Take us with you: Iraqis helping U.S. fear pullout

So benedict wants the crown to protect him.

He's going to find out how much the crown really cares about him.

Gee that's too bad.

When you turn quisling, I guess you gotta expect some blowback.

US opening crack in the door to Iraqi refugees

Published Date: June 02, 2007

WASHINGTON: Millions of refugees fleeing the chaos and bloodshed in war-torn Iraq have found the road to the United States firmly blocked, with only a few hundred so far finding a safe haven here. But the current trickle of Iraqis allowed into country since US President George W Bush ordered the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003 is due to speed up by the end of the year, the State Department has pledged. US authorities finally began to acknowledge the magnitude of the problem at the beginning of the year and have promised to take in some 7,000 refugees by the end of the fiscal year, October 1. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said improved screening operations had opened the door to the Iraq resettlement program. The government was committed to accepting up to 7,000 "of the most vulnerable Iraqi refugees, such as persons whose lives may be in jeopardy because they worked for coalition forces," he said.

This week the US administration announced that 59 Iraqis would be permitted to emigrate to the US, joining the 701 refugees already granted asylum here. The figures pale in comparison to the numbers of Vietnamese granted permission to move to the US after the fall of Saigon in 1975 to communist North Vietnamese forces. Within eight months, some 130,000 Vietnamese, many of whom had collaborated with the American forces during the war, were re-settled in the US. In the past two decades several hundred thousands more have fled Vietnam to join them. "We have been much less generous with the Iraqi refugees ... So far the Iraqi resettlement has been inexcusably low, deplorably low," said Ken Bacon, head of Refugees International, a Washington-based non-governmental organization.

"We've let in far too few, the process has taken way too long," he added. Two million Iraqis have so far fled the country, most streaming into neighboring Jordan and Syria, according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Another 1.7 million are internally displaced within the country, rocked daily by sectarian violence and a vicious, destabilizing insurgency. According to the United Nations, some 50,000 Iraqis are leaving their homes to escape the violence every month. But Bacon cautioned that it was unlikely that all 7,000 of those approved for re-settlement would arrive before October 1. "By the end of the year they might reach 7,000, but by the end of the fiscal year it's more likely they'll do 2,000 or 3,000," he said.

The State Department hinted on Wednesday that only half of those 7,000 would physically be able to enter the country by October 1. "We fully intend and expect to be able to handle 7,000 referrals from UNHCR in the ... numbers assigned to this fiscal year," said State Department spokesman Tom Casey. "But at the time as they said the expectation was only that approximately half those numbers would be travel-ready by the end of the fiscal year." The delays have been blamed on red-tape-the need to put into place special rules for interviewing asylum seekers and verifying their claims. Earlier this week the Department of Homeland Security finally announced that all the procedures had been put in place to ensure any potential terrorists were screened out.

"So my hope is that everything will speed up and that's also the hope of the State Department and Homeland Security as well," said Bacon. Teams are ready to go to Syria, Jordan and may be Egypt to "do a lot of interviews in a short period of time to try to get the processing going as quickly as possible," he added. According to Refugees International, the UNHCR as of May 18 had referred 4,692 Iraqis to the US, as candidates for resettlement already screened by the UNHCR. There is also a separate group of people who worked for the US, as translators for the military or US contractors who have been targeted by insurgents. Many of them have already left the country, and special procedures are to be put in place for them, Refugees International said. - AFP
[link to www.kuwaittimes.net]