Pressure for Results: The Politics of Tallying the Number of Iraqis Who Return Home
BAGHDAD - At a row of travel agencies near the highway to Syria, the tide of migration has reversed: the buses and GMC Suburban vans filled with people heading to Damascus run infrequently, while those coming from the border appear every day.By all accounts, Iraqi families who fled their homes in the past two years are returning to Baghdad.
The description of the scope of the return, however, appears to have been massaged by politics. Returnees have essentially become a currency of progress.
Under intense pressure to show results after months of political stalemate, the government has continued to publicize figures that exaggerate the movement back to Iraq and Iraqis’ confidence that the current lull in violence can be sustained.
On Nov. 7, Brig. Gen. Qassim al-Moussawi, the Iraqi spokesman for the American-Iraqi effort to pacify Baghdad, said that 46,030 people returned to Iraq from abroad in October because of the “improving security situation.”
Last week, Iraq’s minister of displacement and migration, Abdul-Samad Rahman Sultan, announced that 1,600 Iraqis were returning every day, which works out to a similar, or perhaps slightly larger, monthly total.
But in interviews, officials from the ministry acknowledged that the count covered all Iraqis crossing the border, not just returnees. “We didn’t ask them if they were displaced and neither did the Interior Ministry,” said Sattar Nowruz, a spokesman for the Ministry of Displacement and Migration.
As a result, the tally included Iraqi employees of The New York Times who had visited relatives in Syria but were not among the roughly two million Iraqis who have fled the country.
The figures apparently also included three people suspected of being insurgents arrested Saturday near Baquba in Diyala Province. The police described them as local residents who had fled temporarily to Syria, then returned.
Some Iraqi lawmakers said that overly broad figures were being used intentionally.
“They are using this number because they want to show that Maliki is succeeding,” said Salim Abdullah, a lawmaker and member of the largest Sunni bloc, known as the Accordance Front, referring to Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. “But this does not make the number correct. I think dozens of Iraqis return home daily, but not 1,600.”
A half-dozen owners of Iraqi travel agencies and drivers who regularly travel to Syria agreed that the numbers misrepresented reality.
They said that the flow of returnees peaked last month, with more than 50 families arriving daily from Syria at Baghdad’s main drop-off point. Since Nov. 1, they said, the numbers have declined, and on Sunday morning, during a period when several buses used to appear, only one came.
The travel agents said that they believed that Iraqis would continue to return to Baghdad from Syria and Jordan but that the initial rush appeared to be over.
A United Nations survey released last week, of 110 Iraqi families leaving Syria, also seemed to dispute the contentions of officials in Iraq that people are returning primarily because they feel safer.
The survey found that 46 percent were leaving because they could not afford to stay; 25 percent said they fell victim to a stricter Syrian visa policy; and only 14 percent said they were returning because they had heard about improved security.
Underscoring a widely held sense of hesitation, many of those who come back to Iraq do not return to their homes. Clambering off the bus on Sunday, a woman who gave her name as Um Dima, mother of Dima, said that friends were still warning her not to go back to her house in Dora, a violent neighborhood in south Baghdad. So for now, she said, she will move in with her parents in southern Iraq.
Raad al-Kihani, a prominent Shiite tribal leader in Baghdad and supporter of the prime minister, said that most people returning were still restricted by the fear of sectarian violence. “There are no Shiite families moving back to Sunni neighborhoods and no Sunnis moving back to Shiite neighborhoods,” he said.
The Iraqi government is using incentives and aggressive public relations to try to bring more people home. Iraqi officials plan to pay for buses to transport Iraqis from Syria. Prominent government figures recently visited Saab al-Bor, a largely abandoned town near Baghdad, to emphasize that families should feel safe enough to return.
The Displacement Ministry offers 1 million Iraqi dinar, about $800, to internally displaced families who can prove they have returned home with a letter from the police and their neighborhood council. But the movement has been limited. As of Thursday, 4,358 internally displaced families, about 25,000 people, had returned to their homes in Baghdad, the ministry’s registry of payments to returnees said.
Furthermore, people are still leaving their homes - 28,017 were internally displaced in October, according to the latest United Nations figures. In all, the United Nations estimates that 2.4 million Iraqis are still internally displaced, with many occupying someone else’s home.
