Thanks,
Pamela

The UN restricted their activities in northern Iraq because Saddam asked them to. According to a Brookings report.

UN human rights officials…have not visited the North. Their terms of reference allow them to visit countries only at the invitation of the government. In this case, the government in Baghdad has unsurprisingly never ‘invited’ them to visit the North.

The UN mostly deferred to Saddam’s wishes and ignored them.

All the UN can do is to assist national governments if they agree to receive assistance, assuming that the UN has money to do it. The UN can’t force Jordan or Syria (where most of the Iraqi refugees are) or any other sovereign state to do anything. Saddam’s wishes have nothing to do with that, that’s silly.

Ragout, this issue has been a hot one in Australia for many years – it was, for example, central in the 2001 election. So when I say it’s hard to believe, I mean that even when the actions of the CoW have directly created the refugee crisis, and even when large numbers are fleeing because they are seen as collaborators with the occupying forces, there has still been no change in the policy.

I hope your Vietnam analogy is right, but I think the view of most supporters of the war is pretty much that of anon at #3, repeated various times through the thread.

I think that HRW report is focussing on a small aspect of Iranian policy. If you look at Iran’s record as a whole it’s pretty good: they host more refugees than any country in the world (see this HRW report). A lot of the Marsh Arabs fled to Iran.

At the moment, though, things are awful. Even if the UN registers Iraqis as refugees they still wouldn’t be let in, since most Iraqis would probably be considered terrorists under US law.

But, John, the only reason you find the current situation “hard to believe” is because of the international “humanitarian” community’s shameful silence. They’ve been been ignoring the plight of Iraqi refugees for decades.

Before the 2003 invasion, there were already about 2 million refugees from Saddam’s Iraq: 1 million internal refugees, and 1 million in neighboring countries. The UN mostly deferred to Saddam’s wishes and ignored them. To date, the UN has registered only a few 10s of thousands of Iraqi refugees. NGOs have done very little to help. You won’t find any mortality studies published in epidemiological journals. Jordan has basically treated Iraqi refugeess as illegal aliens. I think the list of good samaritans is limited to Iran.

P.S. The US State Department says that 198 Iraqi refugees were admitted in 2005. The good news is that they expect admissions to increase by 150% this year!

We were actually doing that during the run up to war. As the Blair government were pointing out the human rights abuses of Iraq, kurds were being sent back to face those same abuses. One home office letter actually told an asylum seeker that “the justice system of Iraq is fair, and we did not feel you would be denied a fair trial.”