order to intervene’. Some of the gunmen were later arrested but the Sheikh relates that a senior police investigator told him that certain members of parliament, Sadrists, were watching the case closely and applying pressure on the judge to release the men. The Shaikh was also told: ‘If you don’t drop the charges, if they are executed, not a single member

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of your family will remain alive’. After that threat, the Sheikh and his family left Iraq (28 January 2011 interview). The Sheikh lost faith in the Iraqi state, believing that it was unable or unwilling to provide Mandaeans with security. Together with a Mandaean delegation, including Sheikh Al Sattar – the head of the sect – he went to Najaf to meet Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani, the highest Shi’a religious authority in Iraq. They asked for a religious ruling to protect Mandaeans but Sistani refused each time, citing as the reason the need for a meeting of 25 religious scholars to issue a fatwa. The Sheikh described the closing exchange:

20. Wilayet al Faqih is a model of Shia Islamic theocracy, currently used in Iran, which grants political power to the highest Shia clerical authority. Sistani is recognized as the highest authority and thus the system would, in theory, suit political ambitions he may harbour.

Sheikh Al-Sattar said: ‘We’re being threatened by your people, by Shi’a political parties. Our sons are being killed and robbed by your people – your people are the reason. We’re asking for a fatwa from you. These are our rituals, this is our holy book. We are mentioned in the Quran. So why are we being killed and attacked like this?’ Sistani replied: ‘I can’t issue you with that fatwa, so don’t embarrass me anymore’. (28 January 2011 interview)

21. The Mandaean Human Rights Group Annual Report (2009) lists examples of atrocities against Mandaeans since 2003, including kidnappings, murders and forced conversions to Islam.

Hadi, of the Iraqi Minorities Council, offered this analysis: Sistani is a politician. He has a strategic agenda for the future, one that’s in the interest of religious parties. He wants to rid the country of all the non-Muslims, even the non-Shi’a groups, so that in the future they can declare Iraq to be an Islamic state on the model of wilayet al-faqih.20 The presence of religious minorities prevents them from doing this. (28 January 2011 interview) There is a widespread belief among Mandaeans who are now refugees in Syria that they have been excluded from Iraq. This might be explained in terms of general insecurity and growing religious extremism – circumstances not unique to Iraq.21 Many other refugees, however, relate experiences at the hands of communalist organizations and of the state itself, which suggest that exclusion is part of the process of reshaping the nation state. From 2003 intensive episodes of conflict in which rival groups attempted to seize state resources and to occupy the political spaces of the state have entailed the identification and exclusion of Iraqis formerly seen as part of the fabric of national society. Testimonies repeatedly show that purging the old order not only means removing selected former employees but also removing symbols of the idea that Iraq was once a secular state, tolerant of religious pluralism, and among such symbols are the religious minorities. The actions of state and would-be state actors have created environments that compel Iraqis to leave their homes. Accounts from refugees included in this article provide an indication of what it is like to experience first hand the consequences of nationbuilding and state re-formation. Those affected have been part of political processes, ambitious and protracted in nature, in which entire social groups are targeted as part of agendas to create a new political order.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my gratitude to the Iraqis who took part in this research and the many others who have been generous with their time and effort. Thanks are also due to Philip Marfleet and Tahir Zaman for comments

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and input on this article in draft. I am also grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the University of East London and the British Institute for the Study of Iraq for their financial support. Thanks are also due to Institut Français du Proche-Orient for their assistance in the field.

REFERENCES Batatu, Hana (1986), ‘Shi’i organizations in Iraq: al-Da’wah al-Islamiyah and al-Mujahidin’, in Juan R. I. Cole and Nikki R. Keddie (eds), Shi’ism and Social Protest, New Haven: Yale University Press, pp. 179–200. —— (2004), The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq: A Study of Iraq’s Old Landed and Commercial Classes and of it’s Communists, Ba’thists, and Free Officers, London: Saqi Books. Brubaker, Rogers (1992), Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany, Harvard: Harvard University Press. Buckley, Jorunn J. (2002), The Mandaeans: Ancient Texts and Modern People, New York: Oxford University Press. Chandrasekaran, R. (2007), Imperial Life in the Emerald City, New York: Random House. Chatelard, Geraldine (2011), ‘The politics of population movements in contemporary Iraq’, in Ricardo Bocco, Peter Sluglett, Hamit Bozarslan and Jordi Tejel (eds), Writing the History of Iraq: Historiographical and Political Challenges, London: World Scientific Publishers/Imperial College Press, in press. Chatty, Dawn (2010), Displacement and Dispossession in the Modern Middle East, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gordon, Joy (2010), Invisible War: The United States and the Iraq Sanctions, Harvard: Harvard University Press. Harling, Peter (2010), ‘Beyond political ruptures: Towards a historiography of social continuity in Iraq’, Institut Français du Proche-Orient Seminar, Damascus, Syria, 16 May. International Crisis Group (ICG) (2006a), In their Own Words: Reading the Iraqi Insurgency, Brussels: International Crisis Group. —— (2006b), The Next Iraqi War?: Sectarianism and Civil Conflict, Brussels: International Crisis Group. —— (2006c), Muqtada Al Sadr: Spoiler or Stabiliser, Brussels: International Crisis Group. —— (2007), Shiite Politics in Iraq: The Role of the Supreme Council, Brussels: International Crisis Group. —— (2008a), Iraq’s Civil War, The Sadrists and The Surge, Brussels: International Crisis Group. ____ (2008b), Iraq after The Surge I: The new Sunni Landscape, Brussels: International Crisis Group. Ismael, T. and Fuller, M. (2008), ‘The disintegration of Iraq: the manufacturing and politicization of sectarianism’, International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies, 2: 3 pp. 443–73. Jabar, Faleh A. (2003), The Shi’ite Political Movement in Iraq, London: Saqi Books. Klein, N. (2004), ‘Baghdad year zero: Pillaging Iraq in pursuit of a neocon utopia’, Harper’s Magazine, September, pp. 43–53. http://harpers.org/ archive/2004/09/0080197, Accessed 16 March 2011. —— (2007), The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, London: Penguin.

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Mandaean Human Rights Group (2009), ‘Mandaean Human Rights Annual Report’, http://www.mandaeanunion.org/HMRG/Final_MHRG_Report_2009. pdf, Accessed 16 March 2011. Marfleet, Philip (2007), ‘Iraq’s refugees: “Exit” from the state’, International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies, 3: 1, pp. 397–419. —— (2010), ‘The purging of minds’, in Baker, R. and Ismael, T. (eds), Cultural Cleansing in Iraq, London: Pluto, pp. 212–238. —— (2011), ‘IDPs and the state: The case of Iraq’, in Koser, K. and Martin, S. (eds), The Migration-Displacement Nexus, Oxford: Berghahn, in press. Sluglett, M. and Sluglett, P. (2001), Iraq Since 1958: From Revolution to Dictatorship, London: I. B.Tauris. Soguk, N. (1999), States and Strangers, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Visser, R. (2008), ‘Taming the hegemonic power: SCIRI and the evolution of US power in Iraq’, International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies, 2: 1, pp. 31–51. Zaman, Tahir (2011), ‘Lessons learned: Palestinian displacements from Iraq’, International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies, 5: 2, pp. – . Zolberg, Aristide (1983), ‘The formation of new states as a refugee-generating process’, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 467: 1, pp. 24–38.

SUGGESTED CITATION Ali, A. (2011), ‘Displacement and statecraft in Iraq: Recent trends, older roots’, International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies 5: 2, pp. 231–245, doi: 10.1386/ijcis.5.2.231_1

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS Ali Ali is a doctoral candidate at the University of East London, UK. He completed fieldwork in Damascus, Syria, for his thesis which is an oral history project examining choice and constraint in Iraqis’ migration decisions in the aftermath of the 2003 invasion. His current research interests are survival and coping strategies in situations of social and political crisis. He has worked as a consultant for UNHCR Syria on Iraqi refugee issues, and holds degrees from Durham University and the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Contact: School of Law and Social Sciences, University of East London, Docklands Campus, University Way, London E16 2RD, UK. E-mail: [email protected]

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IJCIS 5 (2) pp. 247–262 Intellect Limited 2011

International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies Volume 5 Number 2 © 2011 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/ijcis.5.2.247_1

ERLEND PAASCHE Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO)

Iraqi refugees in a Damascus suburb: Carriers of sectarian conflict? 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

ABSTRACT

KEYWORDS

The Iraqi exodus has invoked security concerns among many international observers. Sectarian violence in Iraq prompted fears that the new arrivals in Syria, the main destination country for Iraqi refugees, would bring sectarian conflict. No such development has taken place, prompting questions about whether Iraqi refugees embrace sectarian ideologies. Here I suggest that sectarianism has been actively resisted by Iraqi refugees in Damascus, offering explanations for why so many analysts have stressed the risk of ‘spillover’ of sectarian conflict. One central factor, I argue, is that a sectarian master narrative has been imposed on Iraq.

sectarianism refugee militarization nationalism cosmopolitanism boundary maintenance securitization conflict spillover

Large refugee populations may destabilize the host society by altering the demographic or political balance, increasing economic competition (Stepputat 2004) or directly engaging in political violence against the host state or their state of origin (Lischer 2005). It has been suggested that refugee movements from war-torn countries are associated with a tendency for civil wars to appear in regional clusters (Salehyan and Gleditsch 2006). The Iraqi exodus, which began in 2006, following the Samarra bombing, is widely held to be the largest conflict-induced displaced population in the Middle East since 1948. It is described by one scholar as ‘the new crisis in the Middle East’

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1. My data emerged from twelve in-depth, open-ended interviews with Iraqi refugees about flight narratives and socio-economic conditions in exile. Most of my informants arrived after 2006. I also spoke with Syrian residents in order to acquire background information and local knowledge. 2. Until Syria imposed visa restrictions in November 2007, there were academic and media reports of Iraqis ‘flooding’ the country, with one Syrian customs official claiming 20,000 entries a day during the last days of free entry as opposed to a normal 2000 entries a day (Fagen 2007; Aji 2007; Amos 2007; Lyon 2007a).

(Sassoon 2009). The sheer scale of the migration has invoked security concerns among many analysts. One key concern has been the presumed sectarian ideology of Iraqi refugees. This ‘conflict spillover’ argument has conceptualized Iraqi refugees as potential carriers of sectarian conflict to neighbouring countries, notably Syria – a religiously pluralist, minority-dominated host country (Leenders 2008b). In this article, I draw on fieldwork carried out in 2008 in the Iraqi-dominated Damascus suburb of Jaramana, and discuss the extent to which refugee testimonies indicate that Iraqis nurture sectarian attitudes. During interviews I elicited much information about inter-group perceptions and social dynamics.1 How were other sectarian groups perceived, in Iraq and in general? Did informants engage in cross-sectarian friendships? Did they blame other sectarian groups for Iraq’s imbroglio – and, if so, on what grounds? Although the number of Iraqi refugees in Syria is disputed, there is no doubt that from 2006 displacement was unexpected and dramatic. Until 2007 Syria adopted a laissez-faire approach to the migrants, characterized by inertia rather than initiative (International Crisis Group 2008: 16), in line with its long-standing policy of allowing any Arab citizen entry. Most refugees gravitated towards urban quarters in Damascus, where they settled by themselves, blending in with local populations with whom they mostly shared ethnicity and language. The combination of an urban and self-settled refugee population on the one hand, and a host state unable to register cross-border Iraqi population flows accurately on the other (International Crisis Group 2008) means that no one knows the exact total of registered and unregistered Iraqi refugees in Syria. According to Syrian government estimates cited by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), there were 1,054,466 Iraqi refugees as of January 2010 – but the basis for this calculation is far from clear, and numbers may have been inflated. UNHCR has registered 260,000 Iraqi refugees in Syria since the start of the U.S.-led invasion. Some refugees have since been resettled in third countries, have moved on by other means, or have returned to Iraq (UNHCR 2010a).2 Syria has granted Iraqis access to public services including basic medical treatment and basic education. Their presence has had an impact on Syrian infrastructure, on the rental housing market and on health care services. Banned from formal employment as ‘guests’ without formal protection as refugees – Syria is not a signatory to the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees – Iraqis have been prone to exploitation and marginalization in the informal job market.

FEARS OF SECTARIANISM: THE DEBATE The arrival of huge numbers of refugees initially gave rise to a sense of alarm among observers, and warnings of potential conflict in Syria related to the sectarian dimension of conflict in Iraq and its impact on Syria’s pluralist religious make-up. President Bashar al-Assad’s regime is dominated by the minority Alawite community, which composes a fraction of the Syrian population. Most Syrians, 74%, are Sunni Muslims. Of Iraqis registered with the UNHCR in 2009, 60.7% were Sunni Muslims, 18.0% were Shi’a Muslims and 13.1% were Christians (UNHCR 2009a). A key concern was the possibility that Iraqi refugees would act as a vehicle for sectarian conflict, creating ‘conflict spillover’ from Iraq to neighbouring countries. UNHCR researchers pointed out that by 2009 there had been no such development – but describe these fears

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as having been understandable at an earlier stage. They observed, ‘the sectarian nature of the violence inside Iraq and the presence of Sunni Muslims, Shia Muslims and Christians and other minorities […] amongst the refugee population have led to fears that the Iraqi conflict might be “exported” to the countries to which they have fled’ (UNHCR 2009b: 10). They added, ‘Given the escalating violence taking place in Iraq, moreover, there was an understandable fear amongst the citizens of [host] countries that the new arrivals would bring their sectarian conflicts with them’ (UNHCR 2009b: 13). Some warnings were particularly alarmist. Byman and Pollack likened Iraqis to Palestinians: ‘a source of regional violence and regime change for decades’, warning that the Iraqi migration flows posed ‘a tremendous danger to the frail regime of Bashar al-Assad’ (2006). They suggested that Sunni Iraqis could foment radicalization and stir rebellion against the minority Alawite regime and could alter the political balance between religious groups. Other commentators were less dramatic but also stressed the sectarian dimension. Fagen expressed concerns ‘that the arrival of an especially large number of Shi’a who are inclined to be devout could distort the relative sectarian harmony that characterizes Syrian society and pose potential challenges to the secular state’ (2007). Yacoubian (2007) identified ‘heightened sectarianism’ as one of the costs to Syria of accommodating so many Iraqis. Cole was cited as noting reports by Sunni Arabs worried that Shi’a Iraqis were engaging in missionary activity, trying to convert Syrian villagers to Shi’ism (Aida 2007). According to Cole, ‘the Christian and Shi’ite coloration of a lot of the refugees from Iraq in Syria is exacerbating certain kinds of sectarian conflicts that already preexisted in Syria’ (Aida 2007). Even observers who emphasized that there seemed to be little popular basis for sectarianism among Iraqi refugees in Syria (or in other destination countries) pointed to the danger that Iraqi population movements could nonetheless come to serve as vehicles of sectarian conflict, stirring risk of ‘conflict spillover’. Lischer, who has conducted extensive research on refugee militarization, stressed the ‘grave’ security threat posed by Iraqi refugees in Syria, whose desperate circumstances and geographical concentration in certain urban quarters rendered them susceptible to political manipulation by ‘both Shi’a and Sunni’ extremists who had established offices in Syria (2008). Although ‘[a]s yet, large-scale sectarian violence has not spread to the displaced population [in Syria and Jordan]’ (Lischer 2008: 107), the situation was described as unstable to the point that ‘[u] nderstanding the potential for massive and protracted displacement crises to destabilize international security is essential if policymakers hope to prevent the manipulation and militarization of the displaced Iraqis’ (Lischer 2008: 95, emphasis added). Later I will offer analysis of this discourse in light of my empirical findings and suggest why this emphasis on sectarian dimensions of conflict – and the implications for Syria – gained such traction.

FROM TRAUMA AND LOSS TO GRIEVANCE AND SECTARIANISM? Refugees have been seen as prone to conflict partly because of the trauma and suffering they go through (Harpviken 2008). A U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual suggests, ‘in [counterinsurgency] operations, internally displaced persons and refugee security may take on heightened military importance. Traumatized and dislocated persons may become vulnerable

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to insurgent threats and recruitment’ (cited in Lischer 2008). Grievances held on account of sectarian persecution may likewise be conceived as producing or consolidating sectarian attitudes, and several surveys suggest a high incidence of violent trauma among the Iraqi refugees (Al-Khalidi et al. 2007: 46; Amnesty International 2007; Clements and Luu 2007: 8; UNHCR 2008). Amnesty International’s fact-finding mission to Syria in June 2007 concluded that almost all Iraqis interviewed were recent victims of serious human rights abuse in Iraq, including rape and other forms of torture at the hands of the militias (Amnesty International 2007). In a 2008 survey conducted in cooperation with the UNHCR (2008), a total of 754 Iraqi registered refugees in Syria all reported having experienced at least one traumatic event (as defined by the Harvard Trauma Survey). Almost 70 per cent said they had experienced interrogation or harassment by militias or other groups, including receiving death threats; almost 60 per cent had received a direct threat. Here collective persecution appears to have been a highly significant trigger of flight. Christians, like other religious minorities in Iraq, have been singled out for additional attention, making their collective crisis acute to the point that continued existence in their country of origin is under threat (Taneja 2007; BBC 2010a, 2010b; UNHCR 2010b). There is a difference, however, between identifying a grievance on account of religious identity and proposing that sectarian attitudes are based upon or consolidated by that grievance. I found that while a sense of grievance indisputably ran high among Iraqis in Jaramana, the group-based persecution many of them had suffered at the hands of Sunni or Shi’a Muslim militias in Iraq did not – with a few exceptions – seem to have imbued in them a widespread grudge against particular Muslim groups, nor, in the case of non-Muslim victims, for Muslims as such. Sectarian conflict was seen by almost everyone as being anomalous in Iraqi history, and although two interviewees expressed strong sectarian attitudes, the majority was at pains to disassociate themselves from the kind of identity politics that were instrumental in bringing about their flight. I identified three patterns in the interview data: a tendency to externalize blame for the conflict in Iraq; frequent references to normative cosmopolitanism; and a strong sense of national as opposed to sectarian identity.

EXTERNALIZING BLAME My initial conversations with Iraqis typically gravitated towards root causes of the recent Iraqi conflict. In their analyses of Iraq’s violence, which contrast with the theologo-centrism that dominates much western academic and press discourse on Iraq, sectarian hatred did not feature as a root cause. Post-2003 violence was seen as a discontinuity in Iraqi history, an anomaly externally imposed, rather than an Iraqi phenomenon. Several interviewees stressed that violence was not directly traceable to sectarian hatred, arguing that it is unnatural for Iraqis to fight each other. Grievances were not typically explained by reference to religious groups, either Sunni or Shi’a, and those whose actions stimulated the refugees’ flight were not seen as representatives of a larger group of Muslims. Blame was not mainly attributed to the occupying power, the United States, but to Iran. My informants saw the fatal flaw of the United States as removing the one man believed to have guaranteed security – former president Saddam Hussein. Iran, on the other hand, was often singled out as the puppet master behind Shi’a militias, covertly orchestrating Iraqi violence to serve its own aims.

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My very first encounter with Iraqis in Jaramana exemplified this. It took place in a maktab al-‘aq¯ari, one of the ubiquitous real estate offices in this area catering to the needs of refugees. A Syrian friend started discussing root causes of the Iraqi conflict with Iraqi Shi’a Muslims already there. In vain, he tried to argue that the Iraqis themselves had to accept the blame for Iraq’s sorry state. The other three flatly denied that this was the case and blamed Iran for the existence of Iraqi militias. One of them told me that ‘There were no Iraqi militias in Iraq, no “real” internal clashes between Iraqis in Iraq’. Rather, the fighting was the rotten fruit of Iranian conspiracies. He would not excuse the Americans, though, telling me half in jest that he would return to blow himself up next to an American tank, and adding, ‘But the Iranians were behind conspiracies that were more serious than even the ones of America’. Such externalization of responsibility for the Iraqi imbroglio frustrated my Syrian friend, who later lamented that the refugees did not seem to accept Iraqi responsibility. I heard numerous variations on this theme. Attribution of blame would occasionally be directed towards the United States for invading the country and opening a Pandora’s box of violence; more often, Iran was seen as the key actor. Iran’s alleged motives for meddling in Iraq were seen by various informants as follows: •

•

•

To exact revenge due to the historical animosity between the countries, and in particular the Gulf War. ‘They hate us for [the Iraq-Iran war in 1980–1988], and you can’t talk with them, as you can with the Americans. Just as you can’t talk with terrorists the way you can with militias’ To expand Iran’s sphere of political influence through covert operations. ‘They crossed the border when the U.S. invaded back in 2003, and the U.S. did not pay much attention to this. A lot of things are not as they seem in this situation’ To turn Iraq into an Islamic state. One informant voiced concerns that ‘Iran would fill the power vacuum in the event of U.S. withdrawal and perhaps organize an Islamic revolution’.

