Iraq Refugee Crisis

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Interview: Iraq Refugee Crisis

Noah Merrill, Worldview, 10 May 2007

Listen to Jerome McDonnell interview Electronic Iraq contributor Noah Merrill on the Iraq refugee crisis. http://www.wbez.org/Program_WV_Segment.aspx?segmentID=10639 Merrill recently spent six weeks in Jordan, where the refugee crisis is acute. He will return this summer.

Here is the show summary from Jerome McDonnell's Worldview website:

According to The UN High Commissioner on Refugees, in terms of raw numbers, the nearly two-and-a-half million Iraqi refugees displaced because of the war is a bigger crisis than Darfur. It�s also the largest mass migration in the Middles east since the exodus of Palestinians from Israel in 1948.

The vast majority of Iraqi refugees have fled to Syria and Jordan, further straining already overstretched infrastructures in two of the region's poorer countries. The result is inflated housing costs, scarce water resources and crowded public health facilities and schools. Well over a million Iraqis are internally displaced.

According to The UN High Commission for Refugees estimates that as many as a third of externally displaced refugees now outside Iraq is Christian.

Western countries have been extremely hesitant to except Iraqi refugees. The U.S. is one of the biggest culprits, refugee advocates say. After being widely criticized for admitting only a few hundred Iraqi refugees since the war began, the Bush administration promises to increase quotas for Iraqis to a few thousand.

http://electroniciraq.net/news/3065.shtml