Friday July 3, 2009

INTERVIEW - Iraq must do more for refugees to return - UNHCR

By Adrian Croft

LONDON (Reuters) - Iraq needs to do more to encourage people who have fled conflict to return home, the U.N. refugee agency's representative in neighbouring Jordan said.

An Iraqi refugee waits to receive food rations at a United Nations centre in Douma, near Damascus, February 11, 2009. (REUTERS/Khaled al-Hariri/Files)

"What we were hoping for was that the situation within Iraq would improve to the extent that people decide to start going back. That hasn't happened up till now," Imran Riza, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees' (UNHCR) representative in Amman, told Reuters in an interview.

"People are going back and forth ... they are looking, but they are not definitely repatriating -- certainly not the people from Jordan -- at this point," he said on Thursday.

Around 450,000 Iraqis live in Jordan and about 1.2 million in Syria. A further 2.8 million people are internally displaced in Iraq, according to UNHCR figures.

Last year, more than 40,000 Iraqi asylum seekers lodged applications for refugee status in the West.

"There has to be a predictable, sustainable system that prevails when people return, in terms of assistance, in terms of all the various formalities," he said.

"One of the things that needs to be worked on certainly is employment ...

"But they need to also prioritise refugee returns as something that's across the board -- it concerns a lot of different parts of the government," he said, adding that the Iraqi government needed to devote more resources to the issue.

SECURITY LESS OF A CONCERN

Security in Iraq has improved since it was almost torn apart by sectarian killing in 2006 and 2007, although militants still stage frequent attacks.

U.S. troops who invaded in 2003 handed control of Iraq's cities to its domestic security forces this week.

Iraqi refugees still cite insecurity as a reason for not going back home, but less than they did a year ago, Riza said, while concerns about jobs, shelter and restitution of property had grown in importance.

UNHCR had asked donors for $397 million to fund operations inside and outside Iraq this year, but only $164 million was available, he said.

"My big worry is that everything that's been built up in, for example, Syria or Jordan or Lebanon to provide a much better protection and assistance situation for these Iraqis is going to start eroding if we don't have at least some more resources," he said.

"A lot of people want to look away from Iraq. They are looking at other places. It's not a big story any more," he said.

But if UNHCR did not continue its work, Iraqi refugees would be "stuck in limbo for a long time", Riza said.

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