Iraqi prime minister says Iraq wants its refugees back

Several sources are reporting on recent statements by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki. He has been in Sweden for a UN-sponsored conference on rebuilding Iraq.

Iraq wants its refugees to return home and those who do can expect “privileges”, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said during a visit to Sweden on Friday.

“We hope that our children, especially the experts, who are obliged to emigrate, would return,” he told reporters at a press conference with Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt.

“We have statistics that say that tens of thousands of refugees wish to return. We welcome them, we will give them privileges,” added Maliki the day after he co-hosted a large international conference on Iraq in Stockholm.

The Iraqi government has “a clear strategy” and has earmarked funds “so as to take the necessary preparations for a volontary return” of refugees, he said.

He stressed that the returns would take place “especially when security improves and when work opportunities are increased.”

 In addition to jobs, houses are needed as many people have left their homes and returned to find others living in them as populations sorted themselves out in a kind of ethnic cleansing.  Many houses too have been destroyed in the fighting. Even if the government particularly wants “experts” to return, why can’t the experts learn to build houses for a while? That would provide both houses and jobs. The Iraqi government has tens of billions of dollars in oil revenues and could afford to set up such a program. It doesn’t have a good track record of efficiency in getting things like this done, though. Maybe they should call in the Red Crescent, which we posted on recently, which wants to help with resettlement and has an infrastructure in place.

Why resentment against refugees?

This tiny little mention in a blog today reminded me to once again try to explain why there is on-going resentment toward refugees in local communities.  We saw it in our county last year and we have written about it on many occasions at RRW.

Here is the notice that inspired this post: 

Cars for Refugees

LiNK is seeking cars to be used by North Korean refugees resettled here in the US. If you are able to donate and would like more information, please email info (at) linkglobal.org with the subject headline “Cars for Refugees.”

All contributions are, of course, tax-deductible!

By the way, we have guietly started taking North Korean refugees.  Up until 2005 the ORR database shows no refugees from North Korea, but 2006 and 2007 indicate we are now taking a handfull.    But, I guess its enough to encourage some NGO to solicit cars for them.

Refugees enter the US with all sorts of goodies including air fare (technically they are supposed to return this loan money, but many don’t), a housing stipend, medical care, food stamps and the list goes on.   Also, the volags (voluntary agencies contracted to resettle refugees) can participate in a special government program (Match Grant) that returns cash to the volags for junk they collect—including used cars. 

I don’t know if this particular organization (with this advertisement) is getting taxpayer cash for cars, but they are seeking donations of cars for this particular group of refugees.

So, it’s no wonder that Americans living with not much, such as those we mentioned recently in Roanoke, VA or the Quad-cities area of IL,  get resentful.   And, no matter where the refugees are resettled stories abound that refugees get special treatment and it makes for very bad relations in communities where citizens ask, ”What about our own poor people?”

See this early post on refugees getting cars and then go read this 2003 VDARE article by Thomas Allen that explains in more depth how (it’s no rumor), that goodies (and cars) flow to refugees.

Bangladesh: Rohingya can go home to Burma, but refuse

In the wake of a visit to Bangladesh last week by UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Antonio Guterres, according to this report a stalemate seems to have been broken about the repatriation of the final 27,000 Muslim Rohingyas back to their homeland in Burma (Myanmar).   However, they say they will go only when democracy is established in Burma.

Speaking to The Irrawaddy on Thursday, the chief editor of a Burmese news agency based in Bangladesh said that Bangladeshi authorities are asking the refugees—who are almost entirely ethnic Rohingya from Arakan State in western Burma—to return home voluntarily. However, he said, the majority would refuse due to fears of reprisals from the Burmese military regime and the worsening economic crisis in the country.

The Bangladeshi government agreed to a proposal on Monday by UNHCR to reactivate a 1992 tripartite agreement to repatriate the remaining 27,000 Burmese Rohingya refugees to their homeland, said UNHCR Commissioner António Guterres on Wednesday.

Guterres said the intention of re-establishing a trilateral mechanism involving Bangladesh, the UNHCR and Burma was “to create the conditions for voluntary repatriation of the Rohingya refugees to their homeland in safety and dignity.” 

