Terrorizing a Nation into Homelessness: Who is Responsible?

[babylonsister]

http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/22173

Terrorizing a Nation into Homelessness: Who is Responsible?
Submitted by davidswanson on Sat, 2007-05-05 15:45. Media

Eman A. Khammas, Iraqi writer & journalist - 05 May 2007.

Last January, the municipality of Baghdad published a short advertisement calling tenders to bid on burying the tens of "unidentified" bodies found in the streets of the capital every morning for almost a year now. Few months before, the Iraqi ministry of Health proudly declared that it imported two big refrigerators with a capacity of 2 hundred bodies each, to keep those "unidentified" bodies. At the same time a new very big "state" graveyard was created to bury the bodies, after giving them numbers and taking their pictures , just in case one day a family would be lucky enough to identify a son, a husband, or a father…

This is why millions of Iraqis are leaving home. Every morning, a long queue of black-shrouded women, of all ages, wait for hours at the gate of the Baghdad morgue, asking for the body of a loved one who disappeared, kidnapped, or arrested few days ago…Men do not look for the dead in the morgue, because there are always some armed men hiding around the corner hunting those bereaved fathers and brothers. By passers in streets everyday do not dare to approach dead bodies scattered here and there, somebody might be watching and would shoot them.

These are just few examples of the new Iraqi scene, which bypassed any imaginable limit of the absurd and the surrealist. Not to mention anything about the bombings, the car bombs, the random shooting, the kidnapping, the indiscriminate and collective arrests, the horrible stories of torture in prisons…(PM Maliki said in Sharm Al-Sheikh that the security is progressing and the security plan is going well).

The daily life conditions are simply impossible in Iraq now, but this is not why the Iraqis are leaving their country, they do not have this luxury…they are fleeing for survival, for being, they are well aware of the refugees conditions inside or outside Iraq.

UNCHR says that 4 million Iraqis are homeless now; other refugee organizations say that the number is the double. But how big the number is, does not matter, really. The fact is that the so called international community recognizes now, four years after the US-led occupation of Iraq, that there is a humanitarian crisis in Iraq, although the crisis began 4 years ago, or to be more accurate 17 years ago, when Iraq was devastated, put under the most outrageous international sanctions that killed and uprooted 5 million Iraqis. In the last 4 years hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were killed (again the numbers are not the issue here, whether they are 600.000 or 800.000, according to the latest estimation last year). What is this called if not a genocide?

more...

[midnight]

1. This is why we are going to have to worry for many generations.

It has nothing to do with freedoms, but mass murder. We are considered terrorists, not liberators.

[babylonsister]

2. Yep. Makes me ashamed to be an American. nt

[OwnedByFerrets]

4. I have been ashamed to be an American for some time. The things

that are being done in OUR name is intolerable. And we all sit back and let it happen. And NO, I dont know how to fix it.

[slipslidingaway]

3. Holbrooke Slams Bush Refugee Policy

snip>>

http://www.iraqslogger.com/index.php/post/2632/Holbrooke_Slams_Bush_Refugee_Policy

"Compares Abandonment of Iraqis to Holocaust-Era Refusal to Assist Jews...

The situations brave men such as Wallenberg, Sousa Mendes, and Bingham faced are not just ancient history. They are similar to what is happening now in Iraq. Since the 2003 invasion, the U.S. government has allowed only 466 Iraqi refugees to enter the United States, even though more than two million have fled the country (mostly to Jordan and Syria). Among those desperately seeking safety are thousands of Iraqis who worked with or supported U.S. personnel in Iraq. They are at the greatest possible risk..."