Iraqi Refugees in Jordan

One of the difficulties of working on a story about Iraqi refugees in Jordan is that while one can easily talk to individual Iraqis, it's hard to get a sense of the whole community. Iraqis are spread out all over Amman in almost every neighborhood and in almost every apartment complex. There are everywhere, and nowhere in particular.

If that's difficult for journalists, it's even more difficult for aid organizations who are trying to keep track of the Iraqi refugee population and assess their needs. Past refugee crises have involved large populations relocating to refugee camps. Though there are some major problems with refugee camps -- if neglected they can become incubators for disease, crime, and radicalism -- camps also make it easy to find community leaders, count heads, and deliver the standard aid packages.

A conspicuous minority of well- to-do Iraqi families don't need any help at all. They have set up businesses, dine on Iraqi cuisine at their own restaurants (such as the one pictured above) and have pushed up housing prices all over the city. But most of them are normal middle class families -- the cost of living in Jordan is higher than Syria, which has been more welcoming to poor Iraqis -- who have arrived with their savings and have disappeared into the urban environment, often without even registering with the United Nations, or seeking help from aid organizations.

But most Iraqis aren't legally allowed to work in Jordan, and two years after the first big wave of refugees arrived here, people are starting to run out of money, and run out of hope that they will be able to return to Iraq any time soon. The Amman office of the UN High Commission for Refugees recently began delivering food aid for the first time. A once proud, self-sufficient middle class is having to learn how to become a dependent population.

To help Iraqis with food, education and health care, UNHCR is having to develop a new paradigm. The Jordanian government is adamant that Iraqis cannot be settled permanently in Jordan, and that there can't be new institutions created to help them, so aid has to go through existing government channels or existing charities. The concern is that the Iraqis become like the Palestinians refugees of 1948 and 1967. Jordan has been once of most welcoming hosts countries -- granting citizenship to Palestinians -- but 60 years on there are still 10 Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan, home to some 330,000 refugees. (There are about 1.8 million Palestinian refugees in all of Jordan.)

That's a big burden for a fragile country. Carved out of the Ottoman Empire by the British, post-colonial Jordan has struggled to create its own identity, a process made that much harder in a turbulent region. In 1970, Palestinian guerillas led by Yassir Arafat tired to assassinate the late King Hussein and overthrow the Jordanian monarchy. That "Black September" is no doubt on the mind of his son, King Abdullah, amid the current crisis.

--Andrew Lee Butters/Amman