DAMASCUS, 20 February 2007 — With rising rents and crowded streets in Damascus and traffic jams and job losses in Amman, patience with Iraqi refugees who are flooding the capitals of Syria and Jordan is running thin.
And the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Antonio Guterres, is a worried man.
“It’s no longer possible to ask Jordan and Syria alone to bear this very heavy burden,” Guterres said in Damascus earlier this month, before announcing an international conference on Iraqi refugees would be held in Geneva in April.
“There must be a massive mobilization of support from the international community to these two countries in order to allow them to have the capacity to respond to such a challenge,” he said.
Aside from highlighting the plight of the refugees, the aim of the Geneva conference is to persuade donors to give $60 million to meet the immediate needs of refugees and the internally displaced.
It is not for nothing that Guterres describes the displacement of Iraqis as “the biggest movement in the Middle East since the Palestinian crisis of 1948,” when Palestinians fled the creation of Israel.
According to UNHCR figures, a whopping two million Iraqis have fled to the safety of neighbors, mainly Jordan and Syria, since the US-led invasion of their country in 2003, while 1.7 million are displaced within Iraq itself.
With more than 34,400 people dying in sectarian violence in the past year, the flood of refugees is growing and according to the UNHCR, around 50,000 Iraqis are abandoning their homes every month — close to 1,700 a day.
Syria is playing host to about one million Iraqi refugees, Jordan has absorbed around 750,000, Egypt has opened its doors to some 100,000, Lebanon to tens of thousands, Turkey to 2,719 and Sweden to 80,000.
At the other end of the scale, the United States has granted refugee status to fewer than 700 Iraqis since its forces went in to topple dictator Saddam Hussein.
US officials said this week this number would be increased to 7,000 over the next year or so. While other countries may be picking up some of the slack, it is Jordan and Syria that are bearing the full brunt of the economic fallout of the massive influx of refugees.
Jordan’s King Abdallah II said last month that their arrival had put “pressure on infrastructure” and meager resources of the desert kingdom, but said they were welcome as long as they abide by the law.
Jordanian economist Fahed Fanek in a recent newspaper article complained of “congestion in the streets” and pressure on the “economic and social infrastructure, such as houses, schools, and hospitals.”
Most of the Iraqis in Jordan have set up home in the capital Amman, where the population has doubled from one million in 2003 and where the cost of real estate has soared three-fold since 2005.
The impact is apparent in all sectors of society, not least of all in the job market, with trade unionists complaining that Iraqis are slowly pushing Jordanian workers aside. “Thousands of Iraqis work illegally, accepting lower pay than the Jordanians who are becoming unemployed,” one unionist said.
In Syria, where the price of apartments in the capital Damascus has doubled or in some places even tripled, Iraqis are accused of stoking inflation and putting a strain on infrastructure and resources.
Faced with rising tensions over the presence of so many refugees, Syrian authorities in January stopped handing out three-month permits to Iraqis, replacing them with documents that allow a stay of only two weeks.
Despite assurances by Syrian officials that refugees will not be repatriated, thousands of worried Iraqis have been queuing at the UNHCR offices in recent weeks to register as bona fide refugees.
Part of the UN scheme is to resettle some 20,000 refugees in third countries in the coming year, thus alleviating some of the congestion in Syria and Jordan.
The United States, which has been roundly criticized for its lack of interest in the plight of Iraqi refugees this week pledged $18 million to the UN effort to help displaced Iraqis.
Guterres, who called the US measures “a very good start”, also said he had received “very positive” indications that further donations would come from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.
Whether enough aid will be forthcoming from Western nations suffering donor fatigue is unclear. Whether it will arrive in time is even less certain.
Ron Redmond, a UNHCR spokesman, warned back in November already that the refugee problem was “practically beyond” the capacity of relief agencies.
