Pauvre la Syrie ? certes, mais généreuse, fraternelle et solidaire !

Associated Press write
http://www.thedalleschronicle.com/news/2007/02/news02-05-07-03.shtml

DAMASCUS, Syria - Decades after the Middle East was hit by the mass
uprooting of Palestinians, it is again struggling with a gigantic refugee
problem - this time from Iraq.

The exodus - one million to neighboring Syria alone, according to the
U.N. - is another unforeseen byproduct of the 2003 Iraq invasion. When it
might peak, nobody knows, but if it continues at its present rate, the
consequences for the region would be profound.

Iraqis now make up more than 5 percent of Syria’s population, the U.N.
refugee agency says. Jordan says its 700,000 Iraqis have swollen its
population by 12 percent, and its officials say they have already moved to
cu t off the flow. So has Egypt, with 130,000 Iraqi newcomers.

But Syria’s doors remain open and the new arrivals have transformed some
Damascus neighborhoods to such an extent that Iraqi-accented Arabic is all
that’s heard.

In the capital’s Jarramana suburb, restaurants advertise Iraqi dishes,
along with belly dancers and singers imported from Baghdad, Basra and Mosul.
Many store windows advertise apartments and houses for rent or sale. In
al-Sayda Zeinab, another Damascus suburb, Iraqis crowd into the marble-tiled
plaza of a Shiite mosque, far outnumbering Iranian pilgrims.

Syria is poor and lacking in jobs, and many Syrians grumble about the
newcomers pushing up the cost of food and housing. The U.N. refugee agency
says it is struggling to help the newcomers, many of whom are poor and
running out of the meager funds they brought.

New York-based Human Rights Watch accuses the United States of doing too
little, saying i t should “significantly” increase the number of Iraqi
refugees it will resettle this year and contribute generously to the U.N.
appeal for funds to cope with the crisis.

“Washington is spending about $2 billion per week on the war in Iraq,
but has barely begun to address the human fallout from the war,” said Bill
Frelick, Human Rights Watch’s refugee policy director.

The U.S. resettled several hundred Iraqis in 2006, according to the U.N.
agency, whose formal title, UNHCR, stands for U.N. High Commissioner for
Refugees. It wants Washington to take up to 20,000 in 2007.

Egypt and Jordan have reported only minor security frictions with the
refugees, but both say their fear of importing Iraq’s violence forces them
to clamp down.

Jordanian officials point to the killing of 60 people in 2005, when Iraqi
suicide bombers linked to al-Qaida blew themselves up in three hotels in
Jordan’s capital, Amman.

Human Rights Wat ch says Jordan refuses entry to Iraqi men between ages
17 and 35. Government officials acknowledge restrictions on the entry of
Iraqis, but won’t give specifics.

The Iraqi presence in Jordan is a “burden,” Jordanian government
spokesman Nasser Judeh said. Jordan, he said, wants an international
conference to discuss compensation for Arab nations hosting fleeing Iraqis.

Syria, population 18 million, is the refuge of choice primarily because
of its relaxed entry regulations for Arabs, the relatively low cost of
living and availability of schools and health care.

President Bashar Assad’s government is reluctant to detail the costs.
“There is indeed a burden, but Syria doesn’t complain to anyone and is not
asking anyone for help,” Vice President Farouk al-Sharaa told reporters in
Damascus in January.

Still, the impact is felt. Housing prices in the Damascus area have
soared by up to 300 percent. Syrians also complain abou t higher food prices
and overcrowding at some schools, which have reportedly admitted up to
28,000 Iraqi children. In areas where Iraqis have settled, residents say
some classes have swollen from 30 pupils to 50.

The Damascus office of the UNHCR says about 40,000 Iraqis arrive
monthly. They can stay for six months, then must leave and renew the visa
process from scratch. The quickest way is a short trip to neighboring
Lebanon, but at $20 a person or more, the sightseeing packages are too
costly for the poor.

Still, most Iraqis in Syria say they have no serious complaints about their
life in exile, and have made a home away from home.

