Transcript
ELIZABETH FERRIS: Today, there are close to 5 million people who’ve been displaced, including those who were displaced under Saddam Hussein. As Mike said, about 2.8 million inside Iraq, maybe 2.2 million in the neighboring countries. The numbers are uncertain. And, frankly, this is characteristic of a lot of refugee and IDP -- or internally displaced person -- situations, where it’s hard to know exactly how many people are displaced. It’s particularly difficult in the context of Iraqi displacement because people are not living in camps, where international agencies can go around with clipboards and count people and register people and have a pretty good idea of how many people there are -- whether both inside Iraq and in neighboring countries, they’re living dispersed among the population -- the world’s largest urban caseload, both for internally displaced people and for refugees.
If you look at the patterns of displacement after March 2003, it’s probably an oversimplification, but also probably true, to say that those who had the means and those who had the connections went first and went further. Now, there were people who fled to Jordan, primarily, in the initial months following occupation, included former supporters of Saddam Hussein, but also people who felt that life was becoming unsustainable, if you will -- the wealthy, the middle class, many went first. Later patterns of displacement tended to be those who were poorer, with more limited resources, fewer connections. And those who tended to leave the country tended to have more resources than those who stayed behind.
Minorities were disproportionately represented among the displaced -- both internally displaced and, particularly, refugees. There’s some evidence that more secular individuals tended to leave rather than to stay. Brain-drain has been a constant concern around Iraqi displacement for the past five years. In particular, if you look at statistics around the number of doctors and engineers and trained civil servants, and lawyers and computer programmers, a large proportion of Iraq’s trained middle class has, in fact, gone into exile. As a UNHCR official says, 2.2 million of Iraq’s best and brightest, with implications as well for the future of Iraq.
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