Like Rana, many Iraqis were desperate enough to attempt reaching Europe via Turkey. Suha’s brother Daoud, after fleeing to Syria, tried several times to join family in France and Finland. The border crossing from Turkey to Greece at the Evros River, used by smugglers, however, was heavily guarded. Daoud was caught both times trying to cross into Greece, each time being sent back to Turkey. He finally returned to Syria to rejoin Suha and Aodish.
The reason Iraqis risked taking the smuggling routes to Europe was because Germany, Sweden, and Denmark had by this time well-established diasporas of Iraqis. Previously liberal refugee policies in the European Union (over 50 percent asylum recognition rates for Iraqis) had allowed significant numbers of asylum seekers temporary and permanent protection during the Iran-Iraq and Gulf Wars. Ibrahim’s sister and her family, fearing that Saddam Hussein was on a collision course toward another war, left Iraq in 1997 for Yemen, where they applied for asylum at the German consulate and arrived in Germany in 2000. Germany had by that time granted asylum to over fifty thousand Iraqis who had fled during and after the Gulf War.32 Sweden already had close to one hundred thousand Iraqi immigrants and gave asylum to over thirty thousand more from 2003 to 2007, the proportional equivalent of the US accepting five hundred thousand refugees.33
Asylum had been applied liberally by European countries to Iraqis fleeing Hussein’s brutal dictatorship. Hence, after the overthrow of Hussein by the coalition forces, asylum acceptance rates for Iraqis in some of the major destination countries in Europe dropped, and even some Iraqis who had made it to Europe were later deported when their asylum claims were rejected.34 Unfortunately, the EU at this time, unlike the US, did not have formal refugee relocation programs for those fleeing countries like Iraq. Instead EU countries processed asylum seekers as they arrived as irregular migrants.35 Reaching Europe, therefore, meant that Iraqis had to hire a smuggler to take them through Turkey into Greece. As we saw in the case of Suha’s brother, however, Europe had tightened the land border between Greece and Turkey. With the land border with Greece more militarized, Iraqis began attempts to cross the Aegean Sea from Turkey. With their options running out, and resettlement doors still closed, trying to make it to Europe, with all of its risks, was better than doing nothing. If they managed to make it to Greece, then it was northward through the Balkans to Germany, Denmark, and Sweden.
Like the strategic land bridge that Turkey has been for centuries between East and West, it was a key transit country for Iraqis fleeing toward Europe after the Gulf War.36 In Turkey, Iraqis could apply for refugee status with the UNHCR office in Ankara, which gave them legal permission to stay on a temporary basis. Those with refugee status were assigned by Turkish authorities to live temporarily in about fifty “satellite cities” throughout the country to prevent them from congregating in cities that were already crowded with refugees. The downside to this arrangement was that many experienced isolation while they were living within a non-Arabic-language community. To assist them, the US State Department sponsored Turkish-language classes and counselling for people who either suffered during their adjustment to Turkey or who were dealing with trauma associated with their flight from Iraq.
It is not surprising that Iraqis in Turkey found ways to circumvent the satellite-city restriction in order to live at least part of the time in Istanbul, “a place where people find help from those culturally like them,” according to one NGO source.37 The social geography of Istanbul held characteristics vital for Arabic-speaking Iraqis in a Turkish-speaking country—religious communities and family networks provided them a form of contingent belonging and a means of survival while they either waited for resettlement or prepared for the boat crossing into Greece, onward to Europe.
A longer and even riskier route to asylum emerged through Southeast Asia to the shores of Australian territory. In contrast to the US, Australia responded to the postinvasion refugee crisis by formally resettling one to two thousand Iraqis per year beginning in 2004.38 Iraqi refugees coming through Malaysia to Indonesia were trying to rejoin family members in Australia.39 Once they were smuggled into Indonesia, they attempted to hire a small fishing vessel, often captained by a teenage boy, to take them on an uncertain voyage to Australia.40 In a tragic incident on December 15, 2010, twenty-eight people drowned when a boat carrying eighty Iraqi and Iranian asylum seekers wrecked on Christmas Island, a territory off the Australian coast close to Indonesia.41
Iraqi “boat people” who did manage to land safely on Australian territory, such as on the rocky shore of Christmas Island, would have found themselves immediately transferred to a very crowded prison-like complex, where over two thousand men, women, children, and unaccompanied minors lived in a facility run by SERCO (an Australian corporation that operates prisons), meant to accommodate four hundred.42 Like other destinations for asylum seekers from Iraq at that time, as well as from Iran and Afghanistan, Australia had begun taking a harder line to deter boat people, eventually putting a freeze on granting security clearances, a prerequisite for granting asylum. Eventually they would be declared ineligible for refugee status in Australia. Policies would eventually emerge that denied the possibility for asylum for boat people who arrived on Australia’s shores.43
Despite the harder line emerging toward boat arrivals, Australia was at least doing its part in accepting refugees from the Middle East through its official humanitarian refugee-resettlement program. From 2003 to 2006 Australia accepted 5,170 Iraqis who had applied for resettlement, including one of Ibrahim’s sisters. The US during that same period accepted only 770.44
The Social Construction of the Worthy Refugee
At the peak of the violence in Iraq, the door to the largest resettlement country still remained closed. This lays bare the brute fact that who gains entry into the US as a refugee is an intrinsically political, rather than humanitarian, decision. To gain entry to the US, it must be demonstrated that refugees serve a government’s political interests.45 During the Cold War, refugees fleeing oppressive Communist states were an essential motif in the West’s narrative as the “beacon of freedom,” evidence of the superiority of its political system. Another interest served in refugee policy has been to protect those who have been the allies of the US in its imperial projects. “In general, the U.S. does not welcome refugees,” wrote Reginald Baker and David North to explain why one hundred thousand Vietnamese were allowed into the US in 1975 with little public debate on the matter. “We do, however, have a specialized interest in those who are our defeated allies in our world-wide struggle against Communism.”46 As the “world-wide struggle against Communism” has given way to the worldwide War on Terror, Iraqis became a litmus test for whether the same logic would hold about “defeated allies” in far-flung conflict zones being deserving of protection.
The US opened its doors to Iraqi Shi’a and Kurdish refugees immediately following the Gulf War (1990–1991), once again as acknowledgment of some culpability for the two million people who were displaced during the uprisings that followed. Prior to the US-led offensive that liberated Kuwait and routed the Iraqi army, George W. Bush had called on the Iraqi people to rise up and overthrow Saddam Hussein. In the aftermath of the defeat of Hussein’s army by the US and its coalition partners, there were in fact large-scale Shi’a and Kurdish rebellions. These were brutally suppressed with nerve gas and helicopter gunship attacks on civilians. The Shi’a refugees fled to Saudi Arabia and Iran, the Kurds to the Turkish and Iranian borders.47 In response to that crisis, the US accepted 29,080 Iraqi refugees for resettlement between 1991 and 1999.48
Iraqis who faced mass displacement after 2003 did not