It is an ironic emblem of war that it is often the living who are forgotten. As we read Callie Maidhof and Manuel Schwab’s op-ed on April 15, we were struck by the emphasis on numbers of the dead—a sobering but incomplete list of the casualties of war.
Of course, what we have now is no longer simply a war. In fact, the anniversary commemorated by next week’s “5 Years of Occupation, 5 Days of Action” doesn’t even coincide with the beginning of the war—a date that, as Maidhof and Schwab note, passed nearly a month ago. Next week comes much closer to the end of combat operations, and the beginning of a full-scale occupation. Occupations, as we well know, concern themselves not simply with the politics of death, but the politics of life.
Perhaps even more harrowing than the numbers of dead are the numbers of displaced. These, we suggest—not the dead, but the living—have become the forgotten Iraqis. And so, if we must talk numbers, here are a few: one in five Iraqis has been displaced. What that translates to is approximately 2.4 million refugees (out of country) in addition to 2.2 million people internally displaced within the borders of Iraq.
Like the death counts, these numbers are at best approximations and, at seven months old, are already woefully out of date. Last September, the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) estimated the number of newly displaced Iraqis at nearly 2,000 per day—that’s 80 people, every hour, fleeing their homes.
The regional impact of this situation cannot be understated. Bearing the brunt of the refugees are Syria and Jordan, where Iraqis now make up 7 and 10 percent of their host countries’ populations, respectively. The equivalent for New York would be if nearly 171,000 refugees arrived in Manhattan alone with little or no money, housing, or a support network. The problem is exacerbated by the strict control of Saudi Arabia’s border with Iraq, where plans are underway to replace the security forces that police it with a border wall, complete with radar, motion sensors, and facial recognition technology, and by Lebanon, where, according to Refugees International, Iraqis live illegally, facing arrest, detention, and deportation.
It is this tidal wave of displacement—and the implications it has for the political relations within which residents of the region find themselves—that is the lasting legacy of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, one that promises to remain with Iraqi survivors and refugees for the foreseeable future. While Maidhof and Schwab are right to insist that we mourn the dead, this living legacy—what amounts to a renewed ethnicization of the political relations prevailing in the region—may seed a violence that dwarfs the already innumerable casualties we have seen.
Two arguments may be made. One, that this displacement is the inevitable and unfortunate by-product of an otherwise justifiable (or even unjustifiable) occupation, and following from that, that foreign populations of the scale I’ve just described will always and again inevitably and unfortunately come into tension with their host country counterparts. And yet there is nothing “inevitable” about this disastrous and large-scale displacement.
The renewed ethnicization of regional politics cannot be considered without an account of the role of the Coalition Provisional Authority in the ethnicization of “democracy” in Iraq. The coalition’s original plan involved a fixed number of seats for each ethnic and religious group in Iraq. While this plan was eventually bartered away, Seymour Hersh argued in a July 2005 article in the New Yorker that the United States continued to operate and even manipulate the Iraqi election based on ethnic and religious assumptions, the end goal being to minimize as much as possible Shi’a power in the state.
This went so far as to mark religious or ethnic affiliation upon the election ballots themselves. In the words of one U.N. official quoted in Hersh’s article on the plan, “The election was not an election but a referendum on ethnic and religious identity.”
At the very least, this demonstrates an inexcusable insensitivity to the explosive force that mobilizing ethnicized identities has historically had in the last hundred years. More importantly, this dual movement of displacement and ethnicization threatens to be the longest lasting legacy of violence that Operation Enduring Freedom leaves in Iraq, long after any distant troop withdrawal.
It is this violence that we should keep in mind as we turn out next week to mark the anniversary of the invasion, not because the commemoration of the dead is unimportant, but because the enduring violence to which our country’s politics have exposed future Iraqi generations will remain on our conscience, even if they never make the direct body count of the occupation.
Geoff Aung is a Columbia College senior majoring in anthropology. Ugo Aniukwu is a Columbia College senior majoring in sociology. They are both members of the Burma 88 Coalition.