In Baghdad, this troupe of five clowns called themselves the “Happy Family Group.” Their purpose was to bring some entertainment and relief to children whose lives had been scarred by violence and fear. They called their show, “A Child Is Just As Sacred As A Country.” By every account, the show was popular among children, an oasis of laughter in the desert of violence. Their story over the past six months is tragic and inspiring. It also highlights the plight of Iraqi refugees.
The story of the Happy Family Group has received some attention in the press, including the BBC and Menassat.
The sad news
The Happy Family Group began performing in 2004 as a way to help Iraqi children cope with the violence and suffering in their country after our invasion. After nearly four years of performing, the Happy Family Group began to get death threats last August. It was unclear why they had marked for death. Unfortunately, the good clowns did not take the evil clowns seriously. Two members of the troupe failed to show up for rehearsals and were later found to have been murdered as they traveled across Baghdad. Innocent people murdered in Baghdad during the height of the patented surge? Impossible.
The murders convinced the remaining members of the Happy Family Group (Rahman, Ali and Safi) that the evil clowns were serious and fled Iraq. “We don’t know why they targeted us. We were entertaining children,” says Rahman. The troupe made their way to Damascus, joining an estimated 1.5 million Iraqi refugees living in Syria.
The good news
The clowns were hired by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR). Their job is to keep the children occupied while their parents register for relief. Registration for families means retelling the story of how they became refugees, a painful experience.
The clowns also provide public service announcements from the UNHCR. Less than a third of Iraqi children in Syria attend school. Iraqi refugees are also the target of fraud and exploitation.
“One in every five refugees who registers with us is a victim of violence or torture“, says Laurens Jolles, the Dutchman who heads the UNHCR office in the Syrian capital. “This means that the families and the children in particular, are traumatized when they get here.”
The UNHCR also uses the clowns to get children back to school. Only about 70,000 of the 300,000 Iraqi children in Syria attend school. “Far too few,” says Jolles.
The clowns at the UNHCR office continue their show. But their funny performance also contains a warning: watch out for swindlers, stay away from people trying to sell fake UNHCR registration forms.
The 1.5 million Iraqi refugees in Syria are an easy target for petty criminals, says UNHCR official Sybella Wilkes. “It really hurts, after everything the Iraqi refugees have been through; robbery, kidnap and losing their homes, when you see them become the victims of fraud.”
– Source
“Most of the children are traumatized and incredibly scared,” say Rahman, Ali and Saif . “We try to convince them that there is a different future for them.”
“We don’t do it for money but because we’re clowns. We just want to make the children happy in order to remove the fears and memories of bombs and bad days.”
– Source
Corporate Media Clowns
The American corporate media has largely ignored the plight of Iraqi refugees. It won’t sell because these stories will not boost our fragile ego or distract us from our crumbling economy. In one of the rare stories about the Iraq refugee crisis, CNN was careful not to state the obvious – it is the direct result of our invasion and occupation of Iraq.
Population flight has been occurring for years, but the situation worsened after a bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra unleashed sectarian warfare two years.
See? The refugees are running from sectarian warfare, not the chaos and power struggle that ensued as a result of our invasion and occupation.
The UNHCR is making a push for the world community to help ease the burdens the refugee influx has placed on those nations. Redmond said there is an agreement in the works to bring in more nongovernmental organizations into Syria to address refugee problems.
This is obviously not an American-made mess since the UN is asking the world community to clean it up. It is funny how CNN’s John King last night pounced on Senators Clinton and Obama to admit that the Bush surge and splurge had returned Iraq to near Garden-of-Eden status.
The British press skillfully points the finger at “rich nations” failing to help the refugees. Here is a description from The Economist.
WHETHER they supported the American-led campaign to topple Saddam Hussein or denounced it, all rich countries now agree that the turmoil which engulfed Iraq after the war was a tragedy whose victims should be succoured. But by no means all wealthy countries are prepared to back up those compassionate sentiments with money or hospitality.
Of the 4m Iraqis who have been displaced by conflict at various times, about half are still inside the country. Most of the rest found shelter of sorts in nearby places, like Syria and Jordan. But there is an important third category: people deemed by the United Nations’ refugee agency to be extremely vulnerable and in need of relocation somewhere far from the region.
Some of these people are at risk because they, or members of their families, worked for the American-led administration of Iraq, or for Western humanitarian agencies. Others belong to ethnic or religious minorities: these include Christians, and Palestinians who are seen by some Iraqis as collaborators with the old regime. Also viewed as vulnerable are families with no healthy bread-winners.
The office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees says that some 80,000 to 100,000 of Iraq’s refugees are in pressing need of resettlement outside the region. But few have found new homes.