If Iran was widely perceived to be behind the power of militias, Iranian motives were not always elaborated. For instance, an outbreak of cholera in Iraq in 2007, which subsequently spread into Iran and possibly also Syria (IRIN 2007), was rumoured to have affected some Iraqi refugees. This was casually attributed to Iran by one Iraqi: ‘The cholera, the car bombs … All of it comes from Iran’. Rather than viewing the conflict and their forced displacement through a sectarian lens, which could lead to the extension of blame to Muslims in general, many refugees viewed Iraq’s predicament through a foreign policy lens. It has been noted elsewhere that the war in Iraq is largely believed by Iraqis to be ‘a war of others’ – ‘harb al-¯akharı¯n’ (Leenders 2008a). Among my interviewees, it was widely believed to be ‘harb al-iraniyy¯ın’.

NORMATIVE COSMOPOLITANISM Although the neighbourhood in which I conducted the research was predominantly Christian-Druze, a few Muslims would normally be present in most public places. Cross-sectarian friendships were common but never emerged as an issue in our conversations about life in exile, except as illustrations of the virtues of al-ta‘¯ayush – coexistence. This was not because they were taboo in any way but rather because they were doxic – ‘the class of that which is taken

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3. ‘Cosmopolitanism’ is here meant in terms of religious categories, not national ones, i.e. an ideology of peaceful coexistence across religious divides. As used here, cosmopolitanism hence does not negate nationalism. 4. ‘al-din lil-lah wal-watan lil-jam-•a’. 5. Cross-sectarian marriages used to be more common before the invasion. In central Baghdad, mixed marriages made up 3–5 per cent of all unions in late 2002, but by late 2005 there were virtually none registered (Tavernise 2006). 6. Based on available statistics, Iraqis made up the largest national group of asylum seekers to Europe in the period 2002–2008 (Norwegian Ministry of Justice and the Police 2010).

for granted’ (Bourdieu 1977: 163). In other words, cross-sectarian friendships were ordinary to the point of not warranting an explanation. That is not to say that all Christian Iraqis in Jaramana interact socially with Muslims on a regular basis, but that among those who do, identity issues are not a significant matter. ‘Allan’, a Christian, observed: I did not care about religious differences before the invasion, and I don’t care now. Rather than separate between Muslims and Christians we must separate between the extremists and normal people. And it’s extremists I hate, be they Muslim or Christian. In Iraq I used to have more Muslim friends than Christian. Now I don’t have any Muslim friends. But it’s not because I don’t want to. It’s because I live in a Christian area and do not work, so there are few arenas where I can socialize with Muslims. Articulations of cosmopolitanism were often backed up with reference to commonly known proverbs, adding normative authority.3 Some reiterated the proverbial phrase ‘Religion is a matter between you and God, the country is for all’.4 Others would raise a hand as a metaphor symbolizing the Iraqi people: ‘The fingers are different, yet the same’. There was likewise frequent mention of the expression ‘We are all people of the book’, referring to a shared spiritual bond between Jews, Muslims and Christians. I was challenged myself on more than one occasion when I asked about the relevance of sectarianism in everyday lives, by the pedagogical returning of the question. ‘You’re Norwegian. Let’s say that some Norwegian guy comes to Jaramana, and we find him repulsive. Does that mean all Norwegians are like that? Are you no good? Do you represent Norwegians?’ An interreligious couple drew a parallel between bad Muslims vis-à-vis good Muslims to Jews vis-à-vis Zionists.5 ‘It is important to distinguish between Zionists and Jews, even though most of the Jews perhaps hate Islam’. One formerly high-level Iraqi Ba’thist and Sunni Muslim complained about the imposition of hijab on women in Baghdad. ‘It’s a personal choice’, he said, ‘not something to force on others. Under Saddam Hussein there was no religious discrimination, everyone were at equal footing’. Pointing to the employees at the restaurant where we were eating, he added, ‘Two employees are Christian, one is a Sunni Kurd. Who cares?’ Accusations towards Iran and habitual cross-sectarian friendships can be seen as substantiating a form of cosmopolitanism. Aspirations for third-country resettlement can be analysed at least partly in the same way. There is no single answer to the question of why the vast majority of Iraqis I talked with wished for resettlement in Europe and ‘the West’.6 One Iraqi listed ‘Living standards, freedom and mercy’ as the reasons. Others pointed to stability, peace, infrastructure, security, etc. A reason cited by several, however, was the presumed absence of religious discrimination. One argued that ‘Europeans have reached an advanced stage in history. You can see this from the way you’re dealing with refugees. You don’t care about the religious affiliation of a refugee, only if he’s a genuine refugee or not. This has to do with humanism and generosity’. A notable reason for why resettlement in ‘the West’ is so attractive, in other words, has to do not only with the liberalism, stability and material welfare associated with this part of the world, or family reunification, but with the fulfilment of the dream of coexistence and its concomitant security – words that were often melancholically invoked when Iraqis described and imagined the pre-invasion years.

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DIVERGENT DATA: THE LIMITS OF COSMOPOLITANISM These observations portray Iraqi refugees in Jaramana as actively resisting the notion of sectarianism and identity politics; there are a few cracks in this image, however. First, there are religiously segregated patterns of Iraqi self-settlement in Jaramana as elsewhere in Damascus. If sectarianism seems largely irrelevant to people’s daily lives in Jaramana, why is Jaramana host to an enclave of Iraqi religious minorities, mostly Christians? Whereas the high concentration of Iraqi Christians in Jaramana at first glance may suggest the primacy of religious identities, not a single informant in Jaramana mentioned sectarian motivation for settling in this Christian-Druze area, or security motivations in the sense of ‘strength in numbers’. Rather, they described it as (1) the chance result of accumulated migration (the initial trickle to Jaramana increased when those already there helped family and friends to settle nearby); (2) proximity to a church; and (3) a liberal, Christian-Druze lifestyle. In addition, I was informed that some Iraqi Muslims choose to settle in Jaramana to keep a low profile and not attract the attention of potential adversaries in the Sunni/Shi’a communities. Broadly speaking, it seems plausible to assert that horror on the Iraqi scale does not fade easily from memory and that, as the Christian community grew, some Iraqis from religious minorities (SabeanMandaean, Chaldean, Assyrian, Fa’ili, etc.) were also attracted to it due to a better-safe-than-sorry approach reflecting lingering, generalized fears. On the other hand, there are many Christian Iraqi refugees living in further outlying suburbs. As for Iraqi Muslims, it seems fairly normal for Iraqi Shi’a and Sunni Muslims to be neighbours elsewhere in Damascus, although reliable data on settlement patterns remain elusive. Two single interviewees held virulently sectarian attitudes. George’s brother had been decapitated by ‘Muslims’ and he himself had subsequently been kidnapped and mistreated in captivity for a week. You can’t trust them. They lie. You can be friends with them for more than 20 years, but when push comes to shove, they betray you. The majority is like this […] Muslims are not only the biggest cause of trouble in Iraq. They are the biggest problem in the world […] They either think about [points to his sexual organ], or [mimics a rifle]. For George, sectarian boundary maintenance was a matter of security. Interestingly, though, he rejected my labeling of him as discriminating. ‘I’m not discriminating’, he argued. ‘But we are Christians. You are good, he is good, I’m good. You’re all welcome to my house’. Such a statement implies a normative stance against discrimination even if his narrative reveals a different reality. A second case was Rafy. Jocularly, during our first meetings, he had stressed how much he would have liked to have a Christian and European name, and that his parents named him as they did because it was less indicative of religious affiliation and would cause him less problems in Iraq. Our subsequent sustained socialization then opened up for what was first a trickle and then a flood of sectarian statements. Rafy had had his son kidnapped and killed in Iraq, in spite of paying a heavy ransom, and would teach the rest of his children never to trust a Muslim. Watching footage of Taliban on the television he once turned to me and asked who they were. ‘Taliban’, I replied. ‘Muslims’, he corrected. Were they not all terrorists? Rather than attributing

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Iraq’s woes to Iran, Rafy saw the Muslims themselves as the root cause. ‘They did not understand anything, you see. Every one of them just wanted to be like Saddam Hussein’. Conversely, the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq was seen by Rafy not as triggering Iraqi conflict dynamics, but as a ‘liberation’ by the president of the United States at the time, George W. Bush – ‘a very misunderstood, very good, and very religious man’. These narratives stand in stark contrast to the much more common message of coexistence that was conveyed by almost all other Iraqis I talked with. Sectarianism is taboo in religiously diverse Syria. The government has invested much effort in uniting Syrian citizens by focusing on their common identity as Arabs and as Syrian nationals, and downplaying religion and tribalism as competing grounds for loyalty. This state campaign has not been without some success. As Nome has observed (2008), ‘[t]he official discourse concerning religious diversity in Syria is dominated by depictions of harmonious co-existence [reflected in popular speech]’. Does the omnipresence of Syrian intelligence, ‘al-mukh¯abar¯at’, in a state that does not tolerate openly expressed sectarianism thus invalidate my findings that most Iraqis profess cosmopolitanism? I think not. While this national political context could satisfyingly explain the most explicit statements of national identity and coexistence, it would be far less satisfying for the frequent implicit messages of cosmopolitanism. Moreover, avoidance of the researcher asking about sectarian issues (and typically in indirect ways), or refusal to talk about sectarian issues by the informants altogether, would have been unlikely to cause them any trouble. In spite of this, most Iraqis were eager to express their cosmopolitanism and were generally very friendly and forthcoming. Finally, it is of course also possible that Iraqis fleeing sectarian conflict in their homeland are genuinely happy to have the host state impose zero-tolerance on sectarianism. One Iraqi interviewed by a journalist expressed such gratitude: ‘In Iraq there is a sectarian war’, he told me. ‘Here, we all get along’. He attributed this to the vigilant Syrian authorities: ‘Praise God, thanks to the Syrian government we have no problems. If anything happens, they deal with it when it happens. As shop owners we are not allowed to talk about sectarianism. Word spread to all business owners: You live in a different country, not your country; you have to respect their rules’. (Rosen 2008) In spite of the fact that, or perhaps because, the Iraqis in Jaramana were well aware that they lived in a country different from their own, they brought to it a strong sense of national identity that was consolidated by exile, as described below.

NATIONAL IDENTITY My general observation is that informants often stressed a national as opposed to sectarian identity. One told me that the Iraqi-run businesses that popped up after the arrival of thousands of refugees in 2006 used to be dotted with highly visible Iraqi flags. Apparently the Syrian authorities regulated this to signal that the Iraqis were now on Syrian soil – but what the story also indicates is a strong sense of Iraqi national identity. When talking about Iraq and their migration narratives, most of my informants did not invoke sectarian categories but a national one, speaking of ‘us Iraqis’, ‘the Iraqis’, ‘a fellow

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Iraqi’, etc. The primacy of national identity over sectarian identity was at times also made explicit. Likewise, my preconceived notion of a solidarity network of exiled co-religionists rather than co-nationals was contested. When asked whether Christian Iraqis help each other out when a problem arises, one informant gently corrected me: It is not a question of religion, it’s a question of nationality. Iraqis help each other here because they are Iraqis. If I for instance ask someone in the street for road directions, he will take me there and show me around. All he needs to know is that I’m Iraqi, like him. Another informant told me how much better it was to work for an Iraqi than a Syrian boss. ‘Because Iraqis help each other. If you are abroad and in need and you meet a fellow Norwegian, he helps you, right?’ An unemployed Iraqi with a lot of time on his hands told me that whenever he is outside Jaramana and hears someone speak the Iraqi dialect, he approaches him and strikes up a conversation. The marginalization of Iraqi refugees in Syria seemed to consolidate a pride in national identity. Syria is not a signatory to the 1951 Convention and, while offering shelter, offers little in the way of institutionalized rights. Stuck in legal limbo as ‘guests’, Iraqis are marginalized legally and socio-economically and are, as a rule, not allowed to work and are thus forced to do jobs in the informal sector, often underpaid and manual work that they are overqualified for. ‘Exploitation’ was a common refrain in Iraqi descriptions of their interactions with the local population. According to the local UNHCR representative, in December 2007 the agency was confronted with examples of young girls or women involved in nightclubs to supplement the family income, and observed that such survival sex was directly proportional to the general refugee impoverishment (Lyon 2007b). My informants confirmed that this took place, and one refused to let his wife work because of it, saying that ‘[t]hey look down on Iraqi women here. They look at my wife as if she’s a dancer at a club’. The journey across Iraqi–Syrian borders has for many been a humiliating journey of downward social mobility, and a social transformation from ‘citizens’ to ‘refugees’ dependent on the goodwill of the host population and humanitarian organizations. It is not unusual for refugees to experience this, but the experience of loss takes on a particular meaning for Iraqis on the run. The term ‘refugee’ is closely associated with the history of Palestinian loss and suffering in the region, indicative of political failure and dependence on others (Sassoon 2009: 5; Zaiotti 2006: 333–53), making it a generically troubling identity to assume. One Iraqi told me, unprompted, ‘We are not Palestinians, you know’. Seemingly displaying the same need to negate ‘Palestinian-ness’, others referred to themselves as guests, tourists or immigrants – or upheld a narrative of impeccable strength. ‘You don’t see Iraqis begging in the street and Iraqis don’t seem poor. It’s because we’re a proud people. We’re used to having money and caring about our appearance. And Iraqis are used to hardship’. Iraqis’ embarrassment about being defined as refugees is underscored by the UNHCR itself. Harper (2008: 172) comments, ‘For almost all [Iraqi] refugees, registering with UNHCR and subsequently queuing for assistance is both a humiliating and a demeaning experience’. Not only is refugeehood a troubling identity, it is stigmatizing when projected on Iraqis by the host population – as witnessed in the following incident.

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I often entered a small, family-run shop where I had made some Iraqi friends, including Rafy the proprietor and Waseem, a neighbouring Syrian friend. On one occasion Waseem pulled away curtains separating the public part of the shop from the private part behind it. There I now saw Rafy cleaning the floor. ‘Look! Rafy is cleaning like a woman’, Waseem told me, with a smug giggle. Rafy responded furiously to the joke, rebuking his Syrian neighbour for coming to his shop and making fun of him. Then he explained why he found the joke so unbearable. In Baghdad I had been the proprietor of several cars for hire, worth $US250,000. Here, all I have is this laundry service. It’s bad enough to be a refugee without having the Syrians mocking me […] It was not easy for us to come to Syria as refugees. We have had to fight hard, open this little business, start from scratch. And what does he know about that? [He] is a nobody. He doesn’t own anything. Syria itself is nothing, compared to what Iraq used to be. Still they mock us. We used to have lots of money and be respected people. What Rafy bemoaned was ultimately what he perceived to be a lack of, and loss of, respect, as a refugee in Syria – leading him to frame both himself and his adversary in terms of national identity. Waseem’s disrespect was extended to all Syrians, and our conversation thus quickly turned from this particular incident towards the relations between Syrians and Iraqis in general. Rafy’s little brother, holding back tears, found the disrespect they face unbearable. ‘The Syrians look at us as garbage’. The gist of the matter from Rafy’s perspective was not the joke itself, but the social context from which it arises. The joke was seen as a reminder that his ascribed refugee identity and marginalization in Syria allows for jokes to be made at his expense, by a ‘nobody’ of low social standing in the local social hierarchy. The reference to ‘what Iraq used to be’ could be interpreted as a way of claiming an alternative ‘national’ identity to a ‘refugee identity’. This could explain the myriad references to Iraqi superiority and a pride in all things Iraqi that was shared by many of my informants. When interviewees spoke at length about the superior quality of: Iraqi gardens ‘Every house in Baghdad has a garden’; Iraqi chicken ‘It just tastes different here, I can’t put my finger on it’; Iraqi parks ‘The smallest park in Baghdad is the size of the entire Jaramana district’; Iraqi roads ‘More orderly’; Iraqi houses ‘More spacious’ and so on, this should thus perhaps not only be understood as mere expressions of melancholy, but also as a complex reassertion of pride in a position of refugeehood. Recollections of the past tended, as in Rafy’s case (‘cleaning lady’ vs. ‘business man’) to constitute a binary opposite to the present. ‘Being Iraqi’ seemed to serve a purpose of empowerment, a selfessentialization as something other than a refugee. One UNHCR-registered refugee whom I knew suffered severe economic hardship insisted to me that he did not need UNHCR’s humanitarian assistance. We Iraqis, coming from a rich country, we don’t need the food. We have money, and just need to work a little in order not to spend all of it. In many ways Iraq used to be more developed not only than Syria, but all the other countries of the Arab world. It was even richer than Saudi Arabia. Salaries were higher as well, and we didn’t eat bad Syrian bread, but meat. We used to eat meat, even for breakfast.

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As the dictum has it, the past is most important for those who do not own the present.