Here is what doesn’t make sense.  If 237,000 have voluntarily returned to Burma, then what is the hold up for the final 27,000.   Only a few things seem logical.  They could be troublemakers who fear to return, or they could be enjoying the care and attention they get from the UN and humanitarian groups while begging to be resettled in the West.

Around 258,000 ethnic Rohingya people from Arakan State fled to Bangladesh in 1991, following a campaign of human rights abuses by the Burmese junta. They were registered as refugees by the government of Bangladesh, but without any proper legal status.

By 2006, around 237,000 refugees had returned to Burma. Most of the remaining refugees live in two camps in Nayapara and Kutupalong in Cox’s Bazar, where they receive assistance from the UNHCR and World Food Programme.

See our category “Rohingya Reports” for our archive on the Rohingya efforts to be resettled in first world countries.

P.S. Based on his efforts here, I like Guterres for trying to solve this problem without automatically whisking more Muslim refugees to the US and the West.

How many refugees and from what countries…

And, to which states were they resettled.    I just realized we don’t have all these databases in one handy place.   Here are links to the Office of Refugee Resettlement data bases for refugees resettled in the US.

First, for a very handy chart for 1983-2005, go here.

Then for individual years from 2000 to 2007, go here.

South Africa: Tensions continue as immigrants beg to be resettled

As perhaps the world’s most highly touted experiment in multiculturalism continues to crumble, immigrants and refugees storm humanitarian offices insisting they be resettled to first world countries.  See our coverage last week of the anti-immigrant riots in South Africa and with them the demise of the “rainbow nation” myth.

Here is the latest news, this story is from Durban:

The spotlight was thrown on the true nature of intimidation, robbery and assault that Durban’s foreign community has had to deal with, as angry yet desperate foreigners pleaded for help at the gates of the Diakonia Centre on Thursday.

Police were called in to control the furious group of foreign nationals and refugees who had barricaded the gates to the centre after demanding intervention from Lawyers for Human Rights (LHR) and the Mennonite Central Committee Refugee Project (MCC).

Some women clutched babies swaddled in blankets while men waved hastily written placards in the air outside the gates, but they quickly abandoned their protest action and gathered around journalists to tell their individual stories of oppression in a country they thought they were safe in.

Their protest action was aimed directly at forcing the LHR and MCC, who act as local agents for the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), to act in assuring them protection and, in some cases, repatriation.

Tensions rose as some vocal refugees shouted at LHR and MCC staff across locked gates, before police intervened and restored calm.

Incidentally, I think the reporter is misusing the word “repatriation” which means to be returned to one’s native country.  The gist of the article is that the immigrants do not want to go back to the country they were escaping from but want third country resettlement—code for free passage to Europe, America, Canada, Australia or New Zealand.

But LHR attorney Sherylle Dass said the dreams many of the refugees had of being repatriated to other countries, let alone a first world country, were extremely slim.

The intervention of the UNHCR only resulted in about 2 percent of applications for repatriation being successful. It could take up to five years for such applications to be processed.

She said a letter outlining the frustration of Durban’s refugees and foreigners seeking repatriation and help had been sent to the UNHCR fafter the protest action and a subsequent meeting.

“The people were basically seeking protection in various ways. Some want a local refugee camp, but others want to resettle. We have had a steady stream of resettlement applications before the xenophobic attacks, but now there has been a huge influx,” Dass said.

“Some may have security risk, but there are those who are using this as an opportunity to get into a first world country.”

Obama and friends on Fox this weekend

Just received this alert to a TV special featuring Daniel Pipes talking about Obama’s Islamist friends.    How does all this tie in with immigrant and refugee activists and your tax dollars being spent on groups such as the Arab American Action Network?    See my post from March, “Obama and the taxpayer money trail.”  Be sure to follow the link back to Atlas Shrugs for a full view of “community organizing” Chicago-style.

Then watch this special! 

Alert from the Middle East Forum

To watch Daniel Pipes discuss the connection between Barack Obama and Rashid Khalidi, please tune in to “Hannity’s America” on Fox News Channel. It will air twice:

· Saturday, May 31 at 9 p.m. EDT

· Sunday, June 1 at 9 p.m. EDT.

This is part of the show’s ongoing “Real Barack Obama” series (for links to the six prior episodes, see Fox here).

