For much of this year, Washington analysts have been extremely worried about what to do about the vast numbers of refugees flowing out of Iraq (about 2 million so far, or 7% of the population, and that doesn’t include internally displaced persons – IDPs). Daniel Byman of Brookings, who has led the charge on this issue with Kenneth Pollack, describes taking care of the refugees as a rare issue on which “morality and strategy come together in the Middle East“. I think we can take the morality part for granted, and the strategic case looks clear too: the outflow of people seems bound to cause economic and political instability in the region.
But yesterday’s New York Times raises an alternative problem: what if the refugees and IDPs come back? The few that have are frequently finding their homes occupied, which is proving especially incendiary when the returnee and occupier come from different religious or ethnic communities. Now, this sort of problem is familiar from so many recent conflicts – the Balkans alone – you might think there was a plan for this.
Or not:
Col. Cheryl L. Smart, who tracks the data on displaced Iraqis for General Petraeus’s command, said that the American military had been “very vocal” with the Iraqi government about the need to establish a system to adjudicate claims about property rights and to avoid using Iraqi troops to carry out “forced evictions.”
Colonel Rapp [another Petraeus aide] voiced the hope that confrontations might be avoided by building new homes for returning Iraqis instead of forcing all of the squatters to leave. “It is probably going to be resolved with new housing construction as opposed to wholesale evictions and resettlement,” he said.
“Whether they will remix is probably a multiyear, decade kind of issue,” he added, referring to the possibility of sectarian reintegration.
“The immediate return of I.D.P.’s will create tensions in that system, and we are concerned about it,” he said, referring to the internally displaced people in Iraq.
This raises a short-term question: if the Surge has created a sufficient degree of stability for some IDPs and refugees to return home, will their return undermine that stability, making it a self-defeating exercise? Answer: depends how many do actually come back.
Which points to a bigger problem. Morality would suggest that one wants to see a high level of returns (as we did in Bosnia but not in Kosovo), but what’s preferable in strategic terms: a high level of returns creating instability inside Iraq, or a low level of returns that leaves the risk of instability among its neighbors high? Take your pick.
A nasty PS: as Byman has pointed out, the refugees are likely to adopt radical politics abroad. So guess which Iraqi politician has been appointed to come up with a plan on returns: yes, it’s Ahmed Chalabi, player of Iraqi exile politics par excellence. Ouch.