CONCLUSION: REVISITING THE SECURITIZATION OF IRAQIS ON THE RUN As the years have passed, it has become less fashionable to emphasize the sectarian dimension in Iraqi refugees’ alleged potential for destabilizing the Syrian host state. In April 2008, Iraq’s ambassador to the United States, Samir Shakir Mahmood Sumaida’ie, noted that the Iraqi flight was ‘a flight of moderation’ consisting of people who had refused to take part in the violent conflicts (cited in Ferris 2008). One of my informants made a similar statement, saying that ‘[t]hose who care about sectarian conflict are the ones who stayed in Iraq’. Various academics have reached the conclusion that any conflict potential involving the Iraqi refugees in Syria is more likely to arise out of their long-term, unsustainable socio-economic destitution (Ferris 2007; Leenders 2008b; Asseburg and Angenendt 2008; Bazán 2008; Margesson et al. 2009). As Leenders has argued, that scenario does not involve conflict spillover, but the eventual emergence of a new and separate conflict (2008b). My empirical data are drawn from a small sample and limited to one Damascus suburb. Moreover, there is a bias in the sample towards Christian Iraqis. This group had no militia of its own in Iraq and in a rational-actor perspective professing sectarianism would run counter to its collective interests in Syria. What my informants do have in common with the overall Iraqi population in Syria, however, is lack of involvement in sectarian conflict since their arrival – neither among themselves nor with the host population. Half a decade after the initial mass migratory movement into Syria, ‘the sectarian Iraqi conflict’ has not spread. Why? Providing an answer is not straightforward in the context of the Syrian police state. The official discourse concerning religious diversity in Syria is dominated by depictions of harmonious coexistence (Nome 2008), and it is not an easy task to disentangle the deterrence effect of the ubiquitous Syrian secret police and the anti-sectarian secularism it upholds on the one hand, from genuine anti-sectarianism upheld by the refugees on the other. My fieldbased data underscore the political context, as witnessed by the two single informants who did profess sectarianism – but only after carefully establishing trust with the interviewer and only ever behind closed doors. Having suggested this caveat, the influence of the Syrian state may not alone explain the anti-sectarian stance of the vast majority of my informants. In spite of the refugees’ grievance and their suffering in Iraq, they embrace cosmopolitan coexistence across religious identities, and pride themselves in a national identity that crosses sectarian divides. This empirical finding is consistent with another field-based study by Leenders (2009: 352), who found that Iraqi refugees he interviewed ‘almost unanimously express strong weariness regarding the conflict in Iraq, stating their disappointment with virtually all Iraqi parties and political leaders and their disgust with the sectarian and ethnic strife engulfing their country’. It is not my aim here to scoff at failed warnings of sectarian conflict spillover with the privilege of hindsight. As noted by UNHCR researchers, such fears were understandable, implying that there were good reasons for voicing them. Yet one may hazard the estimation that there were also negative reasons for voicing them. The initial dearth of field-based studies is certainly

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one of them, leaving too much of an empirical gap to be filled by analysts with insufficient access to the refugees themselves and their perspectives. In addition, there are two discursive frameworks that may have been conducive to the idea that Iraqi refugees would bring with them the seeds of sectarian conflict to Syria. First, there is a discourse of ‘Iraqi sectarian violence’ in which sectarianism has been perceived as a root cause rather than a symptom of conflict, of misguided U.S. polices and state failure (Davis 2007). Iraqi politics and society have unfortunately been interpreted through the lens of sectarian division and strife, and thus conflict has often been portrayed as something embedded in national history, while in reality sectarian violence has been the exception in modern Iraqi history, not the norm (Ismael and Fuller 2008; Davis 2008). Contrary to the cliché, the vision of a non-sectarian, peaceful Iraq has strong historical roots in the monarchy period and the late Ottoman era (Norwegian Institute of International Affairs 2009: 17). A 2009 report by a group of distinguished Iraqi academics and professionals representing a cross section of Iraq’s population put forth a strong case for acknowledging the history of Iraqi cosmopolitanism (Norwegian Institute of International Affairs 2009: 17). The key to stability in Iraq is to recognize the longevity and endurance of non-sectarian Iraqi patriotism as a fundamental value among most Iraqis. Despite the clichés that prevail in Western mainstream media, historical studies clearly demonstrate that Iraqi national sentiment is more than Baathism, and that over time it has proven a far stronger force than sectarianism. As observed by Visser (2007: 810), ‘by imposing a sectarian master narrative on Iraqi politics, western journalists consistently overlook aspects of Iraqi political discourse that point in directions other than sectarianism’. This is supported by Davis (2007), who states that ‘[t]he problem with much Western analysis of Iraqi politics is the use of conceptual prisms that employ simplistic and flawed conceptions of ethnicity and religion’. Such a sectarian master narrative has been discursively imposed on Iraq, with consequences for the conceptualization of Iraqi refugees as carriers of sectarian conflict. If Iraqis are engaged in a violent conflict fuelled by ancient hatreds and toxic sectarianism, it follows that Iraqi refugees must be ‘sectarian’ too. There is yet another discourse that may have shaped the construction of Iraqi refugees as threats, namely the global tendency in refugee discourse to construct refugees as threats, per se. Leenders argues this eloquently in more depth elsewhere (2009); suffice it to say here that there is a global trend to label refugees in increasingly pejorative ways (Zetter 2007), and that today’s security paradigm in which refugees are categorized as ‘threats’ is no exception to that rule (Frelick 2007). Rather, the whole security discourse framing Iraqi refugees as carriers of sectarian conflict is an analytical vantage point located squarely within that security paradigm. In a Gramscian perspective it is fully compatible with both inadequate international responses to the humanitarian needs of Iraqi refugees and the outright resistance of western nations – including the occupying power – to the notion of Iraqi refugees’ resettlement in their midst (International Crisis Group 2008: ii). In this article I have critically reassessed such a theoretical practice, and demonstrated its lack of empirical substance. Alarmist outcries will take place in the wake of the next large-scale refugee situation as well, involving analysts at leafy campuses

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and in the air-conditioned offices of think tanks. They should be substantiated by empirically driven research.

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—— (2008), ‘The looming crisis: Displacement and security in Iraq’, Policy Paper No. 5, The Brookings Institution, August, http://www.brookings. edu/~/media/Files/rc/papers/2008/08_iraq_ferris/08_iraq_ferris.pdf. Accessed 15 March 2011. Frelick, Bill (2007), ‘Paradigm shifts in the international responses to refugees’, in James D. White and Anthony J. Marsella (eds), Fear of Persecution: Global Human Rights, International Law, and Human Well-Being, Lanham: Lexington Books, pp. 33–58. Harper, Andrew (2008), ‘Iraq’s refugees: Ignored and unwanted’, International Review of The Red Cross, 90: 869, pp. 169–190. Harpviken, Kristian Berg (2008), ‘What is special about refugee mobilization?’, Global Migration and Transnational Politics Project, Center for Global Studies, George Mason University, Washington, DC, US, 17–19 April. International Crisis Group (2008), ‘Failed responsibilities: Iraqi refugees in Syria, Jordan and Lebanon’, Middle East Report No. 52, 10 July, http:// www.crisisgroup.org/~/media/Files/Middle%20East%20North%20Africa/ Iraq%20Syria%20Lebanon/Iraq/ailed_responsibility___iraqi_refugees_in_ syria__jordan_and_lebanon.ashx. Accessed 15 March 2011. IRIN (2007), ‘Iraq-Iran: Fear among refugees as cholera crosses border’, IRIN, 7 October. Ismael, Tareq Y. and Fuller, Max (2008), ‘The disintegration of Iraq: The manufacturing and politicization of sectarianism’, International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies, 2: 3, pp. 443–473. Leenders, Reinoud (2008a), ‘L’adiux aux armes: La politique des réfugies Irakiens et son impact sécuritaire sur la région’ (A farewell to arms: The politics of Iraqi refugees and their impact on regional security), MaghrebMachrek, 198, pp. 93–122. —— (2008b), ‘Iraqi refugees in Syria: Causing a spillover of the Iraqi conflict?’, Third World Quarterly, 29: 8, pp. 1563–1584. —— (2009), ‘Refugee warriors or war refugees? Iraqi refugees’ predicament in Syria, Jordan and Lebanon’, Mediterranean Politics, 14: 3, pp. 343–363. Lischer, Sarah Kenyon (2005), Dangerous Sanctuaries: Refugee Camps, Civil War, and the Dilemmas of Humanitarian Aid, New York: Cornell University Press. —— (2008), ‘Security and displacement in Iraq’, International Security, 33: 2, pp. 95–119. Lyon, Alistair (2007a), ‘Iraqis fleeing conflict flood over borders’, Reuters, 30 January. —— (2007b), ‘Iraqi refugees turn to the sex trade in Syria’, Reuters, 31 December. Margesson, Rhoda, Sharp, Jeremy M. and Bruno, Andorra (2009), ‘Iraqi refugees and internally displaced persons: A deepening humanitarian crisis?’, Congressional Research Service Report for Congress, 13 February, http:// www.fas.org/sgp/crs/mideast/RL33936.pdf. Accessed 15 March 2011. Nome, Frida Austvoll (2008), ‘Engaging religion to reduce tension: The case of Syria and Lebanon’, Policy Brief No. 1, Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), http://www.prio.no/sptrans/1113470645/Engaging%20 Religion%20to%20Reduce%20Tension%20_Policy%20Brief%201%20 2008.pdf. Accessed 15 March 2011. Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (2009), ‘More than “Shiites” and “Sunnis” – How a post-sectarian strategy can change the logic and facilitate sustainable political reform in Iraq: A report by Iraqi academics and professionals, prepared in cooperation with the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI)’, http://www.nupi.no/Publications/ Books-and-reports/2009/More-than-Shiites-and-Sunnis-How-a-Post-

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SUGGESTED CITATION Paasche, E. (2011), ‘Iraqi refugees in a Damascus suburb: Carriers of sectarian conflict?’, International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies 5: 2, pp. 247–262, doi: 10.1386/ijcis.5.2.247_1

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CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS Erlend Paasche is a doctoral candidate writing his Ph.D. on Iraqi return migration at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO). This research is part of the international research project, Possibilities and realities of return migration (PREMIG), 2011–2014, led by PRIO. Paasche holds a B.A. and an M.A. in Middle East Studies from the University of Oslo, has studied Arabic in Damascus and Cairo, and has fieldwork experience in Syria and Iraq. Contact: Bentsegata 10, 0645 Oslo, Norway. E-mail: [email protected]

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International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies Volume 5 Number 2 © 2011 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/ijcis.5.2.263_1

TAHIR ZAMAN University of East London

Lessons learned: Palestinian refugees from Baghdad to Damascus 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

ABSTRACT

KEYWORDS

This article seeks to address the paucity of research on the Palestinian Iraqi community. Analysis of refugee narratives gathered at the Association of Palestinian Iraqis community centre in Damascus reveals the dynamics of the refugee process in the context of local integration with the host community. It also considers the extent to which previous experience and memory of being a refugee acts as a social and cultural resource, helping to create a distinctive geography of exile and a means of bolstering welfare strategy. Mukhayim Yarmouk, a suburb of Damascus, provides the context in which social relations unfold, and where Palestinian Iraqi refugees renegotiate identity and space.

Iraq refugees Palestinians Syria integration sectarianism.

INTRODUCTION Little has been written on the Palestinian Iraqi community. Apparent lack of interest can perhaps be attributed in part to the relatively small size of the Palestinian community in Iraq, which numbered at its peak about 34,000 and today stands at just over 11,500 (IRIN 2010)1 – and to the dearth of material available from inside Iraq during the Saddam era (Harling 2010; Chatelard 2011). This article seeks to address a blind spot in the literature on Palestinian Iraqis for whom the recent events in Iraq have become a second and in some cases a third experience of forced migration.

1. AMore recent estimates put the figure at around t0,000. Author’s interview with member of the Palestinian Iraqi Community Association, Yarmouk, March 2011.

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2. ‘The entitlement of a person’, Sen tells us,stands for the different set of alternative commodity bundles that the person can acquire through the use of various legal channels of acquirement to someone in his position … [and] is determined by his original ownership (what is called his ‘endowment’) and the various bundles he can acquire starting retrospectively from each initial endowment, through the use of trade and production (what is called his exchange entitlement mapping). (1995: 52–53) 3. British Foreign Office documents at the time reveal that the British government was considering a transfer of as many as hu, 100,000 Palestinian refugees to Iraq with a similar-sized Iraqi Jewish population moving in the opposite direction, though this was something that the Iraqi government of Nuri al-Said resolutely rejected. By autumn of 1949, the proposed scale of the transfer had been scaled down so that the incoming refugees from Palestine would be accommodated in property vacated by Iraqi Jews in urban centres (Shiblak 2005: 110–1–13).

In what follows, I consider how previous experiences of displacement and of life as refugees act as a social and cultural resource in the strategies of Palestinian Iraqis once more compelled to seek sanctuary. Particular attention is paid to the community structures of Palestinian Iraqi refugees who have settled in Damascus. I do not limit the definition of a refugee to that set out in the 1951 Geneva Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. In the Convention it is ‘alienage’ – a legal status that results from crossing state borders – which is of paramount importance. Following Malkki (1996), I suggest that refugees are people engaged in transformative processes, in which new experiences, especially those affecting relationships and social networks, are of critical importance. Such an approach posits the refugee as a social agent rather than a victim whose circumstances are determined wholly by events beyond his or her control. By drawing on the testimonies of Palestinian Iraqis in Syria, it is possible to obtain a humanized picture of the process of displacement, shedding light on the practices and decision making of refugees as they position themselves in relation to both secular and faithbased organizations with the aim of gaining access to vital resources. I propose that much can be learned from the field of welfare economics, and in particular the work of Amartya Sen and his notion of ‘entitlements’. Primarily concerned with the political economy of hunger, Sen argues that famines are a construct not only of supply-side problems, but more importantly, that they are brought about through a failure of what he terms ‘entitlements’.2 For Sen, famine ensues where there is a change to an individual’s endowment, perhaps through the loss of health or of vital resources such as access to land. Starvation can also occur when entitlements are affected by a loss in earnings, unemployment or a rise in prices. In the context of forced migration, I suggest that the endowment of a Palestinian Iraqi forced migrant (that is to say the cultural, economic and social resources he or she has at his or her disposal) has been severely depleted and is faced with further erosion as his or her ability to maintain these resources is diminished through restrictions on work, rising costs of living and serious problems in relation to welfare provision (Sen 1995: 4). How do Iraqi Palestinians address these challenges?

PALESTINIANS IN IRAQ 1948–2003 The Palestinian Iraqi community that settled in Baghdad following the nakba of 1948 numbered 873 families comprising 4280 individuals, originating largely from the areas near Haifa and Yafa; some 77 per cent hailed from the villages of Ijzim, Jab’a and ‘Ayn Ghazaal (Mohammad 2007: 23). Following fierce resistance to attacks by Zionist forces lasting six months beyond the ceasefire agreed between the Arab armies and the nascent state of Israel, inhabitants of these villages were transported to Jenin by Iraqi forces that had been sent to fight alongside the resistance. From Jenin, sanctuary was offered in Iraq.3 In Jenin and throughout the journey to Baghdad, refugees received an outpouring of support from local people and organizations: I remember there being lots of small community organisations that were helping us at the time. The main organisation that helped us was called Nady al-Arabi fi Jenin [The Arab Club in Jenin]. It put up, for example, temporary housing, accommodating us in schools, mosques and tents. They provided us with meals as we didn’t have any stoves to cook with or anything. I mean where did this association derive its capabilities from?

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It drew its support from other grassroots organisations such as trade unions and syndicates, like the teachers union for instance, or from some families who God had blessed with wealth and had the financial ability and capability to help. The ‘ulama of the mosques opened their doors so that people had somewhere to stay at that time. At the sermons on Friday prayers, they would apportion the donations collected from the wealth of the people to give to us. This would include clothes, blankets, everyday things and fixed amounts of money. Some of the ‘ulama demanded that every family in the West Bank and Jordan should welcome as guests the Palestinian families that had been dispossessed [...] During the course of the journey, at Rutbeh – the first town that you come across once you cross the Jordan/Iraq border – the people of Rutbeh started crying when they came out to welcome us on our way to Iraq. You could sense the feeling, the emotions. They were deeply affected and were crying over what had happened to us. They gathered whatever they had to spare from their homes – clothes, blankets – and distributed it amongst us. (Palestinian Iraqi man, 70 years old) On arrival in Iraq, responsibility for displaced Palestinians was placed with Iraq’s Ministry of Defence. Some refugees were temporarily housed in military barracks at the Shu’aybah military base in Basra, formerly home to the British army.4 By 1950, responsibility for the newly displaced Palestinians had been passed to the Department for Palestinian Affairs in Iraq, which reported to the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs. Unlike in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and the Palestinian Territories, UNRWA (which had been established to meet the needs of the displaced Palestinians) did not have a presence in Iraq.5 Housing for the displaced was initially provided through what was known as the Shelters Ordinance (nizam al-malaaji). Under this system, families who initially sought refuge in Iraq were accommodated in buildings vacated by Iraqi Jews in response to the creation of Israel and the passing of Law 1/1950, an annex of Law 62/1933, which permitted cancellation of Iraqi nationality.6 These buildings included synagogues, schools, hotels and community centres.7 Having visited some of these shelters in 1967, the Minister for Labour and Social Affairs in a report to the Iraqi cabinet described the shelters as having: […] no light or air vents […] they [Palestinians] are living in perpetual worry and in repugnant fear. Families, that range from seven to twelve individuals, are living in a single room of 3 metres by 3.2 metres; and this one room is the place where they cook, wash clothes and dishes, take a bath, sleep as well as at the same time being a play space for children […] Indeed, any human in such a place would lose their humanity and their life would be transformed into one that resembles that of an animal. (author’s translation, cited in Mohammad 2007: 29) As a result of this report, a ministerial committee was established to provide greater welfare support to the Palestinian refugees and to rehouse8 the majority of the refugees in sixteen apartment blocks – comprising 768 flats in Hayy al-Baladiyat and small houses in Hayy al-Hurriye (129 houses), Hayy as-Salam (137 houses) and Tel-Muhammad (24 houses) (Mohammad 2007: 38). Between 1950 and 2003, welfare support for Palestinian Iraqis was administered by the Department for Palestinian Refugees in Iraq. This was financed

4. Author’s interview with Palestinian Iraqi refugee, Yarmouk, January 2011. 5. Two conflicting accounts have been put forward as to why this was the case. The first version posits that the Iraqi government rejected the presence of UNRWA on account of the existence of a government department dedicated to the affairs of the displaced Palestinians and thus no need for the Iraqi government to be a donor for UNRWA. The official Iraqi government version makes clear that the Emergency Committee for Palestinian Refugees felt there was no need for an agreement for provision of aid and assistance to the Palestinians in Iraq as the number was relatively small (Mohammad 2007: 19–20). 6. Saleh Jabr, the Iraqi Minister of the Interior at the time, suggested that impeding the emigration of those who no longer wanted to be in Iraq ran contrary to the national interest. He said, ‘Those who want to do so for good would do the country harm if they remained. As to the remaining Jewish nationals, the government considers them as Iraqis equal with Muslims and Christians […] the constitution is a guarantee of this’ (cited in Shiblak 2005: 104). 7. Author’s interview with Palestinian Iraqi refugee, February 2011. 8. It is worth mentioning here that Palestinians in Iraq were denied the right to own property until 1980. The decree to allow them to do so was later rescinded in 1989.

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9. The targeting and looting of government ministries and offices in the wake of the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 meant that records were lost. There followed a period in which Palestinian Iraqis were given temporary residency that was renewable every one to two months. Those who have remained in Iraq have now returned to having permanent residency. Author’s interview with Palestinian Iraqi refugee, Yarmouk, February 2011.

by a fixed annual budget of 300,000 Iraqi Dinars apportioned by the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs, covering rent and utility payments in addition to cash welfare benefits (Mohammad 2007). Palestinians were granted education rights equal to those of Iraqi citizens, with free access up to and including the tertiary level. They also enjoyed rights to health care on a par with Iraqi citizens and permanent residence status.9 Mohammad (2007: 65) identifies several stages in the development of the right to work for Palestinian refugees under Iraqi law. The initial two years after their arrival in 1948 were regarded as a relief operation. From 1950 to 1964, many of the work opportunities were largely limited to the informal sector, with refugees taking low-paid jobs. The situation remained as such until 1964, when a law was passed giving Palestinians equal treatment with respect to pay, contracts, benefit entitlement and promotions. In March 1994, however, the Iraqi government issued Law 23/1994, reducing Palestinians’ rights. They were forbidden to own motor vehicles and to deposit money in post office saving accounts; their membership of the Chamber of Commerce was cancelled; and they were excluded from employment in several key public bodies such as the Ministry of the Interior, the Foreign Ministry and the Ministry for Oil (Mohammad 2007: 40).

CO-OPTING THE PALESTINIAN ISSUE Iraqi governments have also adopted various and changing policies in relation to both the sociocultural and political status of Palestinian refugees and the Palestinian issue in general. As early as March 1960, the government of President Abd al-Karim Qasim announced the formation of the First Regiment of the Palestinian Liberation Army under direct supervision of the Iraqi armed forces and financed from the budget of the Ministry of Defence. At the same time a government-supported charitable organization, Rabeta abna’ Falasteen fi’l Iraq/ Community of the Sons of Palestine in Iraq, was established, charged with raising cultural awareness amongst Palestinians and working alongside government agencies to open schools and cultural centres dedicated to this task. The organization also worked in cooperation with the Iraqi authorities to raise awareness of health and social issues amongst poor and destitute refugees, and to encourage sporting activities. A number of trade unions were formed specifically to represent the growing Palestinian community (Mohammad 2007: 53–56). Later the Palestinian issue was used instrumentally to justify the legitimacy of the Ba’th Party. Mobilizing references to Islamic traditions and to the Palestinian resistance, songs and poems celebrated the leadership of Saddam Hussein, especially during the war with Iran. Adib Nasr’s I Shall Throw Stones in our Name, O Saddam identified Iraqi troops with youth of the Palestinian intifada: The missile bursts forth, The missile bursts forth, And I shall throw stones in the name of Allah, And I shall throw stones in the name of Jerusalem [al-Quds, the Holy] And I shall throw stones in your name, Oh Saddam, I am faith, I am flint, I am stones from the walls of Jerusalem, [Thrown] at Tehran. (cited in Bengio 2002: 197)

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In a discourse analysis of Saddam’s public statements and speeches, Ofra Bengio (2002) notes that use of Palestinian themes was particularly intensive following the invasion of Kuwait in 1990. The Ba’thist regime had couched the conflict with America and its allies in religious terms, with the liberation of the holy cities of Islam as a key objective.10 Such imagery was to have serious consequences for Palestinian Iraqis, helping reinforce the notion that the Gulf War was fought on their behalf. In 2001, Saddam declared a E billion euro aid package for Palestinians in the Middle East,11 causing resentment on the part of Iraqis suffering under the sanctions regime (Human Rights Watch 2006). In the minds of marginalized communities in the poor urban quarters of Baghdad such as Madinat as-Sadr, Palestinian Iraqis were increasingly perceived as favoured clients of the regime.