Mr. Pipes will provide information on the two men’s social, intellectual, and financial connections in Chicago, then consider the implications for his presidential candidacy.

For background on the topic see the Los Angeles Times article of April 10, 2008, “Allies of Palestinians see a freind in Barack Obama”

The BAMs vs. the IMMs! Tribalism within US Muslim community?

Since I’ve written on several occasions lately about black Americans having conflicts with black refugees in communities where the volags apparently placed the refugees—assuming the black ‘African’ brothers would bond, I don’t think I am going too far afield to discuss this very fascinating post I came across yesterday.    It is written at a blog called Muslim Matters and is entitled “The Scourge of ‘Internet Tribalism’”.

This article is also relevant because we are bringing large numbers of Muslim immigrants to the US through the Refugee Resettlement program, so things could get still uglier in the Ummah.

There has been a recent uptick in phenomenon, which for lack of better terminology, I will refer to as “Internet Tribalism”.

This tribalism is pitting black brothers, who I will refer to as BAMs*, against immigrants and their progeny, who we will simply abbreviate as IMMs.

Wow (or Woe)!  I had no idea that Black American Muslims (BAM’s) are suspicious of Immigrant Muslims (IMM’s).   We have been told it’s all peace and love among all of Islam’s brothers and sisters.   But, this article and the comments that follow suggest there is much going on under the surface which the author, Amad (an IMM), is desperately trying to resolve by discussing openly. 

If you are interested in this, and you should be as we continue to bring in Muslim refugees, I encourage you to read the whole post and the comments there.     It is a lot to absorb, so I’ll just pull out a couple of things that interested me.

I guess we may need to add a new category at some point, the BIMMs—Black Immigrant Muslims—-hmm, wonder where they will fit in the mix? 

Anyway, back to the tribalism which Amad describes and then says this, which is apparently one of the things “hate-mongering” BAM bloggers are discussing:

Before I move on, there is a fundamental question that needs to be addressed: Is this social gap between IMMs and BAMs a result of CONSPIRACY, involving a series of deliberate actions by the IMMs to keep the BAMs down and away from the circles of influence and wealth? Or is it that just how history played out where each community was engrossed in its own priorities and issues that it did not stop and think about the other? Or as a third option, does the truth lie somewhere in the middle?

As an IMM who has been active in the Muslim community for nearly 15 years, I would like to believe the following: There is no conspiracy at hand and that there was/is no plan to keep our BAM brothers “down”. But I cannot deny that affluence and authoritarian attitudes of the immigrant community have played a role in silencing and stunting the growth of the BAM community, inadvertent as it may have been. So, while there is no conspiracy, the result has been similar – the BAM community has been kept “down”.

Regardless, conspiracy it is not. And this strange belief of the all-powerful “Immigrant Syndicate” is part of the increasing internet nationalism that has reared its ugly head,

Also, Amad is very concerned about how the “Islamophobes” will use this information.  Apparently the blog Little Green Footballs had already at one point seized on this racist rift. 

As a result of this “internet tribalism”, we saw the formation of new blogs along similar lines of hate-mongering against IMMs. In fact, the Islamophobic community, sensing an opportunity to exacerbate disunity among Muslims, found the posts so appealing that two of them were prominently linked on the most notorious anti-Muslim, right-wing vitriolic site called LGF- Littlegreenfootballs.com (whose members appropriately refer to themselves as lizards). While singularvoice (link) has mysteriously gone offline, the two posts can still be found on LGF.com (google singularvoice).

Perhaps there is something to the BAM’s concerns, maybe they know their history and know that it was the Arab traders who enslaved Africans in the first place.    Although American ‘whites’ get the blame, we fought a Civil War and many Americans died to free the slaves here.   Islam still tolerates slavery of certain people and slavery of Africans by lighter skinned Muslims is still going on according to this account at wikipedia (scroll down to Slavery in the Muslim World).

Amad says its a wild insinuation that modern Muslim activist groups in the US are suppressing BAM’s and seeks to dispel that notion in a section that begins:

The wild insinuation that “I.S.N.A, Q.S.S., C.A.I.R., M.A.S., I.I.I.T, [Muslim activist groups in the US] etc, clandestinely subscribe to this noxious belief that Arabs are Master Race, and that this “fact” has led them to suppress BAMs.