Some have settled in Palestinian refugee camps, where rents are lower,
joining tens of thousands of Palestinians who came to Syria as refugees
following the 1948 creation of Israel and the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.
Iraqis also have set up a private university outside the capital, with Iraqi
l ecturers and a mostly Iraqi student body - a reflection of Iraq’s
war-driven brain drain.

Two Damascus theaters are showing Iraqi plays, complete with star
actors-in-exile. “Homesick,” a slapstick comedy set in the offices of an
imaginary Iraqi satellite TV channel based in Syria, has drawn near sellout
crowds since opening Dec. 7.

“My homeland is like a paradise even if it resembles hell,” blares a
song from the theater’s speakers.

For $5 a ticket, Iraqis who have fled suicide bombings, death squads,
gunbattles, unemployment and violent crime laugh hysterically as comedians
Majid Yassin and Nahi Mahdi joke about Baghdad’s fuel shortages and power
outages.

“It is not a good life, but at least we are safe here,” said Ibrahim
Hamad, a former Iraqi army officer who came to Syria eight months ago with
his wife and three children from Anbar province, the heartland of Iraq’s
Sunni-led insurgency.

“No bombs, no sho otings, no Americans, no militiamen and no power cuts,” he
said.

Hamad is not entitled to an army pension because he was an active member
of Saddam’s now-outlawed Baath party. The family lives on the $250 a month
he collects from tenants living in his central Baghdad apartment, and from
dabbling in cross-border commerce.

The promise of a well-paid job in a business run by relatives in the
Persian Gulf city of Dubai keeps his hopes up.

The United States and Iraq’s Shiite-dominated government accuse Syria of
harboring leaders of Iraq’s Sunni-led insurgency - particularly former Baath
Party officials - and allowing them to move back and forth across the border
with Iraq. Among the Iraqis in Syria are some 300,000 Shiites, but there
have been no reports of Iraq’s Sunni-Shiite tensions spilling over into
Syria.

The UNHCR is struggling to deal with the flood of Iraqis across the
region - and within their homeland. It say s some 500,000 fled their homes to
other parts of Iraq in 2006 alone, and that the number of internally
displaced people could reach 2.3 million - nearly one in ten Iraqis - by the
end of 2007.

This month, the Geneva-based agency made an emergency appeal for $60
million to help fleeing Iraqis.

“Unremitting violence in Iraq will likely mean continued mass internal
and external displacement affecting much of the surrounding region,” it
said.

Already, its resources in Syria are stretched thin. The waiting time for
seeing a UNHCR official is five months, said Laurens Jolles, the UNHCR
representative in Syria. He hopes it will drop to one month after his office
recruits 10 new staff.

“Syria’s generosity is admirable and must be noted,” he said in an
interview.

But many Iraqi families are running out of money and becoming increasingly
dependent on aid from religious and political support groups, he said. Up to
30 percent of young Iraqis aren’t attending school, he added.

Some of the refugees are fortunate enough to find legal work, but Jolles
said many more are employed illegally, and vulnerable to exploitation.
The Iraqis pose no security threat, “but there are social ills like theft
and prostitution,” said Elias Murad, editor-in-chief of the Al-Baath,
official newspaper of Syria’s ruling Baath Party.

Saad Hamza Ilwan, a retired primary school teacher from Mahmoudiyah, a
particularly dangerous Sunni Arab town south of Baghdad, came to Syria with
his wife and three children nearly two years ago. He could only afford a
flat in the al-Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp, which is more like a
sprawling suburb of Damascus.

He sells cellular telephones and phone cards. “Business is slow,” he
said as his 10-year-old son, Mohammed, dusted the shelves. “There are five
shops selling the same things on this part of the street alone.”
< BR>He said his children are struggling with a Syrian school system that is
more rigorous than Iraq’s.

“But the Syrians treat us well,” said Ilwan, who says he fled Iraq four
months after U.S. troops stormed his home, arrested two of his brothers and
held them for eight months.

In al-Yarmouk, the men spend their evenings smoking and drinking sweet
black tea while swapping stories of conditions at home learned from
telephone conversations with relatives and friends in Iraq.

Mohammed, the 10-year-old, huddles by an electrical heater to fend off
the cold and declares himself homesick.

“I don’t like Damascus,” he says, drawing protests from his father. “I
want to be back in my school in Iraq.”