ON THE PERIPHERY A formal legal status, together with limited socio-economic rights, might suggest that Palestinian refugees were integrated into Iraqi society. The lived experiences of Palestinians suggested otherwise, however: You’d always be made to feel Palestinian rather than Iraqi. This house is Palestinian, this employee is Palestinian – things like that. Despite living together; working together, there still remained some barriers which Saddam Hussein didn’t let you cross. (Palestinian Iraqi man, 50 years old) By the mid-1990s, the international sanctions regime was beginning to take its toll on Iraqi society at large.12 Welfare payments introduced in the 1960s were replaced by the food distribution system; the public health system was in free fall, employment was becoming increasingly scarce and the value of the Iraqi dinar plummeted, rendering worthless savings held in the local currency.13 Landlords who had previously collected a reasonable sum from the government for property rented to Palestinians found their rent payments were frozen as the government struggled with inflationary pressures. Under Iraqi law, it was not possible for landlords to break their contract with the government, saddling them with rental income of as little as $1 per month (Human Rights Watch 2006). In the 1990s, the Iraqi government suppressed uprisings that followed the 1990 Gulf War and forcibly moved large numbers of people in the South,14 resulting in dispossession and displacement of large numbers of people to poor neighbourhoods in Baghdad such as Fudhayliya and Madinat al-Thawra, later renamed Madinat al-Sadr. By 2003, the label Shrugi, long used pejoratively for this social underclass, was increasingly associated with fear, as inhabitants of more affluent suburbs began to envision them as an ‘unruly mob’ (Harling 2010). Chatelard (2011) observes that ‘[t]he number of shruqi’s [sic] kept growing in the cities and at least in the imagination of those who have been casting them as barbarian Others [they] now form the majority of the recruits of the Jaysh al-Mahdi militia’.15 This view was echoed by a Palestinian Iraqi refugee, who told me: [In] Baghdad Jedida, the families were educated and respectful. But after the collapse of the regime, there came people from who knows where [and] there was more riff-raff and uncivilised behaviour. In the 1990s, the people were more educated and respectful and there was more

10. The naming of Iraqi ballistic missiles at the time further illustrates how the imagery of the Palestinian struggle was appropriated by the regime. One missile was named al-hijarah al-sarukh, or the stone that is a missile (Bengio 1998: 199). 11. Palestinian Iraqis were not beneficiaries. 12. For a more detailed analysis of the sanctions regime and the extent to which it contributed to the collapse of Iraq’s infrastructure, see J. Gordon (2010). 13. The collapse of the Iraqi economy resulted in more widespread corruption as people struggled to come to terms with hyperinflation: when the Dinar collapsed, you couldn’t do anything. At the time, a kilo of meat was 5000 Iraqi Dinars. As a teacher, I had a salary of 4,500 Iraqi Dinars. [That’s] less than a kilo of meat by 500 Dinars. So teachers were compelled to stretch their hands out to students and the education system fell apart. Judges stretched their hands out to the accused and the judicial system collapsed. Doctors and nurses started taking more money from patients and medical services collapsed. In my opinion, that was the end of the Iraqi government, not just when Saddam fell. (Author’s interview with Palestinian Iraqi refugee, Yarmouk, January 2011) 14. The Ba’thist regime considered this to be a necessary

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measure to deny enemy combatants an accessible route to infiltrate the country. Author’s interview with Iraqi refugee, Damascus, March 2011. 15. The Jaysh al-Mahdi militia was not the only militia operating in Iraq at the time. The SCIRIbacked Badr Corps had largely infiltrated the Ministry of the Interior and was absorbed into local police units, and has been accused of operating ‘death squads’ targeting Sunnis. Tandhim al-Qa’ida fi Balad al-Rafidayn or al_Qaida’s organization in Mesopotamia headed by Abu Musab az-Zarqawi claimed responsibility for a number of attacks on Shi’is (International Crisis Group 2006a: 14–18). 16. Author’s interview with Palestinian Iraqi refugee, Yarmouk. December 2010. 17. Author’s interview with Palestinian Iraqi refugees, Yarmouk, March 2011. 18. The number of Egyptian migrant workers dwindled from 1.25 million in 1985 to around 66,000 in 1999 (IOM 2004). Egyptians were so conspicuous in the 1980s that one Palestinian Iraqi refugee remarked to me, ‘If you threw a rock, it would have landed on the head of an Egyptian. There were that many at the time’ (Author’s interview, March 2011).

intermingling between Shi’a and Sunna. Only a very few had that fire of sectarianism in them. For the most part, we got on well […] [In Madinat as-Sadr] you had a million and a half Shi’a gathered together, packed in, crammed. I would only go to Sadr only if it was absolutely necessary. The only reason would be to pay the installments at the bank in Madinat as-Sadr. Believe it or not, I’d go into Sadr, do my business and get out of there straight away. I wouldn’t stay there any longer than I had to. This was in spite of the fact that back then, we were living under the security of the state with stability and order. Even then, you couldn’t vouch for the faces around you […] their faces were of criminals not people. (Palestinian Iraqi man, 34 years old) During the Iran–Iraq war, travel restrictions had been implemented to prevent Iraqi males avoiding conscription. As Palestinians were exempt from military service, the ban on travel was not applicable. This put the Palestinian community in a privileged position compared to their Iraqi neighbours, as they were able to bring back goods and gifts from abroad for them. At the same time, they were marked as different from the population at large and seen as not sharing in the sufferings associated with war.16 This was compounded when Palestinians and other non-Iraqi Arabs contributed to the war effort as part of the ‘People’s Army’ (Jaysh ash-Sha’bi) charged with protecting supply lines. Iraqis fighting on the front line viewed the ‘Arabs’ with suspicion and regarded them as murtaziqeen or mercenaries for Saddam, whose job was to ensure that Iraqi conscripts did not desert their posts – a charge dismissed emphatically by Palestinians.17 There were nonetheless increasingly wide perceptions of Palestinian privilege vis-à-vis the wider Iraqi society. As one informant in Damascus told me: A police officer, a graduate from college who you’d think was educated, said to me: ‘we don’t like you Palestinians because Saddam favoured you.’ I asked, ‘how did we ever benefit from Saddam?’ He tells me: ‘the houses you live in – Saddam Hussein gave them to you’. I laughed. ‘How did you ever graduate from College?’ I ask him. ‘Why? What do you mean?’ I said: ‘Let me tell you something. I was born in 1960 in this house. Saddam wasn’t around at that time, How could he have given me the house?’ He thought a little and I carried on: ‘My brother was born in 1959 in this house. Saddam wasn’t there. Abd al-Karim Qasim was in charge. How did Saddam give me this house? He didn’t take the leadership of the Ba’ath until 1979.’ The guy felt a bit awkward and embarrassed; ‘I always thought Saddam gave you the houses’ he said. And that’s an officer, a graduate. That’s the kind of ignorance and stereotypes people had about us. Some people even actually thought that we had sold Palestine, taken the money and come to Iraq. On top of that, they didn’t know that it was neither Saddam nor the Ba’th party that gave us homes but Abd al-Kareim Qasim’. (Palestinian Iraqi man, 50 years old) Such beliefs fed prejudices among the dispossessed of Madinat as-Sadr, by whom the Palestinians were often seen as usurpers of Iraqi property that rightfully belonged to them. Moreover, in the eyes of this increasingly large population, the Palestinians represented ‘Arabs’. During the Iran–Iraq war, Iraqi males were drafted into the army, creating a huge gap in the labour market. This deficit was filled in part by some 1.25 million Egyptians18 and

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other labour migrants from the Arab world (IOM 2004). In addition, Iraq played host to dissident Syrian Ba’thists who were granted generous support by the Iraqi government.19 However, in the wake of the invasion of 2003 and the collapse of the Iraqi regime, these non-Iraqi Arab nationals were quick to leave – only the Palestinian Iraqis remained. Targeting of Palestinians should also be seen in the context of general economic and social crisis following the invasion, and escalating sectarian violence, particularly following the February 2006 bombing of the Ali al-Askeri shrine in Samarra, a predominately Sunni town. Sectarian violence was already a common feature of the conflict: attacks on Shi’a civilians had produced calls from Muqtada as-Sadr for what he termed takfir al-takfiriyin, or the excommunication of the excommunicators (International Crisis Group 2006b: 15), a reference to the Salafists, pejoratively called the Wahabis, who had begun to establish themselves in Iraq during the 1990s.20 A further problem for Palestinians was the perception that they were both Saddam loyalists and Salafists. As a result, they were marked by the Jaysh al-Mahdi (JAM) as a legitimate target21: The few Palestinian families that lived in my area, even during the time of Saddam Hussein, had nothing to do with the Ba’thists or with Wahabis. Even though the nearest mosque to our house was a Sunni mosque which had lots of Wahabis praying there, we’d prefer to go to a mosque further away; the mosque of Abd al-Qadir al-Jeelani. They [my Shi’i neighbours] knew this. I had been to Najaf and Karbala. They knew this. It was mostly Iraqi Sunnis that would pray at the mosque where there were Wahabis. Some Palestinians would too. But they would be there not because they were Wahabis but because it was the nearest mosque to their homes. As a result they were labelled as Wahabis. Similarly, it was why they saw me as someone who was clean. So, they’d ask me why I didn’t pray in that mosque and I’d say I didn’t like to and they would say yeah, we know you. You don’t like Wahabis; you’re clean people. (Palestinian Iraqi man, 50 years old)

19. Author’s interviews with both Iraqi and Palestinian Iraqi refugees in Damascus. 20. Author’s interview with Palestinian Iraqi refugee in Yarmouk, January 2011. 21. For the Jaysh al-Mahdi it is legally permitted in accordance with a fatwa allegedly attributed to Muhammad Sadiq as-Sadr to execute a nawasib, or one who hates the Twelver Shi’i Imams. In addition, it is also permissible for the appropriation of property belonging to takfiriyin (see International Crisis Group 2006). 22. There was also an informal exchange of housing that took place between Shi’i and Sunni residents of Baghdad, where friends would agree to exchange homes to attain security. Author’s interview with Palestinian Iraqi refugee, Yarmouk, March 2011. 23. Author’s interview with Palestinian Iraqi refugee, Yarmouk, January 2011.

Among my respondents, problems did not lie with Shi’a neighbours but with Iraqis unfamiliar to them who entered the neighbourhood as outsiders. As the Sadrist movement sought to consolidate itself throughout Baghdad, it established offices known as Makatib al-Shahid al-Thani or ‘Offices of the Second Martyr’ outside its strongholds of Madinat as-Sadr and Sho’la, and it moved into predominately Shi’a-populated areas such as Madinat Hurriye or Hayy Salaam. A key function of the offices was to oversee the resettlement of Shi’i families displaced through sectarian strife and to act as an arbitrator for local disputes (International Crisis Group 2006b: 20).22 With the offices came an increased presence of JAM, which conducted local paramilitary parades as a show of strength and as an intimidatory tactic designed to frighten remaining Sunni families into abandoning their homes.23 The basis for Muqtada as-Sadr’s legitimacy as a spokesperson for marginalized Shi’i communities does not rest with the traditional system of the marja’iya from which Shi’i clerics have wielded control over symbolic, material and organizational resources (Motahari 2001; Abdel-Jabar 2003). Instead, Muqtada has elevated his charismatic credentials over and above those who enjoy traditional authority (International Crisis Group 2006b: 18). Although Muqtada continues to act in the capacity of marja, his capacity to

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24. For a description of the conditions at al-Tanf camp, see Amnesty International (2008). 25. Palestinian Iraqis continue to make their way to Damascus, some families having arrived as recently as August 2010. Interviews with Palestinian Iraqi refugees, Yarmouk, December 2010. 26. Interviews with Palestinian Iraqi refugees, Yarmouk, December 2010.

amass revenue through the collection of khums and other charitable donations is associated with his authority among the most marginalized sector of the Shi’a. Followers, including those in JAM, have been given free rein to raise finance: they have targeted Palestinian as both Salafists and supporters of the Saddam regime, demanding money and seizing property used to house Shi’a displaced from mixed or Sunni neighbourhoods in Baghdad.

NEW DISPLACEMENTS Migration from Baghdad to Syria began in earnest in 2006, when many Palestinians concluded that they must seek security in other states. The Syrian government had initially refused them entry to Syria, confining them to al-Tanf camp, located in a narrow strip of no-man’s-land on the Iraqi–Syria border.24 Many attempted to enter the country on counterfeit Iraqi passports, rather than risk being held in this isolated and desolate site, described by the UNHCR as ‘an inappropriate and dangerous [.] place’ (Amnesty International 2008: 1). Others were placed in the Waleed and al-Hol camps. The prohibitive costs of acquiring a passport – around $500 per adult – meant that only those with the financial capabilities to leave were able to do so. Many have since spent years accumulating funds in order to facilitate this means of exit.25 Writing on refugee policy in the Middle East, Michael Kagan (2011) draws attention to a ‘responsibility shift’ for the management of refugee populations from sovereign states to international bodies such as the UNHCR and UNRWA. In effect, the UNHCR has become a ‘surrogate state’ (Slaughter and Crisp 2008) filling the void left by states unwilling or unable to meet obligations set out in the 1951 Geneva Convention. Here the host government adopts the apparently benign position of upholding negative rights regarding refugees, agreeing to observe the principle of non-refoulement. In exchange, international organizations assume the burden of providing direct assistance to refugee populations. Kagan (2011: 13) maintains that in the case of the Middle East, ‘Arab governments are likely to acquiesce to the presence of refugees on their territory only as long as responsibility for their maintenance and ultimate departure from the country is visibly assigned to an international body or other third party’. Syria is a case in point. Memorandums of understandings have been signed with fourteen international organizations whose activities are coordinated by the Syrian Arab Red Crescent. It is through these that refugees access support for health care, education and housing. Significantly, the right to employment has been denied to Iraqi refugees, though it is common for refugees to find paid employment in the informal sector (Ali and Dorai 2010). As one Palestinian Iraqi refugee told me, ‘we’re like the tartoora (rickshaw), we’re not supposed to be here, but we’re everywhere. They turn a blind eye to us’. Refugee interaction with the wider society in Syria is constrained and limited. Work is a key space where refugees can act as agents of social and economic change allowing for greater integration and acceptance of refugee communities (Al-Sharmani 2004; Grabska 2006). Where the right to employment is withheld, alternative strategies are developed, either in the informal sector or further afield. With established irregular migration routes operating through Turkey and Greece into Europe, many Palestinian Iraqis (and especially young men) have managed to circumvent borders and secure asylum in countries such as Sweden.26 For most Palestinian Iraqis, resettlement to a third country is a preferred choice: integration does not seem to be on the agenda.

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By refusing refugees the right to work, the Syrian government ensures that responsibility to provide welfare continues to lie with international organizations. Refugees come to regard local integration as a likely prospect, buttressing the logic of the host state, which favours a vulnerable refugee population able to draw financial resources from the international community to support the cost of hosting refugees (Kagan 2011). As in Iraq, it also marks the refugees as people with access to resources that the local population does not receive.27 Where does this leave local integration? The Arabic root gh-r-b is used to denote several related ideas: exile or an absence from home/ghurba; to emigrate, to be far from one’s homeland; to assimilate to a western way of life/tgharrab; and something that is strange, foreign or alien/ghareeb. For many Palestinian Iraqis, Damascus (and in particular Mukhayim Yarmouk) does not represent a foreign space: it is not ghareeb. Kinship ties already exist not only with Palestinian Iraqis who fled Iraq in the earlier phase of the crisis, but with relatives who settled in Damascus following the nakba of 1948: Dealings with Palestinian Syrians are good. They’ve supported us and I don’t feel like a foreigner around them. This is a Muslim Arab country, so I don’t have the sense of ghurba. It’s only that my wider family is far from me that I feel like that I’m away from home. There are so many similarities here and with our lives in Iraq; food, language [...] yes, there are some differences but it’s not great. I feel like that we’re all Palestinians together here. (Palestinian Iraqi woman, 40 years old)

27. Discussions with service providers indicate that the Syrian government is considering a more long-term relationship with some international NGOs and broadenign their remit so that the beneficiaries would include not only refugees but also Syrian nationals. In addition, the oversight of the implementation of projects would be coordinated through the Ministry of Social Affairs and Labour, rather than the Syrian Arab Red Crescent. This can be seen in the light of a recognition of the Iraqi refugee crisis being a protracted situation that would entail more long-term planning rather than just the provision of relief assistance.

The liminal space that refugees occupy, together with the ambivalent position of the state towards Iraqi refugees generally (designating them as guests and issuing fixed-term residency status of three to twelve months) nonetheless may prompt feelings of ghurba. This feeling of alienation may not stem from relations with the host population, but rather from those with the state bureaucracy and ‘surrogate state’ organizations that mark Palestinian Iraqis as ‘Other’. The state of mind that Iraqi Palestinians are living in Syria is that of someone who is not a permanent resident. I’m living here as a non-permanent resident. It’s possible that they [the government] issues a decree at any moment that says, ‘Goodbye, it’s time for you to leave the country’. It’s possible at any moment. Maybe there is no chance for re-settlement and the Syrian government has had enough and says ‘okay, time to leave’. So, we live in constant anxiety and that’s why you feel that you really are a stranger away from home. And this affects [you] even at the level of the people, and not the state. People get to know that this house is not a Syrian or Palestinian Syrian house. So social interaction isn’t entirely harmonious. Some people like Iraqis; I mean I get on well with my neighbours. But, how do they deal with you? You’re not an ibn balad […] Up til now, I consider myself a guest, a visitor here temporarily and then someone who is leaving. I don’t have any expectation of permanent residence. (Palestinian Iraqi man, 50 years old) The use of the expression ibn balad is instructive. Literally ‘son of the land’, it refers to someone who is entitled to the resources and welfare of the state, and denotes belonging. Rights and citizenship are the bedrock on which the edifice of integration rests. By denying full refugee status and deflecting the

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28. A UNHCR representative remarked to me that although the UNHCR worked with church organizations as implementing partners, there had been ‘something of a missed opportunity’ with respect to Islamic networks and institutions. Author’s interview with UNHCR representative, March 2010. 29. The organization was founded in May 2006 in response to the needs of the Palestinian Iraqi community in Syria, in particular the Palestinian Iraqis who were stranded at the border camps. Its membership reflects the diversity of Palestinian politics in the diaspora, with members from Hamas, Fatah, PFLP, Hizb al-Ba’th and independents. Consensus lies on three key points: (1) the centrality of al-Quds; (2) the right of return for all Palestinians; and (3) working for the services of all Palestinian Iraqis irrespective of political affiliation. Interviews with the director of Rabeta Falastiniyi al-Iraq, July 2010. 30. Here, I follow Bourdieu’s (1986) understanding of what constitutes social capital, which emphasizes ways in which relationships enable individuals, families and other small groups to influence access to resources. He defines social capital as being a ‘network of relationships [which are] the product of investment strategies, individual or collective, consciously or unconsciously aimed at establishing or reproducing social relationships that are directly usable in the

burden of welfare responsibility on to international humanitarian organizations, the Syrian government in tandem with the UNHCR and UNRWA has established a parallel system of welfare protection that marks refugees as ‘Others’. This lies contrary to the UNHCR’s own guidelines on refugee protection in urban areas, which aims to ‘reinforce existing fully authorized delivery systems, whether they are public, private or community based’ (UNHCR 2009). Although the agency’s policy seems commendable, the UNHCR in Syria falls short of this commitment, particularly with respect to community-based organizations.28 In what follows, I will briefly show how by using support structures offered by community organizations, Palestinian Iraqi refugees in Damascus are able to formulate alternative strategies.

