Thread: This group that benefited for many years as privileged guest

This is a group that benefited for many years as privileged guests

Your Tired, Your Poor, Guests Of Saddam

By Claudia Rosett
Thursday, July 30, 2009
Forbes

America is the world’s leading haven for refugees. But how generously should that extend to people whose interests were entwined for years with America’s enemies?

That’s just one of the questions raised by the Obama administration’s push to resettle in America, over the next few months, more than 1,300 Palestinians who were once among the showcase beneficiaries in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

A related question is whether there are any bounds to the hypocrisy of Arab-speaking states in the Middle East, such as Syria and Saudi Arabia, whose potentates preen themselves as defenders of Palestinians. But in the nitty-gritty matter of providing them with places to live and work, they slam their doors.

Currently housed in a refugee camp inside Iraq known as Al Waleed, near a border crossing into Syria, the Palestinians in question are right now being processed to move to the U.S. They are candidates for U.S. refugee aid packages that include $900 per person upfront, loans for travel, access to a range of publicly funded benefits once they arrive, and eligibility for U.S. citizenship.

Why? This is not a population that has paid a price for cooperation or friendship with America, such as the Hmong of Laos or the boat people who fled the communist takeover of South Vietnam. This is a group that benefited for many years as privileged guests--and to some extent welfare clients--of Saddam Hussein’s regime.

A report released by Human Rights Watch in 2006 provides a history that might prompt not only sympathy, but security concerns. Iraq at the time of Saddam’s overthrow in 2003 had a Palestinian population estimated at some 34,000. Some had come to Iraq in the aftermath of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, some after the 1967 war, and some fled to Saddam’s Iraq from Kuwait, following the 1991 Gulf War.

Almost all lived in Baghdad, where Saddam’s regime welcomed them and bestowed favors upon them. Their presence was part of Saddam’s display of dedication to a Palestinian cause, in which he also launched scuds at Israel during the 1991 Gulf War and, later, despite United Nations sanctions, sent rewards of $25,000 each to families of Palestinian suicide bombers who attacked Israel.

Palestinians living in Iraq were not given Iraqi citizenship. But they did enjoy special dispensations for long-term residency status and big breaks on housing. In many cases, Iraqis were forced by Saddam’s government to rent dwellings to the Palestinians at artificially low rates--in some cases as low as $1 per month. It was a policy that amounted to state confiscation of private property from Iraqis.

When the U.S.-led coalition overthrew Saddam in 2003, Iraqis, especially Shiites, stopped treating the Sunni Palestinians as protected guests and turned on them as reviled free-loaders, accusing them of support for Saddam and involvement in terrorism. Iraqis evicted many Palestinians from the deep-discount housing long mandated by Saddam, hit them with onerous new residency registration requirements, and targeted some for revenge. Some were murdered, tortured and kidnapped, and many were warned to leave.

This coincided with the wave of violence, kidnappings and terrorist acts that swept Iraq prior to the 2007 U.S. surge, so some of it is hard to disentangle from the broader scene.

But some of these Palestinians headed for the borders, only to find there was nowhere to go. With rare exceptions for a small number of asylum seekers, neighboring countries, such as Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Syria refused to admit them.

Some ended up in ad hoc camps along the Iraqi border with Syria, where they have been receiving aid from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and other relief outfits. A push for them to be resettled began with the UNHCR and groups such as Human Rights Watch, and was taken up by outfits such as the Palestine Solidarity Movement (which in its pro-Palestinian stance is also anti-Israeli; supporting, for example, boycotts of Israeli goods).

By 2008, small numbers of the Palestinians from these camps had begun trickling in to places such as Iceland and Sweden. Also in 2008, an international delegation of nongovernmental organizations, from places such as Malaysia, Belgium, the Netherlands and the U.S., visited the camps. They issued a joint report last November, recommending that the camps be emptied and shut down by way of resettling all the resident Palestinians elsewhere. These NGOs proposed that Canada, Australia and some European Union countries take the residents of two smaller camps, one inside Syria and another in a no man’s land at the Iraq-Syria border crossing.

The delegation further urged that in the case of the biggest camp, Al Waleed, “given its location inside Iraqâ€

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