Bordering On Insanity: Texans Witness Plight of Iraqi Refugees — Interview With Carla Mercado, Registered Nurse/Peace Activist

SAN ANTONIO The living conditions of Iraqi refugees in the neighboring country of Jordan are deplorable, according to a delegation of Texans that recently returned from a 10-day fact-finding mission.

This four-person group led by Charlie Jackson, director of Texans for Peace, set forth on a trip designed to identify the needs of Iraq’s professional women and business owners.

Specifically, participants in the Baghdad Business Women’s Center are given practical business tools and in some cases micro-loans with which to operate their businesses in Jordan until the U.S. occupation of Iraq ends.

The tour met with officials from schools, hospitals, refugee camps, and non-governmental organizations as well as individual families to assess the situation of refugees.

Still, after five years of continued conflict in the region, the conditions of the refugees are “pretty poor and have gotten worse,” Jackson said. Middle class families, having already been uprooted from their homes and livelihoods, are now starting to splinter as their wealth has depleted over the last several years.

In some cases, for example, Iraqi fathers had fled out of fear that their families will suffer any number of dangers because of them. In other cases, these men, if caught, are deported because they lack the necessary legal permits to work and reside there. In other words, security as these Iraqis sought originally has yet to be fully realized.

This situation, as a result, has left women as the sole means of economic support for their families in a country that has given them limited resources to survive. A majority of the aid given comes from Jordanian and internationally-recognized charities and NGOs such as:

United Nations Human Rights Commission (UNHCR) on Iraq, CARE International, the University of Jordan (British research team on Iraq refugees), MIZAN (the Jordan Women Lawyers’ Association), the Jordan Woman’s Union, The Iraqi “Informal school,” Luzmila Hospital, the Catholic Church of Jordan, and the American Friends Service Committee.

The shock-waves of the U.S.-led war in Iraq have already thinned the resources of the Jordanian government. Close to a million Iraq refugees have received guest status there, though no new paths to citizenship have been issued among any of Iraq’s neighbors. The effect is a legal limbo for Iraqi refugees.

“A lot of people have had to go back to Iraq to get the new passports and new visas and then found out that the Jordanians would not allow them to come back,” said Jackson, noting that the United Nations estimates that two million Iraqis would leave their nation for Syria or Jordan if they could.

For the most part, Syria has taken in the poorer of Iraq’s refugees while Jordan has harbored more of the upper and middle classes as well as those who had fled under Saddam Hussein’s regime.

“Jordan and Syria can’t absorb two million more people. It’s a much bigger humanitarian crisis that the United Nations has seen a long time,” Jackson added. “The United Nations folks we met were estimating th