RABETA: A HOME AWAY FROM HOME Welfare services for refugees from Iraq in Syria are provided by a network of humanitarian assistance organizations, with the UNHCR at the apex creating a ‘surrogate state’ for the protection needs of refugees. Support is more than merely financial or monetary, however. We saw earlier, following Sen, how the erosion of ‘entitlements’ is a key factor in decision making and strategies of refugees, who are no less social actors than any others. Entitlements are more than just material assets – they include social, cultural and legal resources. For Palestinian Iraqis, the Palestinian Iraqi Community Association/ Rabeta Falastiniyi al-Ira29 has been integral to maintaining and nurturing social and cultural resources. Rabeta has been able to build the social capital30 of the Palestinian Iraqi refugee community by mobilizing connections of individual members with Syrian Palestinian groups: The good thing about the Rabeta is when someone belongs to a certain political faction, he can put to use the capabilities of that organisation at the service of the [Palestinian Iraqi] people. That is something great, wonderful. Our Rabeta is like that. Some brothers at the Rabeta have relations with certain parties but they don’t compel the people to join this organisation or that organisation. Instead, they put to use the capability of the organisation at the service of the people; whether it is material assistance, medical assistance, sporting activities or moral support. (Palestinian Iraqi man, 50 years old, Yarmouk) This consolidation of collective social capital has empowered the Rabeta to act as a bridge with the wider Palestinian community in Syria, coordinating with the main Palestinian political parties that maintain a presence in Syria to negotiate with the Syrian government and the UNHCR three alternative outcomes on behalf of the Palestinian Iraqis.31 These include residency in al-Hol Camp with a view to fast-track resettlement, residency in Damascus with the possibility of future resettlement, and recognition as Palestinian Syrians. The Rabeta has registered in excess of 500 families, almost all opting for re-settlement as their chances of local integration supported by the state seem a distant prospect. For many, this does not mean that Syria is an inhospitable or alien environment. Rather, there is an implicit recognition that the previous experience in Iraq, of having been integrated de facto but without rights on a par with the local population, has taught Palestinian Iraqis that such a position is precarious and subject to change. Citizenship and rights remain the basis on which all other integration becomes meaningful:

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I suppose I’m a temporary guest here until I get re-settlement. We wish we could continue staying here because we feel that there is security here. If we had a choice between re-settlement abroad and continue staying here with full residence and legal rights, we’d prefer to stay here. There’s no difference between here and Iraq. This is a Muslim country and you can practice your religion here as you normally would. (Palestinian Iraqi woman, 40 years old)

short or long term’ (1986: 245). 31. Author’s observations and discussions with members of the Rabeta, January 2011. 32. Author’s observations between October 2010 and March 2011.

Rabeta helps sustain and nurture linkages, ties of kinship and of friendship, providing continuity when confronted with the rupture of displacement. Refugees who have been displaced as recently as the summer of 2010 find they have a supportive community in place on arrival to Damascus. The Rabeta acts as a hub for signposting of services, an assembly hall for marriages, a gathering place for religious festivities, and a cultural centre where seminars are given on religion and on the complexities and challenges of integration in Syria or further afield in Europe:32 The Rabeta is a house for all Palestinians coming from Iraq because it compensates you for all that you lost in Iraq with moral support. That is what it does fundamentally. Every other week we gather together to go to the Nabulsi mosque in Rukn ad-Din to pray Friday congregation prayers there and listen to the sermon by Muhammad Ratib al Nabulsi. So we feel this sense of community of going together and of praying together at a mosque. We often meet at the Rabeta to talk with our brothers about our situation in Syria; to hear news about relatives who are abroad – what is happening in their lives. Such-and-such is ill or such-and-such is getting married. In addition there are sporting activities and cultural activities to keep you occupied; to make you forget this feeling of being away from home and being a refugee … When some friends from Norway or Sweden come [to Syria] they don’t know where I live and want to get in touch with me, we can meet at the Rabeta. This, I think, is something great. They see me here and they’re surprised and we exchange contact details and we’re able to stay in touch. If it hadn’t been for the Rabeta, none of this would have been possible. So it’s a kind of moral support that the Rabeta provides. (Palestinian refugee man, 50 years old)

CONCLUSION The experience of displacement and dispossession for Palestinians in Iraq has affirmed for many that attempts at integration are inconsequential unless accompanied by the right to citizenship. The speed and ease with which Palestinians were scapegoated and coerced to abandon their homes in Baghdad has left many Palestinian Iraqis pursuing re-settlement solutions outside the Middle East. The option of resettlement is also one favoured by the Syrian government, which has no intention of hosting Palestinian Iraqis for an indefinite period. Meanwhile local integration, for all parties, is off the agenda. Palestinian Iraqis have shown themselves to be active social agents in determining their own future through the establishment of community structures that encourage self-reliance, with Rabeta an outstanding example. Through nurturing and maintaining the social and cultural resources of the Palestinian Iraqi community, the Rabeta has been able to cultivate connections

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33. Re-settlement for Palestinian Iraqis does not necessarily mean the right to forego the right to return to the territories that comprise historic Palestine.

and linkages with the wider Palestinian Syrian community. This has allowed it to foster dialogue with both the UNHCR and the Syrian government to facilitate durable solutions for Palestinian Iraqis.33

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This article could not have been written without the assistance extended to me by the Palestinian Iraqi Community Association in Yarmouk. Thanks also to Institut Francais du Proche Orient (IFPO) for assistance and support in the field and to the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the University of East London for their financial support. For comments on this article in draft, special thanks to Philip Marfleet and Ali Ali.

REFERENCES Abdel-Jabar, F. (2003), The Shi’ite Movement in Iraq, London: Saqi Books. Ager, A. and Strang, A. (2008), ‘Understanding integration: A conceptual framework’, Journal of Refugee Studies, 21: 2, pp. 166–91. Ali, A. and Dorai, M. K. (2010), Under the Radar But Not Invisible, unpublished paper, UNHCR, Syria. Al-Sharmani, M. (2004), ‘Refugee livelihoods: Livelihood and diasporic identity constructions of Somali refugees in Cairo’, Research Paper No. 104, UNHCR New Issues in Refugee Research. Amnesty International (2008), ‘Al-Tanf camp: Trauma continues for Palestinians fleeing Iraq’, http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/RWFiles2008.nsf/ FilesByRWDocUnidFilename/ASIN-7E8KK7-full_report.pdf/$File/full_ report.pdf. Accessed 17 December 2010. Bengio, O. (2002), Saddam’s Word: Political Discourse in Iraq, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chatelard, G. (2011), ‘The politics of population movements in contemporary Iraq: A research agenda’, in R. Bocco, J. Tejet and P. Sluglett (eds), Writing the History of Iraq: Historiographical and Political Challenges, London: World Scientific Publishers/Imperial College Press, forthcoming. Chatty, D. (2010), Displacement and Dispossession in the Modern Middle East, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Drèze, J., Sen, A. and Hussain, A. (1995), The Political Economy of Hunger: Selected Essays Abridged Edition, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Farouk-Sluglett, M. and Sluglett, P. (1990), Iraq Since 1958: From Revolution to Dictatorship, London: IB Tauris. Grabska, K. (2006), ‘Marginalization in urban spaces of the global South: Urban refugees in Cairo’, Journal of Refugee Studies, 19: 3, pp. 287–307. Gordon, J. (2010), Invisible War: The United States and the Iraq Sanctions, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Harling, P. (2010), ‘Beyond political ruptures: Towards a historiography of social continuity in Iraq’, Seminar paper at Institut Francais du Proche Orient (IFPO), Damascus, 16 May. Human Rights Watch (2006), ‘Nowhere to flee: The perilous situation of Palestinians in Iraq’, http://www.hrw.org/en/node/11181/section/2. Accessed: 8 March 2011. IOM (2004), Arab Migration in a Globalized World, Geneva: IOM. IRIN (2010), ‘Middle East: Palestinian refugee numbers/whereabouts’, http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=89571. Accessed 23 February 2011.

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International Crisis Group (2006a), ‘The next Iraq war? Sectarianism and civil war’, Middle East Report No. 52. —— (2006b), ‘Iraq’s Muqtada Al-Sadr: Spoiler or stabiliser?’, Middle East Report No. 55. Kagan, M. (2011), ‘“We Live in a Country of the UNHCR”: The UN Surrogate State and refugee policy in the Middle East’, Research Paper No.201, UNHCR New Issues in Refugee Research, Geneva: Policy Development and Evaluation Service UNHCR. Malkki, L. H. (1996), ‘Speechless emissaries: Refugees, humanitarianism, and dehistoricization’, Cultural Anthropology, 11: 3, pp. 377–404. Mohammad, I. (2007), Al-Laji’un al-Falastiniyun fi’l Iraq: Haqa’iq Jedideh/ Palestinian Refugees in Iraq: New Realities, Damascus: Merkez al-Ghad al-Arabi lil Diraasaat. Motahari, M. (2001), ‘The fundamental problem in the clerical establishment’, in L. S. Walbridge (ed), The Most Learned of the Shià : The Institution of the Marja’ Taqlid, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 161–82. Sen, A. (1995), ‘Food, economics and entitlements’, in Drèze, J., Sen, A. and Hussain, A. (eds), The Political Economy of Hunger: Selected Essays Abridged Edition, Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 50–68. Shiblak, A. (2005), Iraqi Jews: A History of Mass Exodus, London: Saqi Books. Slaughter, A. and Crisp, J. (2008), ‘A surrogate state? The role of UNHCR in protracted refugee situations’, in G. Loescher, J. Milner, E. Newman and G. Troeller (eds), Protracted Refugee Situations, Tokyo: United Nations University Press, pp. 123–40. Strang, A. and Ager, A. (2010), ‘Refugee integration: Emerging trends and remaining agendas’, Journal of Refugee Studies, 23: 4, pp. 589–607. UNHCR (2009), ‘Policy on refugee protection and solutions in urban areas’, http://www.unhcr.org/4ab356ab6.pdf. Accessed 20 February 2011. Wengert, G. and Alfaro, M. (2006), ‘Can Palestinian refugees in Iraq find protection?’, Forced Migration Review, 26, pp. 19–21.

SUGGESTED CITATION Zaman, T. (2011), ‘Lessons learned: Palestinian refugees from Baghdad to Damascus’, International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies 5: 2, pp. 263–275, doi: 10.1386/ijcis.5.2.263_1

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS Tahir Zaman is a doctoral candidate at the Centre for Research on Migration and Belonging at the University of East London. He has recently returned from working in the field with the Iraqi community in Damascus exploring the role of religion in the lives of forced migrants. Contact: School of Law and Social Sciences, University of East London, Docklands Campus, University Way, London E16 2RD, UK. E-mail: [email protected]

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IJCIS 5 (2) pp. 277–292 Intellect Limited 2011

International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies Volume 5 Number 2 © 2011 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/ijcis.5.2.277_1

PHILIP MARFLEET University of East London

Displacement and denial: IDPs in today’s Iraq 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

ABSTRACT

KEYWORDS

There has been little sustained research on Iraq’s internally displaced people. It is nonetheless clear that millions now live far from their original homes, many with little prospect of return. Increasing numbers are marginalized – marooned in communities of urban poor and largely ignored by government authorities. This article examines their circumstances in the context of the wider displacement crisis.

Internal displacement IDPs mass displacement displacement processes social capital patterns of movement secondary displacements urban poor

Research on Iraqi refugees has intensified greatly in recent years. Long ignored, they have at last been a focus for academics and migration agencies, especially those located in Arab states which accommodate the majority of Iraqi exiles. Those displaced within Iraq’s borders, however, receive little attention. Although most estimates suggest that the total of these internally displaced persons (IDPs) exceeds that of refugees ‘proper’1 there has been little interest in their circumstances. This article examines internal displacement, its implications for millions of Iraqis and its significance for analyses of contemporary Iraqi society. Most institutional actors show little interest in Iraq’s 2.7 million IDPs.2 The government body responsible for internal migrants, the Ministry of Displacement and Migration (MoDM), has minimal resources and is barely active in relation to those it is mandated to support. Sassoon comments that it is difficult to identify any concrete steps taken by MoDM since its establishment in 2003 (2009: 9). Both domestic and international bodies have given the issue of IDPs low priority, most adopting a posture of ‘denial’ in the face of increasing

1. In order to make a claim for refugee status or other forms of protection, persons must be outside the state of which they are a citizen. See the United Nations Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, Geneva, 1951. 2. Includes 1.2 million displaced before 2006 and 1.5 displaced since 2006 (IDMC 2010a,).

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3. Speaking at a conference on contemporary Iraq in Beirut in January 2010, Prof Nasir al-Samaraei of the International Committee of the Red Cross, described the posture of the Iraq government and of most state bodies internationally, as ‘a matter of wilful denial’. (‘Dynamics of displacement’, at Future of Iraq: Social, Economic and Political Issues in Question, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies/Japan Centre for Middle East Studies, Beirut.) 4. Figures quoted by Daniel Endres, UNHCR representative in Iraq, in Muir 2011. Elsewhere, UNHCR suggests that 500,000 IDPs live in ‘squatter’ settlements (see UNHCR 2011).

evidence that displaced people face severe long-term problems.3 In recent years, large communities of impoverished IDPs have appeared in or near most Iraqi cities, establishing informal settlements usually described as ‘squatter’ camps. UNHCR has identified 351 such settlements housing over 400,000 people; 91 sites are in Baghdad.4 Muir (2011) describes one such area in the Iraqi capital, the Imam Ali settlement, a former army base in which 455 families live beside a garbage dump upon which they rely for income obtained by scavenging for recyclable materials. The site, he suggests, ‘sums up the mass of problems facing Iraqi and international agencies trying to tackle the issue [of displaced people]’. In 2010 Refugees International conducted field research in twenty similar settlements in the governorates of Baghdad, Diyala and Salah al-Din. It found large numbers of people living at the margins of urban society, reporting: These people have no legal title to the land. Many fear returning to their original homes. Most are too poor to relocate. The settlements all lack basic services, including water, sanitation, and electricity and are built in precarious places – under bridges, alongside railroad tracks, and amongst garbage dumps. (Refugees International 2010) Growth in urban poverty across Iraq is explained in part by developments since the early 1990s, notably the impact of international sanctions, population movements imposed by the former Ba’thist regime and the effect of disruptive economic reforms introduced by the US authorities after the invasion of 2003 and since pursued by successive governments (Marfleet 2007). They do not, however, account for changes on such a scale that they depress statistics for improvements in urban life across the whole region. According to UN-Habitat, developments in Iraq mean that the western Asia sub-region (including Iraq) now lags behind all others in Asia: Only Western Asia has failed to make a contribution [to improved urban conditions in Asia] as the number of slum dwellers in the sub-region increased by 12 million. This setback can largely be attributed to the conflictrelated deterioration of living conditions in Iraq, where the proportion of urban residents living in slum conditions has tripled from 17 per cent in the year 2000 (2.9 million) to an estimated 53 per cent in 2010 (10.7 million). (2010: 33, original emphasis) ‘Conflict-related’ issues to which UN-Habitat refers are sustained episodes of mass displacement that have affected Iraq since 2003, reshaping neighbourhoods in many cities, notably those in the central and southern provinces. Large numbers of people live in informal settlements; many more live in less-constrained circumstances but remain forced migrants for whom there is little prospect of return to their original homes. Are IDPs, like those displaced abroad, now merely part of the collateral damage associated with construction of a new Iraq?

SYSTEMIC PATTERNS Amid general disinterest in Iraq’s IDPs, a handful of research centres and NGOs have produced surveys and reports, and developed welfare interventions. The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) has collated information on IDPs and their circumstances; UNHCR has monitored IDPs on the basis

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that they involve people ‘of concern’ to the agency5; most important, the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) has monitored numbers and movements and initiated local projects to assist IDPs.6 Each organization has a specific agenda – or agendas, as changing circumstances have brought changing policies, including (markedly in the case of UNHCR) some abrupt shifts in direction.7 IOM has maintained a programme of detailed surveys, producing its Displacement Monitoring Reports since 2006 by using teams of researchers in each of Iraq’s eighteen governorates.8 It has enumerated IDPs and their locations, and monitored return movements and IDPs’ intentions in relation to further migration.9 Although it is likely that IOM’s figures underestimate the number of IDPs, these surveys are an important source of basic data. The organization counts all displaced people, distinguishing between those displaced before and after the events of February 2006 – the Samara bombing associated with intensification of sectarian conflict and of mass migration (the Iraqi government recognizes as IDPs only those that were displaced after this date).10 IOM also includes as IDPs people displaced by factors other than insecurity resulting from political violence or threats/fear of violence, so that those compelled to move by drought, for example, are included in its surveys. IOM assessments are used widely by other international agencies. The most striking feature of these reports is evidence of displacement as a widespread national phenomenon. Although some regions have been affected much more than others, none are unaffected. In 2006, as mass displacement accelerated to unprecedented levels of intensity, newly displaced families were distributed across the Iraqi regions. The average size of a family in Iraq is at least six members. The total of 41,189 families above represented some 250,000 individuals in fifteen governorates; in addition, there were 84,000 individuals in Iraq’s three northern governorates (IOM 2007: 3). Governorate Anbar Babylon Baghdad Basra Diyala Kerbala Missan Muthanna Najaf Ninewah Qadissiya Salah al-Din Tameem/Kirkuk Thi-Qar Wassit

Displaced families 3638 3271 6651 1487 3594 2060 2203 968 2609 3665 1614 3073 1002 2072 3822

Source: IOM (2007: 3). (A comprehensive report on IDPs in Iraq as at 31 December 2006.)

Table 1: Newly displaced families in fifteen governorates, 2006.11

5. UNHCR’s mandate is focused upon people eligible to make claims for refugee status, for which they must be outside their state of origin. It nonetheless views IDPs as people ‘of concern’ and monitors their circumstances, sometimes lobbying for policy changes and welfare provision for those internally displaced. 6. Other agencies and NGOs have supported welfare projects, coordinating through a ‘cluster group’. The original ‘cluster’ included UNHCR, IOM, UNAMI, UNOPS, UN-HABITAT, WHO, UNICEF, WFP, UNDP, UNEP, OHCHR, FAO, ILO and UNIDO. The level of their involvement and scale of intervention in Iraq has been modest. 7. See Marfleet (2007) and Marfleet and Chatty (2009) for terse accounts of abrupt changes in policy by UNHCR vis-à-vis displaced Iraqis. These changes have related primarily to policy concerning refugees but have implications for IDPs, notably in the context of return. 8. IOM’s Iraq projects are funded primarily by the US State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration. Its Programme for Human Security and Stabilization (PHSS), a welfare initiative, is supported by the governments of the United States and Germany, and organized through Iraq’s MoDM and the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs (MoLSA). 9. Reports available at http://www.iomiraq. net/iomgovpro.html 10. Some IDPs are not enumerated, notably those who undertake

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secondary or ‘repeat’ migrations within Iraq, and those who leave Iraq, becoming ‘refugees’ before returning to locations in which they are not monitored. 11. In this article the terms governorate and province are used synonymously. 12. See Tavernise (2005) for a report on developments that were under way well before the Samara events of February 2006, widely seen as the trigger for ethnic hostilities.