Greater numbers will not return to their neighborhoods, some Iraqi lawmakers and independent migration specialists say, until a clear legal framework has been established to help them get their houses back without evicting other displaced families.
“The actions are slow and so many things needs to be done, said Ayaed al-Sammaraie, a member of Parliament and a leader of its largest Sunni Arab bloc. “The main thing people would like is to return to their spots, and it seems there isn’t a plan for that.”
Reporting was contributed by Khalid al-Ansary, Ahmad Fadam, Abeer Mohammed and Alissa J. Rubin.
© 2007 The New York Times
How long has it been since we have gotten any numbers from anyone that were accurate and dependable? Lets just guess everything is ok and stop even thinking abour it.
Well, duh. How come this reconsideration only comes after the spin and propaganda offensive, with the media faithfully reporting the false figures as if they had no idea they government could lie, and now they are shocked, shocked I tell you, to discover the truth is very different. By which time the train has moved on and the false impression has been moulded and set in concrete, with flim flam men and women continuing the con trick as if it were holy writ (see Conservative Christians attacking Rowan Williams) and the public happy to still be living in the American Dream. I knew already - anyone who reads beyond the establishment media knows. I suspect they knew too.
What’s new in that type of image manipulation? It’s like when the anti-socialist and anti-humanists in Venezuela protest the modernizing of their constitution; they gather in a rock and bottle throwing crowd of three or four hundred and the imperialist “journalists” photograph them by laying on the ground and pointing their cameras up so that it looks like a tumultuous scene. But when, in response, the supporters of Chavez march the following day in their tens of thousands they are completely ignored by the international press.
After their visas and savings expire perhaps our ‘liberated’ Iraqis are going home to do the same.
We’re being mis-lead? ___ NO WAY, not possible, we have a free press here. It says so in our ‘Constitution’.
TANSTAAFL (Do you read Heinlein?)
KEM: anything that is free is worth what you path for it.
There
Aint
No
Such
Thing
As
A
Free
Lunch
Namaste
__ __ __ __ We must be the change
__ __ __ __ we wish to see in the world __ Gandhi
My guess is, the countries surrounding Iraq are saturated with people fleeing………nowhere to go nowhere now to run they have to return and suffer the fate awaiting them,I sposse is better to stave in a home you know then stave while trying to gain admission into a friendly country who’s recourses are at breaking point with the refugee’s the occupation has caused,
Yeah, well, the twits have never believed in actual numbers or secular evidence of any kind, e.g., reject sampling when it comes to Iraqi civilians killed by
the war: Doctors, take all of the nutty nits’ blood (though there’s no evidence
they believe in blood tests either).
Another tack one should take on the latest
spate of feel-good news is, “Yes, hooray,
Iraq has improved MARVELOUSLY, WONDERFULLY
WELL, and as the philosopher said, THIS IS
THE BEST OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS!
It logically follows that NOW WE CAN SUPPORT OUR BOYS BY BRINGING THEM HOME.
Actually, they’re poopheads for supporting
Bush in the first place, and I’m not really sure anybody should SUPPORT anybody.
Of course we wouldn’t want to offend the Corps of Eagles, the beer-bloated pro-war,
pro-torture Vietnam Veterans still carrying the axe for Jane Fonda.
Or the Legionnaires. Or the causes of Legionnaires’ Disease.
So bring the poopheads home– allot the money for that and no more. And honor
the soldiers who sensibly spoke out against this war.
Chances are quite a few are just doing a u-turn to get visa extensions. All the countries around are getting tight with visas.
Check out this story.
http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/
There will probably be another spike when those run out
Yes NSPIRE, our newspaper is 50 cents, I think the word free in that genre means the government shouldn’t interfere with it, Like “free” speech.
It truly is a sad state of affairs when we have no choice, based on past experience, except to be utterly cynical about anything portrayed as good news. Like folks from the former Soviet Union who observed, ” When our govt told us something and the media publicized it, we all knew it was propaganda. Americans are in the same situation, but haven’t yet figured that out.”
I agree with most all of what is said above. What seems craziest to me is how widespread is the Orwellian notion of lies as truth, and truth—-well I guess it’s portrayed as “unpatriotic and to be discouraged if not actually silenced.” This country (US) is a nightmare I desperately want to wake up from.