Iraqi Diaspora in Europe

Iraqi Diaspora In Europe

There have been many waves of refugees and emigrants from Iraq since the late 1970s until the present. Major events the modern history of Iraq resulted in the flight of what are now millions of Iraqis: more than three decades of repression and occasional violent attacks and massacres against the Kurdish population in the north and the Shi'a in the south perpetrated by Saddam Hussein’s regime, the Iraq-Iran War of 1980-1988, the 1991 Gulf War, the economic sanctions that lasted from 1991 until the toppling of Saddam Hussein, and the 2003 US-led Invasion of Iraq.

By 2008, the continuous violence that unfolded since US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 has displaced a total of 4.7 million people: 2.7 millions are internally displaced persons (IDPs), and the remaining 2 millions have fled the country in search of refuge. Iraqis have become the third largest refugee population after the Afghans and the Palestinians. “That means that more than 15 per cent of Iraq’s population has been displaced, one out of every six.” The majority of these 2 million refugees have found haven in Jordan and Syria, which have kept their borders open for those Iraqis who want to flee the country. However, neither Syria nor Jordan have signed the 1951 Refugee Convention and address the Iraqis not as refugees, but as “guests” on the basis of Arab solidarity. Most Iraqis are not allowed to work and are pushed into the informal labor sector which comes with a host of legal problems and opens the door to exploitative labor practices. In addition, their access to public services is relative and under constant revision. Due to the large influx of Iraqis that were arriving to Syrian and Jordan in 2007, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) established that year a resettlement program in Damascus and Amman. By October 2009, the UNHCR reported that it had referred more than 82,500 refugees for resettlement in industrialized countries, 75 per cent of which were resettled in the United States and the remaining 25 per cent in Canada, Australia and a lesser number in European countries. However, only 33,000 persons of the 82,500 cases mentioned above had completed the resettlement process by 2009.

Europe has hosted an important population of Iraqi exiles since the 1980s with the outbreak of the Iraq-Iran war. In particular, the Iraqi diaspora has had a strong presence in the UK, Sweden, Norway and the Netherlands (which has hosted refugees since the 1991 Gulf War). Nevertheless, Europe’s performance in addressing the refugee crisis that resulted from the US-led invasion of Iraq has been widely criticized by the UNHCR, which denounced the small number of asylum applicants accepted by the EU. By the end of 2008, only 10 per cent of the Iraqi refugees resettled by the UNHCR were hosted by EU countries, mainly Sweden and the Netherlands.The UK —a country that not only had historically hosted a large number of Iraqi refugees but one that had also participated in the invasion of Iraq— granted refugee status or complementary protection to only 8.7 percent of the Iraqi asylum-seekers in 2005, a significant decrease if considered that from 1997 to 2001 that rate averaged 44 percent. In 2007, the UN called on western nations to accept more Iraqi refugees, signaling specifically the US and the UK and adding that the latter should “take the lead in Europe by immediately announcing a program to resettle some of the Iraqi refugees currently living in the most difficult conditions”. After 18 months of pressure by the UNHCR, the EU reached a (non-binding) agreement in November 2008 for accepting up to 10,000 Iraqi refugees, giving special treatment to those living in extreme conditions in Syria and Jordan.

According to the UNHCR, every asylum-seeker than comes from the central and southern regions of Iraq should be granted refugee status. However, many European countries are not following these guidelines and argue that the post-war situation in these areas of Iraq is not enough for qualifying Iraqis as refugees. These discrepancies about the current situation of violence in Iraq —which has important political connotations, especially for those countries that participated in the invasion— and whether Iraqis are eligible for protection or not has enabled some countries not only to reject asylum applications, but also to repatriate asylum-seekers back to Iraq. The UNHCR has repeatedly condemned the UK, Sweden, the Netherlands and Norway, among other European countries, for forcibly repatriating Iraqis when the situation back in their homeland is still not safe for them. UNHCR's spokesman in Geneva, Adrian Edwards, said in September 2010 that "e strongly urge European governments to provide Iraqis with protection until the situation in their areas of origin in Iraq allows for safe and voluntary returns. In this critical time of transition, we also encourage all efforts to develop conditions in Iraq that are conducive to sustainable and voluntary return".

The EU does not have a unified system towards asylum-seekers. In 2000 Brussels announced the establishment of a Common European Asylum System that, however, has not been fully applied. A UNHCR research paper, “Fortress Europe and the Iraqi ‘intruders’: Iraqi asylum-seekers and the EU, 2003-2007,”points out that the only commonality among EU countries lies on their efforts for preventing refugees from reaching their territory in the first place. First, the EU does not accept the ‘S’ series passport—the most common one in Iraq—, but require the ‘G’ series one, which are only issued in one office situated in Baghdad. Second, if the valid series of passport is obtained, the step is obtaining a visa, a process that is “virtually impossible”. Third neither coalition troops based in Iraq nor embassies in Iraq accept petitions for asylum. Therefore, Iraqis who want to reach Europe are left with two options. They can either access the UN resettlement program by arriving to Damascus or Amman and wait indefinitely for being resettled; or they can try to reach Europe illegally. The majority of Iraqis that enter the EU illegally do so through Greece, either by land crossing the Greco-Turkish border, or by reaching one of the numerous Greek islands by sea. Once in Greece, the majority travels to northern European countries and applies for refugee status rom there. The estimated cost of this second and illegal option is around $10,000, an expensive alternative that only those with financial means can afford. In addition to the UNHCR, the European Council on Refugees and Exiles along with human rights groups have denounced the EU’s strict policies, which force many Iraqis to undertake long, dangerous and expensive journeys in order to find refuge in Europe. These tough policies executed by the EU result in a small number of asylum petitions: out of the many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who sought resettlement in third countries from 2003 to 2007, only 60,000 had applied for asylum in the EU.