By 2010 the majority of displaced people originated in two central governorates – Baghdad with 650,000 IDPs, and Diyala with 270,000 IDPs (including people originating locally and those from other provinces [IOM 2010g; IOM 2010h]). Many people were distributed widely across the country, so that IDPs originating in Baghdad could be found in each and every one of Iraq’s eighteen governorates, and people from Diyala in all but one (IOM 2010g; IOM 2010h). There was much evidence of long-distance movements in which people sought security far from their places of origin: •

•

•

•

most IDPs in Basra in the south were from Baghdad and Salah al-Din provinces; among those who had left Basra, over half were living in Salah al-Din and a quarter were in Ninewah in the far north (IOM 2010a) in Anbar in the west, IDPs came mainly from Baghdad but also from Ninewah in the north; IDPs from Anbar were living in Baghdad, Kirkuk, Muthanna, Salah al-Din and Thi Qar (IOM 2010d) in the south-eastern province of Thi Qar, IDPs came from numerous provinces including Anbar, Baghdad, Diyala, Salah al-Din and Kirkuk; IDPs from Thi Qar were living in Anbar, Salah al-Din and Suleymaniyeh (IOM 2010e) in Kirkuk, widely viewed as a safe zone for many people in danger, IDPs came from across the northern and central provinces; at the same time displaced people from Kirkuk were living in every one of Iraq’s governorates (IOM 2010f).

There are numerous similar examples, evidence of complex movements between and across the country that may make Iraqi displacement unique. Most recent cases of mass displacement within states such as Sri Lanka, Colombia, Congo, Burma and Sudan are associated with specific regions and have had restricted geographical impact. In Iraq each governorate has both produced and received migrants, among whom some have been distributed widely. This pattern reflects systemic changes brought by invasion and occupation: the general crisis which followed war in 2003 and sustained efforts by the United States to demolish the Ba’thist state and to construct new political structures – a project which both drew upon and fed communalism, prompting intense sectarian conflict nationwide (Marfleet 2007; Ismael and Fuller 2008). Between 2005 and 2007, when this policy was taking full effect, ‘subnational movements, inter- and intra-sectarian violence [became] the defining social reality’ (Ismael and Fuller 2008: 468). Communalist parties and militias forced millions from their homes, directing people to areas in which their ethno-religious identity was deemed to be consistent with the local majority population. This was especially clear in and around Baghdad, where rival militias enforced segregation and hundreds of thousands of people were forced to align with new ethnic boundaries: hence the contribution of these areas to national totals of IDPs.12 The combined effect of countless migrations across Iraq was to ‘unmix’ areas that had long accommodated diversity of ethnoreligious traditions. At the same time some areas received large numbers of people of varying affiliations, with the result that they now accommodate populations of greater cultural complexity than hitherto. A project which aimed to reconfigure Iraq’s political system has stimulated mass displacement that reflects the systemic character of the original initiative. The fact that many years after these policies were implemented great numbers of people remain displaced, with no prospect of return to their original homes, is testimony to the profound changes introduced as part of the new order.

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DISPLACEMENT AS A PROCESS Headline statistics about IDP movements are important but can be misleading. They capture migratory movements as journeys from a point of origin (home) to a destination (site of displacement). Forced migration is a much more complex process, especially during periods of sustained insecurity like those which have been obtained in Iraq. When there is a direct and immediate threat, people in danger may make abrupt decisions to leave, followed by hasty journeys of flight. In situations of prolonged general insecurity, however, many people perceive dangers which they attempt to avoid or at least minimize. Their coping strategies may initially be much like those adopted in periods of economic crisis worldwide, in which jobs, incomes and welfare are at risk: those affected seek to reduce domestic costs, find new work, borrow from family or friends. In the case of Iraq after 2003 economic insecurity was combined with more specific threats – first from campaigns of retribution vis-à-vis the Ba’thist regime and those associated with its apparatus of state, and later from sectarian gangs and militias (Baker et al. 2009). Millions of people developed strategies of avoidance: they bypassed public areas perceived as dangerous; evaded checkpoints and internal border posts established by government forces or militias; found alternative markets at which to shop; used new routes to work, school or college; or attempted to change jobs or campuses. Over weeks, months or even years they attempted successive measures, often rejecting the option of leaving work or the family home until pressures became intense or (what amounts to the same thing) their neighbours or workmates had departed, leaving them isolated and exposed. Here, pressures are cumulative and displacement is a process – a series of complex episodes in which, as threat continues, individuals, families and even communities are compelled to take more radical measures, eventually moving physically to new locations in which they hope to be secure. Research conducted among Iraqi refugees across the Middle East shows that, before leaving Iraq, many attempted to remain in their jobs, to keep their children at school, and to retain their homes and associations with neighbourhoods in which they were deeply embedded.13 Some eventually moved within their local area, city or region, or further afield within Iraq: they were finally ‘displaced’ in the formal sense, although many observed that disruption to their lives had set in much earlier. Those who left Iraq had experiences similar to those who moved within national borders – confirmation that there is no fundamental difference between IDPs and refugees except their eventual destination (and hence their legal status in relation to state borders). Many refugees differed from IDPs in other respects, however, notably their socio-economic status. Most of those who left Iraq at an early stage of the post-2003 crisis were people whose access to resources gave them a range of options as to timing, routes and destinations. They had means to undertake long journeys: most held passports or could acquire them quickly by making payments to officials; if required they could pass through internal borders and international frontiers by similar means. They were able to pay for airfares, taxis, buses, visas and hotels; they could realize assets held as savings and investments, renting or selling their property and arranging for income in the form of pensions or remittances. They usually moved with knowledge of their country of destination and of social connections abroad. In short, they were able to mobilize both material resources and social capital in the form of family, community and professional networks. This is a pattern characteristic of early departures during many crises of mass displacement, in which the social class of those

13. Research conducted in 2009 in Amman, Damascus, Istanbul and Cairo as part of a project led by Institut Français du Proche Orient and the University of East London, and supported by the University of Oxford.

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14. Comment of an Iraqi academic interviewed in Amman, May 2009. 15. Interviews with refugee support workers, Cairo, November 2009.

affected determines when, where and how they are able to flee. At the end of the US military occupation of Vietnam in 1975 hundreds of thousands of people attempted to leave. The first to go were relatively privileged – the wealthy, senior military personnel allied to the United States and those of professional status. They were able to choose destinations and to take some of their assets. As time passed, however, people without such resources were compelled to use all means of escape, including leaky vessels which crossed the South China Sea carrying ‘boat people’ among whom many died in mass drownings (Marfleet 2006: 197). According to Morrison and Moos (1982: 53) the first Vietnamese refugees to arrive at airports in South East Asia were ‘well-dressed people of various nationalities carrying traditional luggage and the usual accoutrements of travel’; when those travelling by sea later made landfall on beaches in the Philippines, Thailand and Malaysia, ‘they were more miserable than anyone had imagined’. McDowell (1996) demonstrates a similar pattern of events in the case of Sri Lanka. Those who left the island in the 1980s when civil conflict intensified came mainly from among the wealthy or from professional families and travelled to North America or Europe, where they could make claims for refugee status. As war continued, escape became more difficult and much more costly: displaced people and others in danger were often compelled to make payments to pass through insurgent-held areas or across internal borders under government control; meanwhile migration agents demanded large sums from those who entered irregular networks. Van Hear’s research confirms this pattern, noting that material resources and access to key social networks (command over ‘social capital’) were determining factors in Sri Lankans’ attempts to escape danger. He quotes a woman compelled to remain in the war-affected city of Jaffna who observed: ‘It depends on money … the people who went out are doing fine; those who stayed are suffering’ (Van Hear 2004: 12). There is increasing evidence to suggest that a long period of insecurity in Iraq has produced similar patterns of movement. Chatelard (2009) shows how well-established migration networks have been mobilized to facilitate movements to Jordan and Syria. It is to Amman, in particular, that large numbers of businessman, professionals and their families moved in response to events in Iraq after 2003, and Jordan remains a key location for more privileged Iraqis – ‘an alternative Baghdad’.14 In the case of Syria, where commercial links and historic practices of pilgrimage are at the heart of close relations with Iraq, al-Khalidi and others (2007) note a distinct pattern of movement. After 2003, the first to arrive were Iraqis associated with the Ba’thist regime; most were Sunnis and many were wealthy. Later they were joined by members of Iraq’s minority communities, notably Christians and Sabeans, and in 2006 by many Shi’as. By 2007 Iraqis of all cultural backgrounds were moving to Syria: ‘increasingly, those arriving are poor’ (al-Khalidi et al. 2007: 10). In Egypt, Fargues et al. (2008: 16) show that most Iraqi refugees who arrived between 2006 and 2008 were viewed as ‘middle class educated professionals’. All arrived by air, either direct from Baghdad or by transit through Arab capitals. It was not until 2009 that support organizations in Cairo reported the appearance of destitute Iraqis who had travelled to Egypt by land and sea.15 Continuing displacement has ‘sifted’ Iraqi migrants. Those who moved at an early stage to places of security in neighbouring states were invariably those with substantial material and social assets. By the same token, the most disadvantaged (in terms of socio-economic status) were usually the least mobile and the most likely to remain close to their places of origin. Millions of people

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who wished to leave Iraq lacked money, documentation, contacts abroad or access to information, which might facilitate exit from the state. Relatively, very few poor people have crossed Iraq’s borders; by the same token it seems likely that among the most disadvantaged few have undertaken journeys across Iraq to distant destinations. One example of the problem is provided by regulations imposed by authorities in the Kurdish areas. In the case of Sulaymaniyah, IDPs attempting to enter the province by land routes require a local sponsor – without whom they will be expelled – but those arriving by air do not face restrictions. UNHCR (2007) comments that, ‘this requires that the person [wishing for entry] has the necessary financial means’. Much more research is required to determine the social character of internal movements, but it seems that the least mobile are poor people who remain within their areas of origin. Homeless, destitute, largely unrecognized and lacking governmental support, some are compelled to join ‘squatter’ communities. Thrust to the margin of society, they contribute to an exponential growth in numbers of Iraq’s urban poor. Mass displacement is also shaped by relations of gender. In 2008 the Iraqi Red Crescent Society reported than over 80 per cent of displaced people were women and children under the age of 12; in several governorates, including Baghdad, the figure was more than 90 per cent (IDMC 2010b). This is consistent with trends worldwide: during displacement crises men are more mobile; least mobile are women with young children, the old and infirm and those (almost always women), who have responsibility for their care. Among Iraqi IDPs the proportion of female-headed households is higher than the national average and among these the proportion reporting serious problems with income and employment is greater than among the displaced population in general. The process of displacement exaggerates the disadvantage of those most vulnerable before they were compelled to move; it also fragments families and kin networks, so that among today’s long-term displaced people the most seriously affected are women without close male relatives. In these circumstances problems of abuse, especially sexual abuse, are often acute. After conducting an extensive national survey, Human Rights Watch observed:

16. Those displaced after the events of February 2006.

The many women who have fled sectarian or other violence, who have been widowed, or who for other reasons are heads of households and dependent on state aid are particularly vulnerable to abuse. Religious and government institutions are sometimes complicit in their exploitation – in exchange for charity or benefits, widows have been asked to engage in ‘pleasure marriages,’ a previously banned traditional practice that critics say is akin to prostitution. The women who are coerced into the practice face stigmatization and have no recourse. (2011: 7)

LIFE ON THE MARGINS Data collected by IOM suggest that, years after initial displacement, large numbers of IDPs are living in extreme poverty. Nationally almost a third of ‘new’ IDPs16 live in public buildings, old military encampments or improvised housing on publicly, or privately owned land (IOM 2009). Most settlements have no electricity, water or other basic services, nor are they included in municipal construction projects. Many IDPs are vulnerable to eviction by private landowners and by national or local authorities, including those which

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17. The PDS system was established in 1995 and is widely credited with maintaining levels of nutrition during the final period of international sanctions. In 2009, the monthly PDS parcel contained rice (3kg per person); sugar (2kg per person); cooking oil (1.25kg or one litre per person); flour (9kg per person); milk for adults (250g per person); tea (200g per person); beans (250g per person); children’s milk (1.8kg per child); soap (250g per person); detergents (500g per person); and tomato paste (500g per person). In 2010, the government reduced the number of items to five: flour, rice, sugar, cooking oil and children’s milk – in the same quantities. There are further plans to reform the system. 18. Figures collected by IDMC from agencies at work in Iraq and quoted in IDMC (2010a, 2010b, 2010c p. 157).

wish to use occupied lands and buildings to provide services for the wider community. •

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In Baghdad governorate most IDPs live in rented accommodation. Many others, however, live in settlements and public buildings; in some neighbourhoods the proportion living on ‘squatter’ sites rises to 60 per cent of the displaced population (IOM 2010g). In Basra only 40 per cent of IDPs live in rented housing; in many areas the majority live in collective settlements, in which ‘living conditions are particularly bad … families live amidst large pools of stagnant water and sewage and are in need of food and household items’ (IOM 2010b). In Kerbala governorate about 30 per cent of IDPs live in collective settlements: ‘These are often on private or government-owned land, leaving families at constant risk of eviction’ (IOM 2010i). In Missan there are fewer IDPs than in neighbouring governorates but almost 50 per cent of IDPs live informally, in settlements that are ‘collections of crudely constructed houses comprised of mud or old canisters built by the families themselves’ (IOM 2010j). In Salah al-Din, some IDPs live under ‘desperate’ conditions (IOM 2010p). In a large informal settlement near Tikrit, ‘Families … live in damaged public buildings, tents and clay huts that are exposed to the frequent dust storms … so severe that they have given rise to cases of asthma and suffocation’. In Thi Qar the number of IDPs in settlements and temporary shelters in some areas rises to over 70 per cent. They are ‘prone to eviction and vulnerable to the hot summers and cold winters in the governorate’ (IOM 2010e).

There are similar statistics and accounts from across Iraq. In some cases, people displaced under the Ba’thist regime outnumber those displaced since 2006. Their predicaments are almost identical to problems faced by recent migrants, however. The northern governorate of Dahuk accommodates many people displaced in the 1990s, who travelled from central and southern governorates to an area that was more stable politically than most in Iraq. Years after their arrival large numbers still live in settlements and shelters: in some areas over 70 per cent live informally (IOM 2010k). Here there is an indication that even among those who have undertaken long and risky migrations across the country – journeys which usually require planning and resources – displacement has brought immiseration. Housing is the most visible aspect of deprivation – but there are many associated problems. When disadvantaged people are stripped of their modest resources, communities disrupted or even atomized, they quickly become vulnerable. Access to clean water, affordable food, utilities, and health and education services are pressing issues. In 2006 the World Food Program reported that 15.4% of Iraqis were ‘food insecure’ and that a further 31.8% of the whole population would be rendered insecure if not for food rations distributed through the Public Distribution System (PDS).17 In 2008 the Interagency Food Sub-Group reported that almost half of all IDPs were unable to access PDS rations.18 These problems were not confined to people living informally in settlements and temporary housing, although problems there were most acute. In some areas the great majority of all displaced people had no access to rations: IOM reported

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that areas with the biggest problems were Dahuk (91% without access), Sulaymaniyeh (88%), Basra (61%), Erbil (55%), Kirkuk (42%) and Babylon (42%). Only 29% of all IDPs reported food assistance from sources other than the PDS.19 Many IDPs are unable to access PDS supplies because they cannot transfer registration cards to places of displacement. Cards are issued in and remain valid for Iraqi citizens’ areas of origin until formally transferred – one key reason why people already disadvantaged by poverty are reluctant to travel long distances, even in extremis. For those living far from their original homes who do not have cards at all the problem of access to rations is acute: a journey to retrieve cards or apply anew may be risky or impossible: routes may be patrolled by hostile officials or militia; Iraq’s internal borderlines, formal and informal, may be marked by dangerous border zones; and home neighbourhoods in which PDS offices are located may be inaccessible because of changes in communal geography. When mass displacement was at its height in 2007 some governorates banned movement of IDPs who originated in other areas of Iraq, using ration cards as a form of identification. The problem was especially severe in northern governorates under control of the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG). Here ration cards were viewed as ID cards. IDPs wishing to enter the governorate of Suleymaniyeh required a sponsor who held a card issued locally (UNHCR 2007). The authorities declared that, ‘Persons who do not have a sponsor are not allowed to stay and are requested to leave the Governorate or are otherwise forcibly removed’ (UNHCR 2007). IDPs without local sponsors were doubly disadvantaged: they required PDS cards for access to basic food supplies; at the same time, in the absence of a sponsor, possession of such cards (indicating ‘outsider’ status) could result in further displacement. These problems are complicated by issues of income and employment. Nationwide, employment is IDPs’ greatest concern. All displaced communities report pressing problems: in Anbar, 94% of IDPs cite access to work as their priority (IOM 2010d); in Babylon, where 93% of IDPs highlight their need for work, many communities report that no households have adult members in work (IOM 2010l); in Erbil, where 83% of informants cite work as their priority, IDPs from Arabic-speaking regions also report that lack of familiarity with the dominant local language, Kurdish, excludes them from job opportunities (IOM 2010m). In 2009, 73% of all IDPs monitored by IOM named access to work as their main anxiety (IOM 2009).

19. All figures from IDMC (2010c: 159).

INSECURITY Some IDPs report great difficulty obtaining access to clean water: in several governorates, notably Ninewah, Kirkuk and Salah al-Din, these problems are acute and have produced further migrations – ‘secondary displacements’ (IOM 2010n). Many IDP communities have in addition faced difficulty placing their children in school and in gaining access to health services. Even these problems, however, may be insignificant in the context of continued insecurity associated with political strife. Although many IDPs live in relatively stable areas far from the influence of hostile gangs and militias, some continue to be victims of sectarian conflict, or live in fear of state agencies or militias (which may be difficult to distinguish). In areas which have traditionally accommodated people of diverse ethno-religious affiliations, such as Diyala, many IDPs report that they feel unsafe because of threats from sectarian organizations. Here

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20. Figures quoted in Lamani (2009: 3) and widely used by others, including ICG. Notwithstanding problems faced by all minority groups, the figure of 20 per cent seems rather high. 21. The once-large Jewish community has been reduced to a handful of adherents, see Lalani (2010: 6).

displacements continue: in October 2010 over 1000 families were compelled to move to new sites within the governorate (IOM 2010h). Threats to returning migrants (also a problem in Diyala, see below) can have a ‘demonstration effect’, making local IDPs feel less secure and encouraging further migrations. Violence is a major issue in Salah al-Din and Ninewah governorates; in the latter, fighting between rival militias in and near the city of Mosul in 2008, 2009 and 2010 produced a series of new displacements. Ninewah is part of a zone described by the International Crisis Group (ICG) as ‘the new trigger line’, a belt that extends from Iraq’s border with Turkey to that with Iran, passing through areas in which Kurdish and Arab groups contest rights to territory (ICG 2009a, 2009b). Mosul in particular has experienced changes that continue to affect very large numbers of people. The ICG observes: In the aftermath of the 2003 war, Ninewa underwent a spectacular evolution from an area of relative calm, seemingly resigned to the new order, to a stronghold of resistance against, first, the occupation and then Kurdish hegemony. In the process, the governorate suffered huge losses: its economy was paralysed, and a large portion of its population either took refuge in neighbouring countries (chiefly Syria) or was internally displaced. It likewise experienced severe capital flight and brain drain, as Christians, Kurds and Arab entrepreneurs as well as professionals moved, principally to the Kurdistan region (Erbil and Dohuk). To this day, the scale of destruction in Mosul city is striking, and many who stayed behind continue to live in fear. (2009b: 4) These comments capture much of the recent tragedy of Iraq as a whole, notably the combination of economic collapse and socio-political disruption that has prompted mass migration. They note the predicament of minority groups, which make up a disproportionate share of all those displaced at the national level: according to one estimate, although combined numbers of minority communities contribute 5% of Iraq’s overall population, they account for 20% of those displaced.20 The main minority groups are Christians (Armenians and Chaldo-Assyrians [among which there are various sub-groups]), Circassians, Failis, Kaka’i, Roma, Sabian-Mandaeans, Shabaks, Turkmen and Zaidis.21 Many members of minority communities in cities of the South and centre of Iraq were displaced at an early stage of the post-2003 crisis, joining co-affiliates in the North, notably in Ninewah. Of Baghdad’s Christian communities, which once numbered many thousands, one estimate suggests that only 60 families remained by June 2010, most having moved to the North or left Iraq (Lalani 2010: 3, 19). During 2009, Christians, Shabaks and Zaidis in Ninewah were subject to repeated attacks, as a result of which 12,000 Christian families fled their homes in Mosul – a massive migration which demonstrated the precarious status of minority groups in the region (Lalani 2010: 12–13). Elsewhere Mandaeans have been targeted by assaults, fatal attacks, kidnap attempts and arson. Minority Rights Group International reports that 90% of Chaldo-Assyrians, 76% of Yazidis, 75% of Shabaks and 85% of Turkmen have received threats motivated by ethnic or religious animosity, including pressure to assimilate to dominant local religious norms and/or to give pledges of support for Arab or Kurdish parties and militias (Lalani 2010: 14, 18). Among those affected are many who were already IDPs and who have been compelled to undertake further internal migrations or to leave Iraq. In a report published

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in March 2011, the ICG expressed fears that intense local rivalries could soon affect the complex communal geography of Kirkuk (ICG 2011). IDPs elsewhere face other forms of insecurity. Kerbala has accommodated IDPs since the 1980s, overwhelmingly Shi’a Arabs from Diyala, Kirkuk and Anbar who were persecuted by the Ba’thist regime. An unusually high proportion refuse to give reasons for their displacement: IOM (2010i) suggests that they fear being targeted anew because of previous political affiliation, religious or ethnic ties. (Kerbela has been an important recruiting ground for Shi’a organizations and the scene of major struggles between US forces, the national army and rival militias.) Similar anxieties affect IDPs in Kirkuk, a destination for many migrants drawn by the diverse ethno-religious character of the population. Here, however, they have found an increasingly tense climate in relation to property disputes – the legacy of population transfers during the Ba’thist era – in which incoming migrants may be drawn into conflicts in which they have had no direct involvement.