Looks like the “Coalition of the Willing” is unwilling to take any responsibility for the human suffering produced by the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Only the damn liberal rags like The Nation dare to put the Iraqi refugee crisis into some context.
The population of Iraq at the time of the U.S. invasion was perhaps in the 26-27 million range. Between March 2003 and today, a number of reputable sources place the total of Iraqis who have fled their homes — those who have been displaced internally and those who have gone abroad — at between 4.5 million and 5 million individuals. If you take that still staggering lower figure, approximately one in six Iraqis is either a refugee in another country or an internally displaced person.
Now, consider the equivalent in terms of the U.S. population. If Iraq had invaded the United States in March 2003 with similar results, in less than five years approximately 50 million Americans would have fled their homes, assumedly flooding across the Mexican and Canadian borders, desperately burdening weaker neighboring economies. It would be an unparalleled, even unimaginable, catastrophe. Consider, then, what we would think if, back in Baghdad, politicians and the media were hailing, or at least discussing positively, the “success” of the prime minister’s recent “surge strategy” in the U.S., even though it had probably been instrumental in creating at least one out of every ten of those refugees, 5 million displaced Americans in all. Imagine what our reaction would be to such blithe barbarism.
Back in the real world, of course, what Michael Schwartz terms the “tsunami” of Iraqi refugees, the greatest refugee crisis on the planet, has received only modest attention in this country (which managed, in 2007, to accept but 1,608 Iraqi refugees out of all those millions — a figure nonetheless up from 2006). As with so much else, the Bush administration takes no responsibility for the crisis, nor does it feel any need to respond to it at an appropriate level. Until now, to the best of my knowledge, no one has even put together a history of the monumental, horrific tale of human suffering that George W. Bush’s war of choice and subsequent occupation unleashed, or fully considered what such a brain drain, such a loss of human capital, might actually mean for Iraq’s future.
We could not handle the displacement of several hundred thousand people after Katrina. Imagine 50 million Americans displaced by the actions of a foreign government. It is sad how little sleep we lose when one in six Iraqis have been displaced because of our foreign policy.
No laughing matter
Here is what the UNHCR and the Happy Family Group face in Syria.
The Syrian government does not allow the estimated 1.5 million Iraqis in Syria to work legally and an increasing number of refugees have taken up “harmful practices,” from prolonged fasting to prostitution, in order to survive.
“People are finding themselves in extreme situations and at the worst end we’re seeing child labor, early marriage, and survival sex,” said Sybella Wilkes, spokesperson for the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) in Syria. “This is something that these families would never have resorted to in Iraq. They’re facing drastic measures in order to keep some semblance of quality of life.”
[snip]
Iraqi children have in particular borne a disproportionate burden of the harsh economic reality. The United Nations Children’s Agency (UNICEF) estimates that 80 percent of Iraqi children in Syria do not attend school and that at least 10 percent of Iraqi children are being forced to work for an average daily income of $1 or less.
[snip]
Prostitution and marrying off of young daughters, even for short periods in a practice known as pleasure marriages, are also on the increase with young girls increasingly vulnerable to sexual exploitation.
A clash of clowns
The humanity of the three Iraqi clowns touched me. Their message to the Iraqi children living as refugees in Syria is to hope for a brighter future in the face of overwhelming odds. It comes from three young men who have every reason to be enraged or in despair.
“We are lucky to find a job here, but we are stuck. We cannot leave, and we cannot even develop our work,” says Rahman.
“We want to continue our studies and live safely. I left everything behind, my family and home.”
The group hopes to be able to develop its repertoire, and maybe even travel the world giving performances.
“I miss Iraq but I cannot go back. We are afraid we will be killed… That’s our destiny,” said Rahman.
– Source
On the other hand, these evil clowns continue to spread suffering to the people of Iraq.
This one is worried about his legacy.
This one is worried about his Halliburton stock valuation.
This one is worried we will leave Iraq this century.
These evil clowns recently promised 125 million dollars to help Iraqi refugees, the first significant contribution since the war began. It is only a pledge and it represents less than 12 hours worth of current funding to continue the occupation. It is a drop in the ocean compared to the tax subsidies given the oil, gas, and coal companies. Meanwhile, Jordan estimates the cost of sheltering about a half million Iraqi refugees for the past three years at 2.2 billion dollars.
Jordan said on Tuesday that it estimated the costs of sheltering hundreds of thousands of Iraqi refugees over the past three years at more than two billion dollars, and appealed for international help.
“Hosting our Iraqi brothers depletes the infrastructure and has cost the government more than 1.6 billion dinars (2.2 billion dollars) during the past three years,” Planning Minister Suheir al-Ali told visiting UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres.
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