Spencer Ackerman, over at his new blog Attackerman, comments on a Washington Post article by Walter Pincus that I also noticed this morning. In short the article said that the Iraqi government isn’t doing much for Iraq’s 2 million refugees but that sectarian militia’s are helping them resettle.
How are they helping them resettle? By putting them in the houses abandoned by refugees from rival sectarian groups. That’s ethnic cleansing for you, or I suppose sectarian cleansing. To be clear, I’m not using ethnic cleansing as a euphemism for genocide, I don’t think what’s happening is quite so one-sided or has the enormity to qualify.
Here’s Ackerman’s take on the subject:
One of the things that struck me as impressive on the part of David Petraeus and (yes) Ray Odierno was their understanding that you’d support a militia, too, if it was the only thing standing between you and an opposite-sect death squad — or even an out-of-control traffic roundabout. It’s just that there’s a difference between understanding the problem and having the capacity to solve it. It turns out that if you judged just by someone’s track record on delivering security and services to the desperate, the best-qualified reconstruction czar in Iraq would be Moqtada Sadr. And he’s, you know, thugged out.
The Refugee International study found that, with many displaced Iraqis living in poverty, the movement of Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr has become Iraq’s “largest ‘humanitarian’ organization.” It said that Sadr’s group ” ‘resettles’ displaced Iraqis free of charge in homes that belonged to Sunnis.” It said Sunni militias “play a similar role with displaced and needy Sunnis.”
I tend to think the next PM of Iraq will be Sadr or Sadr’s man, although obviously the situation is still volatile enough that I won’t say that with a high degree of certainty.
The deeper problem here is that doing it right, by reintegrating refugees into their former neighborhoods is much harder than just putting them in homes stolen from other refugees. Similarly just keeping people in refugee camps for ages is also destabilizing. The Iraqi government has mostly handled the problem by exporting it to neighbors, but the neighbors are getting tired of refugees and are starting to send them back. Regardless, ethnic cleansing is not a consequence of withdrawal, it’s something that’s happening anyways.
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