22. UNHCR figures quoted in IDMC (2010c: 8).

RETURN The aim of all agencies and NGOs is to assist refugees and IDPs to make a ‘safe and dignified return’ to their original areas (not necessarily their original places of residence). This formula embraces the idea that migrants should not face any form of compulsion in journeys to their places of origin. When sectarian conflict diminished in 2008 many IDPs, especially those displaced close to their homes, were able to return; most remaining IDPs, however, have concluded that return is difficult or impossible. In 2008 the Iraqi government established special centres in Baghdad to register returning IDPs and to offer assistance, including small grants. It also introduced orders aimed to restore private property to legitimate owners and to resolve disputes. By the end of 2009, of an estimated 282,000 families displaced since 2006 some 62,000 had returned to places of origin (IOM 2009). Among returnees, however, only 40% of all those recorded by IOM had registered and applied for grants, and only 30% had received them. Meanwhile 38% of returnees reported that they did not always feel safe, 34% said that they had found homes damaged or completely destroyed, and 50% found that moveable property had been lost or stolen. In July 2009 the rate of return was 17,000 IDPs per month; by June 2010 this had declined to 9000.22 In October 2010 UNHCR published the results of a poll conducted among refugees who had returned to their areas of origin in Baghdad and which also bore directly upon the circumstances of IDPs (UNHCR 2011). Over 60% of Iraqi refugees interviewed regretted returning to Iraq, with 60% of this number saying this was due mainly to insecurity and to concerns about personal safety. Almost 80% of those who returned to the two Baghdad districts of Karkh and Resafa said they were not able to return to their original places of residence. UNHCR concluded that substantial numbers of returns to Iraq and within Iraq (by IDPs) were unlikely in the short term (UNHCR 2011). These findings confirm views expressed widely across Iraq by IDPs who have attempted return. In 2008 IOM (2009) reported that 61% of all post2006 IDPs wished to return; a year later it said that the figure had fallen to 49% (IOM 2009). The organization proposed that the difference in numbers was associated with actual returns over the previous year – but other indicators suggest that increasing numbers of IDPs are disinclined even to attempt return. In Diyala, with one of the largest displaced populations, returnees

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face multiple problems. In 2010, over 40% said they had fears about safety; some had been threatened and displaced for a second time and many also reported problems with access to food and water (IOM 2010h). Meanwhile, IDPs across the governorate faced serious problems with access to rations and almost 40% reported major problems with accommodation; in some areas 25% of IDPs were living in informal settlements and many felt vulnerable to eviction. By November 2010, returns to Diyala ‘ha[d] all but stopped’ (IOM 2010h). The problem can be viewed from a different angle. Dahuk contains a large and very diverse population of IDPs from all over northern and central Iraq, including many members of Iraq’s minority communities. Half report that they wish to stay in the province, even though many live in informal settlements; 35 per cent say that they wish to move to a third location; only 15 per cent say that they wish to return to their area of origin (IOM 2010k). IOM comments: This trend reflects that fact that for the vast majority of displaced families in Dahuk, their places of origin are in the unstable provinces of Baghdad and Ninewah. Returning home would therefore entail new threats of ethnic and sectarian violence. (IOM 2010k) Baghdad, Ninewah and Diyala account for the bulk of all those displaced in and from Iraq. Problems which continue to affect both returnees and IDPs across these provinces are a disincentive for hundreds of thousands of people to attempt return.

DISPLACEMENT AND THE STATE Neither Iraqi nor international organizations have mobilized resources adequate to support IDPs and returnees. IDMC (2010a) notes ‘continuing lack of institutional capacity [that has] allowed corruption and bureaucracy to flourish and has limited [government’s] ability to respond to the needs of IDPs’. In 2008 the government allocated $210 million to MoDM for addressing internal displacement; this was slashed to $42 million in the 2009 budget (IDMC 2010a). In January 2011 the government announced a new initiative to encourage return, including a US$850 assistance grant and a six-month rental compensation package for all families registered. A month later the Deputy Minister for Displacement and Migration, Azhar Al-Mousawi, said the plans would not be fully implemented because of a serious funding shortfall. ‘All these plans need money’, said Mousawi, ‘[but] what we have is not enough’ (IRIN 2011). He complained that MoDM needed $416–$500 million to implement its strategy for the year but had been allocated only US$250 million from a government budget of $82.6 billion (IRIN 2011). The main international actor, UNHCR, has its own funding problems: in February 2011 it reported an expected budget shortfall for Iraq of up to 40 per cent (IRIN 2011). Reviewing the circumstances of IDPs after many years of displacement, Human Rights Watch (2011: 62) notes official disinterest in the plight of millions of people: ‘Many of the government’s assistance programs are non-operational or sub-operational, and vastly insufficient to meet the needs of target populations, despite Iraq’s international and domestic commitments’. Such passivity is striking in the context of exponential growth in urban poverty. According to UNHCR, the population of ‘squatter’ camps is mushrooming.

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In 2010 the agency’s representative in Iraq, Daniel Andres, reported an increase of 100,000 residents in such camps in the city of Baghdad alone – a rise of 60 per cent over twelve months. The growth of such communities, he said ‘is the greatest humanitarian problem facing Iraq’ (Kareem 2010). It is one that neither the government nor its main international allies are prepared to confront: a reflection of disinterest in people rendered powerless by their circumstances and who, standing at the margin of society and effectively outside the political system, have no formal means of articulating their interests. Their predicaments testify to the long-term cost of invasion and occupation, and of reconstruction of the Iraqi state. Mass involuntary migration was always likely to accompany these initiatives: recognition of the human scale of the tragedy appears to be beyond those who now enjoy power.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT Many thanks to a host of colleagues with whom I have been able to collaborate in research on displacements in and from Iraq, especially Geraldine Chatelard, Dawn Chatty, Didem Danıs¸, Kemal Dorai, Sara Sadek, Intissar al-Farttoosi, Ekraam al-Gazzali, Senay Ozden, Erik Mohns, Thomas Sommer-Houdeville, Ali Ali and Tahir Zaman. Thanks also to colleagues of the Centre for Forced Migration and Refugee Studies at The American University in Cairo; Institut Français du Proche Orient in both Damascus and Amman; the Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford; and to officers and staff of Saint Andrew’s Refugee Services, Cairo. Special thanks to Tareq Ismael, Jacqui Ismael, Kamil Mahdi, Keiko Sakai, Ibrahim Aoude, Anne Alexander and colleagues associated with this Journal and with the International Association for Contemporary Iraqi Studies.

REFERENCES Al-Khalidi, A., Hoffman, S. and Tanner, V. (2007), Iraqi Refugees in the Syrian Arab Republic: A Field-Based Snapshot, Washington, DC: Brookings-Bern. Baker, R., Ismael, S. and Ismael, T. (2009), Cultural Cleansing in Iraq: Why Museums Were Looted, Libraries Burned and Academics Murdered, London: Pluto. Chatelard, G. (2009), ‘Migration from Iraq between the gulf and the Iraq wars (1990–2003): Historical and sociospacial dimensions’, Working Paper No. 09–68, Compas, Oxford. Cockburn, P. (2009), ‘Iraq faces the mother of all corruption scandals’, Independent, 29 May, p. 9. Fargues, P., El-Masry, S., Sadek, S. and Shaban, A. (2008), Iraqis in Egypt: A Statistical Survey in 2008, Cairo: Centre for Migration and Refugee Studies, The American University in Cairo. Human Rights Watch (2011), At a Crossroads: Human Rights in Iraq Eight Years After the US-Led Invasion, New York: Human Rights Watch. International Crisis Group (ICG) (2009a), ‘Iraq and the Kurds: Trouble along the trigger line’, Middle East Report No. 88, ICG, Brussels, http://www. crisisgroup.org/en/regions/middle-east-north-africa/iraq-syria-lebanon/iraq/088-iraq-and-the-kurds-trouble-along-the-trigger-line.aspx. Accessed 1 March 2011. —— (2009b), ‘Iraq’s new battlefront: The struggle over Ninewa’, Middle East Report No. 90, ICG, Brussels, http://www.crisisgroup.org/en/regions/ middle-east-north-africa/iraq-syria-lebanon/iraq/090-iraqs-new-battlefront-the-struggle-over-ninewa.aspx. Accessed 1 March 2011.

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—— (2011), ‘Iraq and the Kurds: Confronting withdrawal fears’, Middle East Report No. 102, ICG, Brussels, http://www.crisisgroup.org/~/media/ Files/Middle%20East%20North%20Africa/Iraq%20Syria%20Lebanon/ Iraq/103%20Iraq%20and%20the%20Kurds%20%20Confronting%20 Withdrawal%20Fears.ashx. Accessed 1 March 2011. Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) —— (2010a), ‘Political wrangling leaves around 2.8 million displaced Iraqis with no durable solutions in sight’, http://www.internal-displacement. org/8025708F004CE90B/(httpCountrySummaries)/07CEB2C583FDD5D7C1 2577F800479FC3?OpenDocument&count=10000. Accessed 1 March 2011. —— (2010b), Little New Displacement but Around 2.8 Million Iraqis Remain Internally Displaced. Iraq: A Profile of the Internal Displacement Situation, Oslo: IDMC. —— (2010c), ‘Total internally displaced population is estimated to be 2.76 million (as of November 2009)’, http://www.internal-displacement.org/ idmc/website/countries.nsf/(httpEnvelopes)/B6C0B024031DFA0F802570B 8005A74D6?OpenDocument. Accessed 1 March 2011. IOM (2007), Iraq Displacement: Year in Review, Amman: IOM, http://iomiraq.net/library/IOM_displacement_monitoring_reports/yearly_and_ mid_year_reviews/2006/2006%20Iraq%20Displacement%20Review.pdf. Accessed 1 March 2011. —— (2009), IOM Emergency Needs Assessments: Four Years of Post-Samarra Displacement in Iraq, Amman: IOM. —— (2010a), ‘Review of displacement and return in Iraq, August 2010’, http:// www.iomiraq.net/library/IOM_displacement_monitoring_reports/yearly_ and_mid_year_reviews/2010/IOM%20Iraq%20%20Review%20of%20 Displacement%20and%20Return%20in%20Iraq,%20August%202010.pdf. Accessed 1 March 2011. —— (2010b), Basrah Governorate Profile November 2010, Amman: IOM. —— (2010c), Ninewah Governorate Profile November 2010, Amman: IOM. —— (2010d), Anbar Governorate Profile November 2010, Amman: IOM. —— (2010e), Thi Qar Governorate Profile November 2010, Amman: IOM. —— (2010f), Kirkuk Governorate Profile November 2010, Amman: IOM. —— (2010g), Baghdad Governorate Profile November 2010, Amman: IOM. —— (2010h), Diyala Governorate Profile November 2010, Amman: IOM. —— (2010i), Kerbala Governorate Profile November 2010, Amman: IOM. —— (2010j), Missan Governorate Profile November 2010, Amman: IOM. —— (2010k), Dahuk Governorate Profile November 2010, Amman: IOM. —— (2010l), Babylon Governorate Profile November 2010, Amman: IOM. —— (2010m), Erbil Governorate Profile November 2010, Amman: IOM. —— (2010n), IOM Iraq Displacement Report – Special Focus, Water Scarcity, Amman: IOM. —— (2010p), Salah al-Din Governorate Profile November 2010, Amman: IOM. —— (2011), ‘Overview’, http://www.iom.int/jahia/Jahia/iraq. Accessed 1 March 2011. Integrated Regional Information Networks (IRIN) (2011), ‘Iraq: Funding shortfall hits plans for IDPs, returnees’, 28 February, http://www.unhcr.org/ refworld/docid/4d6c93161e.html. Accessed 1 March 2011. Ismael, T. and Fuller, M. (2008), ‘The disintegration of Iraq: The manufacturing and politicization of sectarianism’, International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies, 2: 3, pp. 443–474.

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Kareem, A. (2010), ‘Half a million displaced Iraqis face grim future in squalid squatter camps’, Institute for War and Peace Reporting, http:// www.alternet.org/world/147021/half_a_million_displaced_iraqis_ face_grim_future_in_squalid_squatter_camps/?page=entire. Accessed 1 March 2011. Lalani, M. (2010), Still Targeted: Continuing Persecution of Iraq’s Minorities, London: Minority Rights Group International. Lamani, M. (2009), Minorities in Iraq: The Other Victims, Ontario: Centre for International Governance Innovation. Marfleet, P. (2006), Refugees in a Global Era, Basingstoke: Palgrave. ____ (2007), ‘Iraq’s refugees: ‘Exit’ from the state’, International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies, 3: 1, pp. 397–419. Marfleet, P. and Chatty, D. (2009), ‘Iraq’s refugees – Beyond “tolerance”’, Forced Migration Policy Briefings No. 5, Refugee Studies Centre, Oxford. McDowell, C. (1996), A Tamil Asylum Diaspora: Sri Lankan Migration, Settlement and Politics in Switzerland, Providence, RI: Berghahn. Morrison, G. and Moos, F. (1982), ‘Halfway to Nowhere: Vietnamese Refugees on Guam’, in Hansen, A. and Oliver-Smith, A. (eds), Involuntary Migration and Resettlement: The Problems and Responses of Dislocated People, Boulder: Westview. Muir, J. (2011), ‘Iraq’s displaced lead desperate lives in squatter camps’, BBC News, 24 January, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east12266900. Accessed 1 March 2011. Refugees International (2010), Iraq: Humanitarian Needs Persist, Washington, DC: Refugees International, http://www.refugeesinternational.org/policy/ field-report/iraq-humanitarian-needs-persist. Accessed 1 March 2011. Sassoon, J. (2009), The Iraqi Refugees: A New Crisis in the Middle East, London: IB Tauris. Tavernise, S. (2005), ‘Sectarian hatred pulls apart Iraq’s mixed towns’, New York Times, 20 November, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/20/international/middleeast/20sectarian.html?hp&ex=1132462800&en=c8e4f36647d 884a9&ei=5094&partner=homepage, . Accessed 1 March 2011. UN-Habitat (2010), State of the World’s Cities 2010/2011, Nairobi: UN-Habitat/ Earthscan. UN OCHA (2007), ‘Humanitarian crisis in Iraq: Facts and figures’, http:// www.uniraq.org/documents/Humanitarian%20Crisis%20in%20Iraq%20 Facts%20and%20Figures%20131107.pdf. Accessed 1 March 2011. UNHCR (2007), Governorate Assessment Report, Sulaymaniyah Governorate September 2007, Geneva: UNHCR. —— (2008a), ‘Statistics on displaced Iraqis around the world’, http://www.unhcr. org/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/home/opendoc.pdf?tbl=SUBSITES&id=470387fc2. Accessed 1 March 2011. —— (2008b), ‘Iraqis still at the top of the asylum seeker table, despite drop’, http://www.unhcr.org.uk/press/PR20October08.htm. Accessed 1 March 2011. —— (2009), UNHCR Iraq Monthly Statistical Update on Return, October, Geneva: UNHCR. —— (2010), ‘UNHCR poll: Iraqi refugees regret returning to Iraq, amid insecurity’, briefing notes, 19 October, http://www.unhcr.org/4cbd6c9c9.html. Accessed 1 March 2011. —— (2011), ‘2011 UNHCR country operations profile – Iraq’, http://www. unhcr.org/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/page?page=49e486426. Accessed 1 March 2011.

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Van Hear, N. (2004), ‘“I went as far as my money would take me”: Conflict, forced migration and class’, Working Paper No. 6, Centre of Migration, Policy and Society, Oxford.

SUGGESTED CITATION Marfleet, P. (2011), ‘Displacement and denial: IDPs in today’s Iraq’, International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies 5: 2, pp. 277–292, doi: 10.1386/ijcis.5.2.277_1

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS Philip Marfleet is Professor of Migration and Refugee Studies at the University of East London, UK, where he is also a Director of the Centre for Research on Migration, Refugees and Belonging. He is the author of numerous publications on forced migration and on displacements in and from Iraq, including Refugees in a Global Era (Palgrave, 2006); ‘Iraq’s refugees: War and the strategy of exit’, in International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies, Volume 1, Number 3 (2007); ‘Cleansing of minds’, in R. Baker and T. Ismael (eds), Cultural Cleansing in Iraq (Pluto, 2009); and with Dawn Chatty, ‘Iraq’s refugees – Beyond “tolerance”’, Forced Migration Policy Briefings No. 5 (Refugee Studies Centre, 2009). He is also the editor, with Rabab El-Mahdi, of Egypt – the Moment of Change (Zed, 2009). Contact: School of Law and Social Sciences, University of East London, Docklands Campus, University Way, London E16 2RD, UK. E-mail: [email protected]

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IJCIS 5 (2) pp. 293–299 Intellect Limited 2011

International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies Volume 5 Number 2 © 2011 Intellect Ltd Reviews. English language. doi: 10.1386/ijcis.5.2.293_4

REVIEWS

WIPING THE STATE CLEAN: CULTURAL DESTRUCTION AS INTRINSIC TO THE US PROJECT OF TRANSFORMING IRAQ CULTURAL CLEANSING IN IRAQ: WHY MUSEUMS WERE LOOTED, LIBRARIES BURNED AND ACADEMICS MURDERED, RAYMOND W. BAKER, SHEREEN T. ISMAEL AND TAREQ Y. ISMAEL (EDS) (2010) London: Pluto Press, 298 + xii pp., ISBN-10: 9780745328126, p/bk, £18.99 Reviewed by Eric Herring, Reader in International Politics, School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies, University of Bristol

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This is an important book in two respects. First, it draws our attention in a sustained way to the staggering extent of cultural destruction that has occurred in Iraq since the invasion. Second, it argues that the United States in varying ways has viewed positively and actually encouraged substantial amounts of this cultural destruction as part of its project to tear down the old Iraq and transform it into a pro-US neo-liberalized country. This review will explore these two themes in turn. The editors – Raymond Baker, Shereen Ismael and Tareq Ismael – argue that debates about the motives behind the invasion of Iraq have for the most part been conducted with insufficient acknowledgement of the scale, causes and meaning of the cultural catastrophe that has befallen Iraqi society (40). In order to respond to that concern, this review will start with an overview of the findings of the book in relation to the multifaceted nature and immense scale of that catastrophe.

