Irak 108

Het Westerse geweld, onder aanvoering van de Verenigde Staten, heeft geleid tot de totale vernietiging van de Iraakse samenleving. Alert Net bericht:

'DAMASCUS. More than three million Iraqis who have been forced to flee their homes to other areas of Iraq and to neighbouring countries are facing what the United Nations' refugee agency (UNHCR) describes as a "very bleak future" after the agency's budget for offices across the region was halved for the coming year.
Andrew Harper, coordinator for the Iraq unit at UNHCR in Geneva, told IRIN that funds for the agency's Iraq programme have been drastically reduced for 2007 because of donors scaling back their contributions.
As Iraq makes up a significant proportion of UNHCR's work in the Middle East, Lolles said this cut in funds for Iraq roughly halves a region-wide budget that is already "totally insufficient to provide tangible results".
"Iraq has seen the largest and most recent displacement of any UNHCR project in the world, yet even as more Iraqis are displaced and as their needs increase, the funds to help them are decreasing," said Harper. "This growing humanitarian crisis has simply gone under the radar screen of most donors."
Harper added that this reduction of funds had led to the suspension of a number of priority UNHCR projects. These include work to identify and aid the most vulnerable Iraqi refugees, including single mothers, the sick and the elderly.
UNHCR estimates that more than 1.5 million Iraqis are internally displaced in Iraq, including some 800,000 who fled their homes prior to 2003 and 750,000 who have fled since. A further 1.6 million Iraqis are refugees in neighbouring countries, the majority in Syria and Jordan.
Donations to UNHCR's Iraq programme from the United States, European Union nations, Japan and Australia have been in free fall since the start of the US-led occupation of Iraq, despite the ever-increasing numbers of refugees fleeing the deadly violence there.
From a high of US $150 million in 2003, the UNHCR budget for its Iraq programme fell to just $29 million in 2006. One quarter of that budget is allocated to meeting the needs of Iraqi refugees in neighbouring countries Syria, Jordan, Turkey and Lebanon.
Syria hosts the largest Iraqi refugee community in the region. Before the fall of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein's government in April 2003, the number of Iraqis living in Syria was estimated to be 100,000. Local NGOs estimate the current Iraqi community in Syria to be 800,000.
A report released in May by UNHCR, the UN's children's agency (UNICEF) and the World Food Programme concluded that an some 450,000 Iraqis in Syria "are facing aggravated difficulties" related to their "ambiguous legal status and unsustainable income". The population of Syria is nearly 19 million.'

Lees verder: http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/

IRIN/a3eca4b722faa10052fe47a33d29b706.htm