First off, Britain is Broke, they have Immigrants taking the jobs of it's citizens.. it's currency is demolished and now they want to take on more people that really do not like Anglo Saxons... how crazy is that. Get ready America.. you can bet we will do the same. We are always looking to take in others and give them welfare, HUD housing SCHIP and all the other Bennies while we let Old Retired WWII Hero's freeze to death because the heat was shut off ... Enough is Enough

Britain offers to accept Palestinians who fled Iraq

Britain has offered to resettle Palestinians who have been forced into squalid desert refugee camps on the Iraqi border.

By Damien McElroy on the Iraq-Syria border
Last Updated: 6:34PM GMT 05 Feb 2009



Palestinian refugees in Al Tanf refugee camp Photo: UNHCR

The Government is leading international efforts to resettle thousands of stateless refugees who have been the target of a Syrian deportation campaign.

Some Palestinians, many of whom were born in Iraq but never granted citizenship, have already left for Europe and as far afield as Chile. But as Syria drives out more refugees - who arrived after the invasion of Iraq - the principal camp at the Tanf border outpost is ever expanding.

Britain is spearheading attempts to persuade countries to absorb all Tanf inhabitants by the end of the year as the co-ordinator of a United Nations taskforce on stranded asylum seekers. Whitehall has initially offered to accept 30 widows with children from the camps, most from Walid, a sister camp inside Iraq plus a handful from Tanf.

The fresh effort to resettle Palestinian asylum seekers outside the Middle East has broken an international taboo against sending those displaced by the struggle for Israeli independence in 1948 to third countries. It was triggered by Syria's refusal to grant sanctuary to Palestinians fleeing Iraq.

Allowing the Palestinians to stay on the same basis as an Iraqi would be tantamount to a concession to Israel. "The solution for these people is resettlement because there is a tacit agreement among the Arab countries that Palestinians cannot move between countries in the region and they don't want to go back to Iraq," said Laurens Jolle, the representative of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in Syria.

"After turning a blind eye for years, Syria feels it has done enough. There has to be a resettlement solution that allows these people to resettle in a third country."

Tanf inhabitants claim Arab government restrictions on Palestinians – imposed to ensure the diaspora maintains its claim on returning to land within Israel – has compounded their misery.

"We are victims of politics in the region," said Mahmoud Abdul, 81, who fled Haifa in 1948. "We have moved from Palestine to Baghdad, then Amman, Damascus and now we are in no-mans land. We want to be citizens where we can set up our homes and feel no one can take it away. With that I can set up my sons and their sons to have a future full of hope."

But UN pressure on the Home Office to provide leadership by example and expand its quota has not secured a pledge of extra spaces.

An estimated 13,000 Palestinians fled to Syria with faked Iraqi identity papers issued in the chaos after the 2003 war that deposed Saddam Hussein.

But these are now expiring and can't be easily replaced with the more secure documents Baghdad currently issues.

News that the West is opening up to Palestinians provides some consolation for Tanf's bleak situation. Its hundreds of tents are lined up in rows, wedged inside Syrian and Iraqi checkpoints between a desert road and concrete blast walls.

The perils of its cramped conditions include fires and floods that have claimed lives and added fresh tragedies to families accustomed to hardship.

Ahmed Mohammad lost his pregnant wife when a fire engulfed his tent last month. "She was Syrian but moved here because we wanted a new life abroad," he said. "The fire took seconds to burn and I could only rescue my son." Palestinians have borne the brunt of a rise in popular Syrian resentment of refugees from Iraq. More than a million fled to the country after it opened its borders to any Iraqi resident fleeing the civil war. There are believed to be more than 800,000 still living in Syria and 224,000 are registered with the UN as refugees.

Officials claim the majority of those are too terrified or disillusioned with the new democratic government to return. "Most of them will never go back," said Mona Kurdi of the Syrian Arab Red Crescent Society. "For them nothing is left of their old life and they cannot revisit the trauma that caused them to leave." Foreign governments have so far pledged to accept 18,000 Iraqis from Syria this year, a fraction of the numbers who have applied for places.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... -Iraq.html