CULTURAL DESTRUCTION: HUMAN AND MATERIAL The destruction and disappearance of material objects signifying Iraqi culture has been enormous. Glenn Perry (Chapter 2) provides some historical and comparative context on the idea of ‘cultural cleansing’. He links it to ‘ethnic 293

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cleansing’ and notes that destruction of graves, monuments, buildings and other material manifestations of culture have been a common practice of domination and assimilation. By eliminating not only people but the record of identities that they embodied, reversing such domination and assimilation becomes qualitatively more difficult. Zainab Bahrani (Chapter 3) surveys the huge loss of antiquities from Iraq’s museums, libraries and archaeological sites through neglect, theft, destruction in combat, destruction through the building of military bases and operation of military forces, and the removal of archives to the United States. Abbas al-Hussainy (Chapter 4) tracks the gradual attrition of Iraq’s archaeological heritage from the mid-nineteenth century all the way through to the present. This slowed after World War I due to new laws passed the Iraqi state, but the Iran-Iraq War and Saddam Hussein’s misguided ‘restorations’ inflicted new damage. After the 1991 Gulf War and under economic sanctions, government officials did their own archaeological plundering for personal gain. Iraq’s own archaeologists made matters worse by providing incentives to find artefacts and not preserve structures. In the assessment of Hussainy, chairman of the State Board of Antiquities in 2007, the archaeological losses in the period since 2003 have exceeded all of these earlier periods. Nabil al-Tirkiti (Chapter 5) provides a thorough account of the fate of Iraqi manuscripts, books and archives based on the best available but still uncertain information. Some of the loss may be temporary in the case of archives seized and digitally copied by the United States with a promise that they will be returned when practical. Some items may be recovered from the international organized crime and its customers. However, Tikriti indicates vast and irrecoverable destruction of large parts of national and provincial collections due to arson and physical deterioration of items that needed to be stored in controlled conditions. As Tikriti argues, societies and individuals put much greater value on those objects that more strongly embody specific cultural identity and memory than more common functional objects. This makes the loss of those cultural objects particularly painful. The cultural destruction has of course also manifested itself in human terms. Hussainy notes that Saddam Hussein engaged in a murderous war of cultural cleansing against Iraqis of the southern marshes (Chapter 4): he had basically the same policy towards the Kurds in the North. At least these hideous campaigns ended with the regime. However, the cultural destruction took new forms in the wake of the invasion. Dirk Adriaensens (Chapter 6) and Max Fuller co-authoring with Adriaensens (Chapter 7) provides extensive empirical material regarding the massive extent of the intimidation, kidnap for ransom and assassination inflicted on Iraq’s professional middle class. Iraq’s professional middle class has under horrendous assault from many directions at the same time with almost no protection. Appendix 2 provides an edited version of an unavoidably incomplete list of murdered academics. Through a survey of university academics in Baghdad, social psychologist Faris Nadhmi (Appendix 1) found pervasive death anxiety. While this is not surprising in these circumstances, it is yet another manifestation of cultural destruction in Iraq because preoccupation with dodging death is unlikely to be conducive to the cultural creativity of scholarship. Dahr Jamail (Chapter 8) and Philip Marfleet (Chapter 9) give overviews of Iraq’s enormous crisis of displacement and its debilitating effects on the functioning of Iraqi society. With millions fleeing their homes to places of mostly temporary and inadequate refuge within and beyond Iraq’s borders, the entire social, economic and cultural infrastructure is deprived of many of those who would normally

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make it work. This has forced ordinary Iraqis to have to improvise their own services and has forced the country as a whole into a new dependence, and vulnerability to, international actors pursuing their own agendas. Mokhtar Lamani (Chapter 10) draws our attention to another human aspect of cultural destruction in Iraq that has taken human as well as material form, namely, the persecution of minorities. Individually, any of these aspects of cultural destruction would represent a crisis for any society. Collectively, and often mutually reinforcing in their effects, they represent an incredible disaster. The editors and other contributors to the book were right to insist on putting this into the foreground of the discussion. The second central theme of the book is that the United States, in particular, has seen some of this cultural destruction as useful to its project of transforming Iraq and has in some ways actively promoted it. This thesis is developed mainly in the chapters by Baker, Ismael and Ismael (Chapter 1), Fuller and Adrianensens (Chapter 7) and Marfleet (Chapter 9) although it is also discussed in others. It is to this thesis that the review now turns.

CULTURAL DESTRUCTION IN SERVICE OF THE US PROJECT TO TRANSFORM IRAQ The argument that the United States sought during the occupation to dismantle the Iraqi state and replace it with a new one that would be pro-US, friendly to Israel and have a neo-liberalized political economy will be easy to accept. After all, these objectives have been articulated openly and consistently by the United States. Nevertheless, this argument also needs to be qualified in relation to the changing approaches and timescales involved. When the United States invaded Iraq, it expected to have to do very little short-term state transformation itself and did not expect to be conducting an unpopular and violently-resisted occupation. It anticipated that the state would continue to function and that the United States would soon be able to withdraw most of its forces once it had held quick elections. It expected that those elections would produce a pro-US government that would neo-liberalize Iraq itself under the tutelage of the United States and the institutions of global governance. It was only in May 2003 that the shift in policy occurred to an all-out, top-down and US-implemented programme of crash transformation. This shift was symbolized by the creation of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) under Paul Bremer in May 2003. It was not pre-planned. Instead, it was a reaction to the unexpected collapse of most of the Iraqi state’s administrative and security infrastructure; unexpected realization that the Iraqi exiles it had backed were in no position to takeover; and the highly visible activities of powerful armed groups hostile to the occupiers about which the United States had little prior understanding. Furthermore, this model of US-run transformation under occupation ran into so much political and armed resistance that it had to be formally abandoned in November 2003 in favour of a handover of formal sovereignty at the end of June 2004. In this period and beyond, the United States has struggled and often failed to impose its preferences, as the editors note (42–43). The United States is still committed officially to the goal of transforming Iraq into a pro-US neo-liberal entity but with much less optimism about timescale and with much more indirect methods. Numerous actors other than the United States and its Iraqi allies have engaged in cultural destruction in Iraq. They have pursued agendas that have in some cases been irrelevant to the US transformation project, unintentionally

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unhelpful to or actively aimed at undermining that project or its potential to create forms of government deemed undesirable, be it liberal, secular and pro-US and pro-Israeli or Iranian-influenced Shi‘a to name only two. Cultural destruction has been inflicted for all sorts of reasons such as revenge against Ba‘thists; opposition to the education of women and their wearing of western clothing; ethnic and sectarian separatism; local political and economic conflicts; individual criminal gain and personal vendettas; looting and smuggling; control of the monetary spoils of corruption; and organized crime through kidnap and ransom. All of these points are generally accepted in analysis of post-invasion Iraq, even if there is great uncertainty over the who has been responsible for what and with what motivation in many specific cases or in terms of the overall mix. The reckless, venal and incompetent conduct of the occupation created conditions without which most of this cultural destruction could not occurred. Hence the United States bears an important part of the responsibility even for those elements of cultural destruction that it did not value or encourage. The book under review touches on all of these familiar points in various places: what makes it different is that it argues that this is not the whole picture. It disputes the assumption that all of the cultural destruction that has occurred has been regarded by the United States as undesirable and it also disputes the assumption that the United States can at worst be accused of indifference. What evidence is there of a positive US attitude to or active encouragement of some of the cultural destruction in Iraq? The central supporting points made in the book are as follows: •

•

•

• •

If the Iraqi world view and the state that flows from it are to be transformed to fit what the United States desires, sweeping away all those material and human cultural components that stand in the way of that transformation could logically be an instrument of pursuing that goal. Even if this creative destruction gets out of hand at times, the purpose of removing obstacles to transformation can be served. To put it another way, it is not possible to be committed to the violent destruction and remaking of a state without being simultaneously committed to the violent destruction of the culture of that state. There is a great deal of undisputed evidence that much of the cultural destruction in Iraq is being carried out directly and with impunity by military and paramilitary elements of the US-backed Iraqi state, and the United States has been heavily involved with those elements, including through provision of intelligence against named individuals. Very little interest has been shown in investigating the campaigns of terror and murder. The targeting of the professional middle class appears in many cases to have no sectarian or ethnic pattern and instead the pattern is more compatible with an attempt to eliminate a large element of the professional class associated not merely with Saddam Hussein but with the notion of an Iraqi national developmental state. On occasion, high-ranked US officials welcomed the chaos and looting as expressions of the new freedom and the tearing down of the old system. Throughout the history of its foreign policy the United States has conducted or sponsored campaigns of repression, assassination, state terrorism and dirty wars against civilian as well as armed opposition. This has included those who even potentially oppose US plans. The most prominent of these include South East Asia in the 1970s and Latin America in

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the 1980s and various regimes across the Middle East, including Israel, in many cases up to the present. In recent decades, cultural destruction has been a frequent part of violent transformations of states and societies towards pro-US neo-liberalism. Hence, as the authors point out, the direct evidence of United States valuing of, and especially support for, cultural destruction in Iraq is limited. They have had to operate on the basis of some empirical induction, a larger amount of logical deduction and the wider demonstrated pattern of such behaviour historically in US foreign policy. The United States has always worked hard to maintain secrecy and plausible deniability and it has often taken decades for the documentary proof to emerge. The authors are right to argue that framing the US role in Iraq exclusively in terms of regime change followed by state building (failed or otherwise) miss the state-destroying role the United States has pursued as a necessary part of the process of state transformation. Furthermore, transforming the state also means transforming much of the society with which it is intimately connected and in which the identity and values of that society and state are encoded culturally in human and material terms. Cultural destruction, physically and otherwise violent, has been intrinsic to the US project of transforming Iraq. Wiping the State Clean would have been an apt alternative title for this valuable book. There is an urgent need for further research to explore its arguments in more depth, and that research cannot wait until the relevant documents are declassified. E-mail: [email protected]

IZDIHÂR AL-‘IRAQ TAHT AL-HUKM AL-MALAKÎ (1921–1958): DIRÂSAH TÂRÎKHIYYAH, SIYÂSIYYAH, IJTIM‘IYYAH MOQÂRANAH, MA’MÛN AMÎN ZAKI (2011) London: Dar AlHikma Publishing and Distribution, 504 pp., ISBN 1-904923-78-X, £15 (pbk) Reviewed by Tareq Ismael, Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Calgary, Canada

This work focuses on a significant period in Iraq’s contemporary history. Given the tumultuous and bloody decades following the fall of the monarchy in 1958, interest in Iraq’s monarchical period has been renewed. One of the main purposes of the author, undertaking this lifetime study, is to warn the new generation of young Iraqis, to avoid the pitfalls his generation had fallen into by following shiny slogans that did not appreciate the accomplishments achieved by the leaders of that era, in their wisdom, realism, morality, integrity, and their astute plans, which resulted in the creation and development of the Iraqi state. (15) In light of Iraq’s current predicament, he hopes that Iraq’s future leadership will demonstrate the ‘honesty, integrity, [and] sacrifice’ exhibited by the classical elite that ruled before 1958 (459). The author’s perspective on

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the royalist era provides a window into the political culture and intellectual environment of Iraq’s royalist-era elite. The author examines the intersection between culture and politics to weave a tapestry of governance in that period, which he characterizes as nationalistic and state-building oriented, with policies reflecting measured development and gradual social change. In the process, much of the critical case against the royal regime and the politics of the royalist-era are challenged, with the author arguing that the ‘positive distinct features of royalist Iraq [were] very often falsified or unjustly attacked’ (15). By the author’s own admission, he has taken a position that is likely to rankle his ‘fellow Iraqis and Arabs’. The author uses an autobiographical approach to explore the cultural and political space of the old-guard elite who ruled Iraq at the foundation of the nation-building process, 1921–1958. The author is a political sociologist who employs the method of his professor, ‘Ali al-Wardî, the founding father of the sociology of contemporary Iraq. He mines the maqâm (Iraq’s classical music), popular poetry of the period, dominant slogans, classical and colloquial proverbs and parables to provide a narrative of this formative period of the history of modern Iraq. Grounded in a sociological perspective, the author’s objective is to provide insight into mindset of Iraq’s founding ‘collective’ personalities, which he dubs as the ‘classical elites’, because ‘they aspired and planned for Iraq to be a constitutional democratic monarchy similar to their European classic counterparts’ (16). He labels the classic elite as a by-product of the ‘Nationalist Conservative School’ created by King Faisal I in the early 1920s, which was carried forward to the 1950s under the leadership of his grandson, King Faisal II and his nephew and Crown Prince, Abd-ul-Ilâh (176). While the author has adopted a historical perspective that is bound to be scrutinized, his historical narrative does raise interesting questions to be reckoned with, particularly with his accounting of Nuri al-Said’s opinions on the most serious political questions of his day; his extensive quoting of Nuri al-Said’s opinion would, however, benefit from additional documentation (28, 160–61, 181). Likewise, his account of Fâdel al-Gamâlî, Iraq’s then foreign minister at the founding non-aligned conference in Bandung 1955 was similarly under-cited, although it would have shed the light on the basic philosophy of that classical elite’s foreign policy foundations (319). The author’s attempt to assess ‘what would have happened if the 1958 coup did not take place’ and if the ‘royal regime persisted’ is an interesting counterfactual thought experiment, but by its nature risks being a speculative enterprise of limited academic use (338–47). The author was quite explicit and is aware that the historical perspective he has taken will ‘certainly trigger discomfort and backlash among many of his fellow Iraqis and Arabs’ (16). Nevertheless, his treatment does provide a glance into the political and intellectual environment that surrounded the era of Iraq’s royal regime. At the same time he extended this spirit of accepting ‘objective and mature critique that is built on logic and constructive discussion’ (397). On a personal plea, I would be remiss if I did not raise the issue for a student of the great Iraqi sociologist, ‘Ali al-Wardî, for not utilizing more of his mentor’s lifetime works and using only one or two volumes of his rich legacy. This is true, particularly when a great deal of the topics that the author ventured into are very well studied by al-Wardî, and his disciples, particularly Ibrahim al-Haidari, especially his monumental works in explaining the basic sociological thoughts of al-Wardî in his book ‘Ali al-Wardî: Shakhsiyyataho wa Minhajoh wa Afkâroh

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al-Ijtimâ‘iyyah (Al-Kamel Verlag 2006, Köln), and also al-Nizâm al-Abawî wa Ishkâliyyat al-Gens ‘Ind al-‘Arab (Al-Saqi Press, London, 2003). That said, this is a very important book. I am sure it will generate a debate on the most critical issues that occupied contemporary Iraqi politics over almost the entire twentieth century. It will raise the discussion into a new height of controversy and debate. E-mail: [email protected]

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NOTES FOR CONTRIBUTORS 2011 The guidance on this page is by no means comprehensive and must be read in conjunction with the Intellect Style Guide, which can be found here: http://www. intellectbooks.co.uk/page/index,name=journalresources/.

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PRESENTATION/HOUSE STYLE All articles should be written in Word. The font should be Times New Roman, 12 point. The title of your article should be in bold at the beginning of the file, but not enclosed in quotation marks. Bold is also used for headings and subheadings (which should also be in Times New Roman, 12 point) in the article. Italics may be used (sparingly) to indicate key concepts. Any matters concerning the format and presentation of articles not covered by the above notes should be addressed to the Editor. QUOTATIONS Intellect’s style for quotations embedded into a paragraph is single quote marks, with double quote marks used for a second quotation contained within the first. All long quotations (over 40 words) should be ‘displayed’– i.e. set into a separate indented paragraph with an additional oneline space above and below, and without quote marks at the beginning or end. Please note that for quotations within the text, the punctuation should follow the bracketed reference. For a displayed quotation the bracketed reference appears after the full stop. All omissions in a quotation are indicated thus: [...] Note that there are no spaces between the suspension points. When italics are used for emphasis within quotations, please ensure that you indicate whether the emphasis is from the original text or whether it is your own. REFEREES This is a peer-reviewed journal. Strict anonymity is accorded to both authors and referees. REFERENCES All references in the text should be according to the Harvard system, e.g. (Bordwell 1989: 9). Please do not group films together under a separate Filmography

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heading. Instead, incorporate all films into the main body of references and list them alphabetically by director. The same rule applies to television programmes/music/ new media: identify the director/composer and list alphabetically with books, journals and papers. Please note in particular: • ‘Anon.’ for items for which you do not have an author (because all items must be referenced with an author within the text) • A blank line is entered between references • Year date of publication in brackets • Commas, not full stops, between parts of each reference • Absence of ‘in’ after the title of a chapter if the reference relates to an article in a journal or newspaper. • Name of translator of a book within brackets after title and preceded by ‘trans.’, not ‘transl.’ or ‘translated by’. • Absence of ‘no.’ for the journal number, a colon between journal volume and number. • ‘pp.’ before page extents. The following samples indicate conventions for the most common types of reference: Anon (1931), Les films de la semaine, Tribune de Genéve, 28 January. Brown, J. (2005), ‘Evaluating surveys of transparent governance’, in UNDESA (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs), 6th Global Forum on Reinventing Government: Towards Participatory and Transparent Governance, Seoul, Republic of Korea, 24– 27 May, United Nations: New York. Denis, Claire (1987), Chocolat, Paris: Les Films du Paradoxe. Flitterman-Lewis, S. (1990), To Desire Differently: Feminism and the French Cinema, Urbana and Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Grande, M. (1998),‘Les Images non-dérivées’, in O. Fahle, (ed.), Le Cinéma selon Gilles Deleuze, Paris: Presse de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, pp. 284–302. Gibson, R., Nixon, P. and Ward, S. (eds) (2003), Political Parties and the Internet: Net Gain?, London: Routledge. Gottfried, M. (1999), ‘Sleeve notes to “Gypsy”’, [Original Broadway Cast Album] [CD], Columbia Broadway Masterworks, SMK 60848. Hottel, R. (1999),‘Including Ourselves: The Role of Female Spectators in Agnès Varda’s Le bonheur and L’une chante, l’autre pas’, Cinema Journal, 38: 2, pp. 52–72. Johnson, C. (1998), ‘The Secret Diary of Catherine Johnson’, programme notes to Mamma Mia! [Original, West End Production], dir. Phyllida Lloyd.

Richmond, J. (2005), ‘Customer expectations in the world of electronic banking: a case study of the Bank of Britain’, Ph.D. thesis, Chelmsford: Anglia Ruskin University. Rodgers, Richard and Hammerstein II, Oscar (n.d.), Carousel: A Musical Play (vocal score ed. Dr Albert Sirmay), Williamson Music. Roussel, R. ([1914] 1996), Locus Solus, Paris: Gallimard. Stroöter-Bender, J. (1995), L’Art contemporain dans les pays du ‘Tiers Monde’ (trans. O. Barlet), Paris: L’Harmattan. UNDESA (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs) (2005), 6th Global Forum on Reinventing Government: Towards Participatory and Transparent Governance, Seoul, Republic of Korea, 24–27 May, United Nations: New York. Woolley, E. and Muncey, T. (in press), ‘Demons or diamonds: a study to ascertain the range of attitudes present in health professionals to children with conduct disorder’, Journal of Adolescent Psychiatric Nursing. (Accepted for publication December 2002). PERSONAL COMMUNICATIONS Personal communications are what the informant said directly to the author, e.g. ‘Pam loved the drums (personal communication)’. This needs no citation in the references list. Equally the use of personal communications need not refer back to a named informant. However, a more formal research interview can be cited in the text (Jamieson 12 August 2004 interview) and in the references list. WEBSITE REFERENCES Website references are similar to other references. There is no need to decipher any place of publication or a specific publisher, but the reference must have an author, and the author must be referenced Harvard-style within the text. Unlike paper references, however, web pages can change, so there needs to be a date of access as well as the full web reference. In the list of references at the end of your article, the item should read something like this: Bondebjerg, K. (2005), ‘Web Communication and the Public Sphere in a European Perspective’, http://www. media.ku.dk. Accessed 15 February 2005. SUBMISSION PROCEDURES Articles submitted to this journal should be original and not under consideration by any other publication. Contributions should be submitted electronically as an e-mail attachment. Please contact William Haddad for further details at: [email protected]

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