The Iraqi Refugee Crisis - Report from an Eyewitness

According to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodard, in his book Plan of Attack, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell warned President Bush that by invading Iraq the US would be bound by the Pottery Barn rule: "You break it, you own it."

By any definition imaginable, the US invasion of Iraq has left the nation more badly broken than even the war's fiercest critics imagined. The stories of violence have left us too numb to absorb them. Estimates of Iraqi deaths soar from 150,000 to 600,000.

Last night here in New York City, I sat down with my old friend Cathy Breen, an eyewitness to the war, and listened to her tell about the Iraqi human rights crisis that has virtually escaped public notice – the flood of desperate Iraqi's trying to flee the violence the US ignited – hundreds of thousands who want to get out and can't.

A Voice of Conscience from the Start

Cathy Breen is no new recruit to the cause of human rights in Iraq. I have known her for more than fifteen years. When I first lived in Bolivia in 1991 Cathy was a Maryknoll lay missionary, a nurse who lived humbly in a poor neighborhood and helped her neighbors with everything from health advice to maneuvering through the maze of Bolivian bureaucracy to secure birth certificates for their children. In 1997 she returned to the US to be nearer her aging parents and took up residence in a Catholic Worker house in lower Manhattan – living humbly once again amidst the homeless, the disturbed and those who sought to make a life by their side.

She also threw herself full scale into the issue of Iraq and the US economic sanctions that cut people there off from medicines, food and other essentials, leaving thousands dead as a result. To ask Cathy how she was in those years (the years between the wars) was to hear accounts of her vigils at the UN and her efforts to let people in the US know what the impact really was of those invisible sanctions.

In 2002 when President Bush started his campaign to push the US into preventative war in Iraq, Cathy responded by moving to Baghdad. As a member of the group Voices in the Wilderness, Cathy lived side by side with the families that would bear the violence the US and its "Coalition of the Willing" threatened. She wrote reports home to her friends and returned to the US to sound the alarm. After the war she returned to Baghdad once more. But eventually, as George Bush's Iraq descended into civil war she found her presence a threat to those she sought to help (being associated with an American is akin to a death sentence) and returned to the US once more.

A Million Refugees and No Room at the Inn

From March to September of this year Cathy returned to the region, planting herself in Amman Jordan and immersing herself in the latest Iraqi human rights crisis to not make it on to the world's radar screen – the flood of Iraqi refugees trying to get out and being told by nation after nation, "Sorry, no room at the Inn."

According to one UN human rights commissioner Cathy spoke with in Amman, there are an estimated 700,000 Iraqi refugees in Jordan alone. Other estimates, Cathy told me, put the number closer to a million. But the Jordanian government has no interest in becoming permanent host to the flood of refugees set loose by Washington. Legally they can stay three months and then they must go. One of the Jordanian prerequisites for permanent residency is $100,000 in the bank.

Families that have faced unspeakable violence at home face the constant threat of deportation back to hell. The US government, says Cathy, has its own plan for helping the refugees escape. In 2006 the Bush administration allotted all of 500 slots for Iraqis to come to the US.

In Jordan, living with and among the Iraqi refugees there, Cathy heard account after account of women raped in the presence of their families, of vicious kidnappings for ransom (some carried out by Iraqi security forces), and of violence at a scale and brutality few of us can imagine. So she set off to the foreign embassies, more than 20 of them, to find out what could be done to open foreign doors to the Iraqi's fleeing the violence. Some were polite – "The Japanese served me tea," she told me. Others, including that of the country that began the war, wouldn't let her in the door. None had plans to address the crisis.

In January Cathy Breen will return to Jordan to take up the refugee cause there once again. Before she leaves, her group (renamed Voices for Creative Nonviolence) will be issuing a report on the refugee crisis. We'll be posting that here and doing all we can to help her get out this story.