Iraqi Refugees

The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the gentlewoman from the District of Columbia (Ms. Norton) is recognized for 5 minutes.

Ms. NORTON. Mr. Speaker, I have a conflict making it impossible for me to remain for the very important hour that the Congressional Black Caucus has taken on Iraq. I am about to go to the Senate floor tomorrow, though, as there is a test on whether there will be a filibuster on the D.C. voting rights bill even as D.C. residents are on the ground in Iraq fighting, even as I have gone to funerals at Arlington Cemetery because of this war.

We have a President who has announced a token drawdown at the same time he is Koreanizing the war, making sure we remain there at least as permanently as we have been in some parts of the world, like Korea and Germany already. He wants to make a piggy bank of the Congress of the United States, and the test is whether we are willing to go along with these now-clear goals of the President.

I want to devote my 5 minutes to asking a question that really needs to be asked. We are looking at the battle. I want to ask, is there really still an Iraq? Three million refugees have left the country since 2003. Another 3 million have been internally displaced. Some have called it ethnic cleansing. I believe it is involuntary ethnic cleansing, because in a civil war you want to win, not chase the other people out. We didn't want the Southerners to go; we just wanted to win the Civil War.

There is a kind of ethnic cleansing going on in Iraq, and let me show it and urge Members to focus on it. Thousands leave every month, and 95 percent remain in the Middle East. What kind of a cauldron are we making in the Middle East?

Syria has been best in taking them, and they are full up. Iraqis are the leading nationality seeking asylum in industrialized countries. Three hundred Iraqis returned after the fall of Saddam Hussein. So encouraged were they that they came back to their land, many of them from Iran.

By 2006, hundreds of thousands of new refugees were fleeing the country, and last week we heard there is less violence? Sure, those people that are leaving. They are being driven out of their own country as a result of a civil war.

What is most shameful as I looked at the data was to find who was taking the refugees. We know who is responsible for them leaving. We know who invaded their country. Well, the U.K. has taken 22,300, a much smaller country than we. Australia has taken 11,000, and the United States has taken 6,000. And they say if we leave, there will be a major fratricide. So why aren't we taking some of these people? Why are our allies willing to take them, even though they had less to do with the fleeing in the first place.

The number of people displaced internally is shocking. It has risen in 2006 alone by 50 percent. Let me show you how we are failing in our duties. In 1992, 1993 and 1994, we were taking over 4,000 Iraqi refugees and settling them. Now in 2005, we report settling 200. This is a moral failing when you invade somebody else's country and you won't take their refugees and you insist upon staying there and fomenting violence when 80 percent say they want you out of the country.

Let me read from an independent journalist. I don't think you can say Iraq exists any more. There has been very effective systemic ethnic cleansing of Sunnis from Baghdad, of Shias from areas that are now mostly Shia, but the Sunnis especially have been a target, as have mixed families. With a name like ``Omar,'' a person is distinctly Sunni. It is a very Sunni name. You can be executed for having the name ``Omar'' alone, and Baghdad is now firmly in the hands of sectarian Shiite militias, and they are never going to let it go.

The refugee story alone is reason enough to begin the exodus from Iraq tomorrow. That is what they want. That is what the majority of the American people want. That's what we must see happen before we leave this Congress this year

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