But, one commenter, Abu Noor Al-Irlandee, makes an interesting point by saying that if the Muslim Brotherhood is behind most of the Muslim activist groups in the US, that needs to be discussed or suspicion will continue to grow among the BAM’s.    

I know no one wants to play into talking points of our Islamophobic enemies, but if all the major Muslim organizations really were originally founded by people associated with or sympathetic to various branches of the Ikhwan al-Muslimoon [Muslim Brotherhood], then we should not try to hide that fact but should explore what the real truth of those associations was. And if such groups are now led by people completely independent from those organizations and even by people who do not subscribe to the methodologies of those organizations then we should be clear about that as well. Covering up such issues will always lead to conspiracy theories and to the idea prevalent in many immigrant led masjids for a variety of reasons (some related to this, some not) that there is a true inner circle of the masjid that outsiders cannot really reach or understand and that what is said in private is different from what is said in public. Even if this is for good reasons, this leads inevitably to “suspicion” and then people are uneasy about what is said publicly even when nothing is being hidden. Of course, post 9/11 persecution of Muslim charities and organizations for foreign affiliations has made this problem a more difficult one.

For what its worth, I believe there is an “inner circle.”    See my earlier mention of the Muslim Brotherhood in this post:   Muslim Mayors coming to a city near you.

 

Germany still wants Christian Iraqi refugees; that’s still a “hitch”

Germany has been talking about taking thousands of Iraqi refugees since March — we posted on this here, here and here. But they want Christian refugees, and that presents a problem to the multiculturalists of Europe. Spiegel reports that 

the CDU [Christian Democratic Union, the ruling party] envisions bringing a large group (possibly as many as 10,000) of non-Muslim refugees to Germany with the understanding that they would not be treated as asylum seekers. Asylum seekers are not allowed to work in Germany, and Steinbach said that it is unrealistic to think that Christian refugees from Iraq would ever be able to return. For this reason, their ultimate integration in Germany should be supported.

Members of Yazidis and Mandaean religious minorities would also be among those allowed in, according to the party’s proposal. The CDU argues that, in contrast to Muslim refugees from Iraq, religious persecution makes it unlikely that Christians, Yazidis and Mandaeans would ever by able to return.

Makes sense, right? The non-Muslims are in a different kind of situation from the Muslim refugees, so they should be treated differently. Not to the UN it doesn’t.

Whether the United Nations refugee agency UNHCR would agree to the CDU plan, however, is unclear. As a rule, the UNHCR is unwilling to divide up refugees for resettlement based on their religious beliefs. Deputy CDU floor leader Arnold Vaatz, though, said on Wednesday that he would like to see the UNHCR take the issue of possible return into consideration. Such a criterion could open the door for Germany to accept a group of refugees that was overwhelmingly non-Muslim.

I don’t really understand this last part — why taking return into consideration would allow Germany to accept Christians. What is clear, though, is that the German government will have to jump through hoops to take in Christian refugees. And it is also clear the UNHCR is insane. Sometimes I think just the word “Christian” makes European secularists lose their minds.

UPDATE: Here is a story from FrontPage Magazine that may show us why Germans prefer Christian Iraqi refugees. Even if they are culturally different from Germans, Iraqi Christians are not going to engage in honor killings!

US Congressmen demand reform of UNRWA

The Jerusalem Post reports on a move by a American congressmen to do something about the UN agency that oversees the Palestinian refugees.

A group of bipartisan US congressmen is urging reform in UNRWA, the UN body that deals exclusively with Palestinian refugees and their descendants, and calling for alternative solutions to the containment of refugees in squalid camps.

“The Palestinian refugees have been used as political pawns for the past 60 years by people who don’t want peace in the Middle East,” said Congressman Eliot Engel (D-New York) at a meeting of international parliamentarians hosted last week by the Congressional Israel Allies Caucus, a bipartisan pro-Israel parliamentary group.

“The UN has been part and parcel of this conspiracy,” he said.

