'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

'At least a car bomb is indiscriminate'

Immortal quote from Riverbend yesterday:

I never thought I’d actually miss the car bombs. At least a car bomb is indiscriminate. It doesn’t seek you out because you’re Sunni or Shia.

I can't tell you how much this reminds me of Lebanon, 1976.

I covered the aftermaths of a number of car-bombs there. They were used especially by the "Christian"-exclusivist forces agains civilians living on the Muslim-and-leftist side.

Body parts scattered about. A hand on the dashboard of a car across the street... Random pieces of human flesh thrown onto a tree...

I covered the aftermaths of a lot of incidences of ethnic/sectarian cleansing, too. The "clearing out" of some 250,000 Shiite Muslims from the neighborhoods of East Beirut-- and of course, the "clearing out" of the Palestinian refugee camps from there, too.

The International Organization for Migration reported June 2 from Iraq that,

More than one million people are displaced in[side] Iraq as a result of decades of conflict with at least 203,000 of them particularly vulnerable and in need of humanitarian assistance. Most urgent however, are the needs of those displaced since late February.

The report also says,

Nearly 100,000 people have been displaced in Iraq’s central and southern governorates since the bombing of the shrine at Samara on 22 February and numbers are continually rising,

Until recently, the UN Country Team (UNCT) that coordinates the humanitarian aid supplied by the various UN bodies in Iraq (UNHCR, World Food Program, WHO, Unicef, etc) has steadfastly tried to avoid supporting the establishment of any large-scale IDP camps, as this report from May 30 spelled out.

(This position was most likely adopted in line with the thinking of former UNHCR chief Mrs. Sadako Ogata, whom I heard agonizing back in 1995 over the effects inside Bosnis of the international community's establishment of--nearly always-- mono-ethnic IDP camps there. Her clear assessment was that the establishment of those camps had facilitated the many waves of ethnic cleansing that raged acorss that land and the concurrent emergence of mono-ethnic and often separatist polities there... This is an incredibly tough kind of decision for humanitarian-aid managers to have to make.)

However, in Iraq, the national government has already started to support the establishment of IDP camps. The UN report linked to there says this:

The UNCT has consistently taken the position that the establishment of IDP camps should be avoided; and that IDPs ought to be supported through host family arrangements until alternative accommodation and durable solutions can be found. Nevertheless, given the fact that the government has already begun setting up IDP camps and isrequesting assistance from the humanitarian community, the UNCT's IDP Working Group is preparing a guidance note on how the UNCT could support these camps as an option of last resort.

As in any instance of atrocity-laden inter-group conflict, large numbers of Iraqi citizens have also fled outside their country. I am not sure how many there are in Jordan or Iran right now. (Any info on such figures, friends?) But this report by the UN's IRIN service from Damascus says:

Local NGOs put the number of Iraqis in Syria at about 800,000, the majority of whom live in the suburbs of Damascus in deteriorating socio-economic conditions. Before the fall of the Saddam Hussein regime in April 2003, their numbers were estimated at only 100,000.

The report further noted that prostitution among young Iraqi women, some as young as 12 years old, “may become more widespread, since the economic situation of Iraqi families is deteriorating.” “Organised networks dealing in the sex trade were reported,” it noted, citing evidence that “girls and women were trafficked by organised networks or family members”.

Rising child labour was also cited as a worrying trend...

“We can’t leave Syria alone on this issue,” said Dietrun Günther, senior protection officer at the UNHCR in Damascus. “If the West really wants to help Syria in this matter, it must negotiate new terms for its support of refugees.”

Anyway, let's all just work for the speediest possible end to the violence and destruction in Iraq, and the speediest possible return of all these internally and internationally displaced Iraqi citizens to their homes.

And we could light a special candle for Riverbend: The clarity, humanity, and eloquence of her writing about the effects of the maelstrom of violence in Iraq make her testimony every bit as powerful as Anne Frank's testimony of living as a hunted fugitive in Nazi-occupied Holland.