We agree, as we have said in several recent posts, including this one. The issue seems to be coming to some kind of head, with more written on it in recent weeks than I have ever seen before at one time, including this comprehensive report which we’ve referenced before.  The Jerusalem Post article goes on:

In contrast to the main UN refugee agency, UNHCR, which assists and resettles refugees from around the world and has an international team of around 6,300 employees, more than 99 percent of UNRWA’s 25,000-strong staff members are locally recruited Palestinians - almost all of them Palestinian refugees or their descendants, and some of them members of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, groups both the US and the EU classify as terror organizations.

UNRWA, which operated on a cash budget of $487 million in 2007 - excluding special appeals for additional funding - receives most of its money from the US, European Commission, Sweden, Norway and the United Kingdom.

Four years ago, amid persistent reports that the group was turning a blind eye to Palestinian terrorism, then-UNRWA commissioner-general Peter Hansen publicly admitted for the first time that Hamas members were on the UNRWA payroll.

Hat tip to Jihad Watch, where Hugh Fitzgerald has a terrific comment providing the proper historical context (scroll down to May 28, 5:37 pm).

A Somali Muslim’s view of Ayaan Hirsi Ali

We’ve written before — here and here – about Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the brave Somali refugee who has broken with Islam and spoken out boldly about its treatment of women, putting her life in danger. Now I have come across a review of her book, Infidel, by a Mahamud M. Yahye, Ph.D., a Somali who thinks Hirsi Ali does Islam a grave disservice, and probably tells lies about her life.

The review is useful for the insight it provides into the mindset of an educated Somali. He does not like the Somalis’ brutality against women, like female genital mutilation, and points out that the practice is not Islamic (true, but it is mostly Muslims that practice it) but later in the article claims that Islam gave rights to women before the west did.

The author devotes only one chapter towards the end of her book, shamelessly titled “Leaving God” to the idea why she had to break with the noble Islamic religion and justifies it in a very superficial way. She does not give any valid points in this regard, except her repetition without solid evidence, that Islam everywhere subjugates women and violates their basic rights. She also says that, after 9/11, she discovered that Islam was a violent religion. As a man who lived in both the Arab/Muslim world and the West, Ayaan’s naïve and superficial argument did not convince me and I became more attached to my divine Islamic religion. As some female writers like Asra Nomani have shown, Islam has given some fundamental rights to women, such as participation in inheritance, keeping their identity/names (and not adopting their husbands’ family names after marriage, as Western/Christians do), initiation of divorce, engagement in business – as the Prophet’s first wife Khadija did [may Allah be pleased with her] - and participation in community leadership, before Western women could obtain such basic human rights. Besides, the heinous acts of a small clique of misguided Muslim extremists/deviants cannot wipe out the Islamic religion’s real nature of peace and tolerance.

 Because Hirsi Ali broke with Islam, the writer disparages everything about her and questions many of her autobiographical claims. He suggests she should have followed the lead of a Muslim woman reformer in a movement for “renewal of the soul of Islam.”

…with regard to the running of one of their mosques in West Virginia, USA, this movement had, for instance, struggled to allow women – contrary to the old practices of that community – to walk through the front door (and not the rear one only) of their mosque, to pray in the main hall, to fill positions of leadership, and to guide community activities in their area. In this regard, the mission of this enlightened Islamic movement could be summarized in the following few words: “to fight to liberate Muslim communities from cultural norms that contradict the Islamic principles of tolerance, inclusion and equality.” In her more objective, rational and well-argued book, Asra Nomani even draws up as appendixes for her book two interesting bills of rights, namely, (a) An Islamic bill of rights for women in mosques; and (b) An Islamic bill of rights for women in the bedroom.

What he ignores is the mental and emotional liberation Hirsi Ali found in leaving Islam and embracing western civilization. She loves, adores, the west, although I believe that in her rejection of all religion she does not understand the Judeo-Christian roots of our civilization.  But her conversion to what someone has called ”enlightenment fundamentalist” is one of the most moving parts of her book. If this reviewer had read it more open-mindedly, he would have been forced to wrestle with the repressiveness to the human spirit that Islam represents, versus the freedom of thought and action found in the west.

Since we have accepted tens of thousands of Somalis here as refugees, others as immigrants, and continue to do so, it is useful to get a glimpse of the mentality they bring — though most are far more primitive than this educated man.