Hearing of the House Foreign Affairs Committee - Neglected Responsibilities: The U.S. Response to the Iraqi Refugee Crisis
Statement
REP. ACKERMAN: The subcommittees will come to order.
First I will ask unanimous consent that Representatives Welch, Lofgren and Waters be permitted to participate, although not being members of the committee, to sit in and participate -- if the members -- as if they were members of the committee.
Is there any objection? So ordered.
Almost a year ago, the Middle East and South Asia Subcommittee held a hearing on the Iraqi refugee crisis and we learned several disturbing things. We learned that the administration was doing next to nothing to assist those Iraqis who put their lives in jeopardy in order to assist the United States in our efforts in Iraq. Not only wasn't the administration helping them, they didn't even know how many Iraqis actually worked for us, so they naturally had no idea how many people needed our help.
We learned that the administration was woefully unprepared to process refugees referred to us by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. We learned that it took up to five months to process a refugee referral. We learned that the United States had the capacity to process merely a few hundred refugees a month, but wasn't working anywhere near even that limited capacity. We learned that we were telling Iraqis seeking our assistance and protection to flee to a safe place like Syria -- imagine that -- because weren't processing at-risk populations inside of Iraq. We learned that the need for refugee assistance was so great that Congress ultimately had to take the lead in providing an additional $150 million to address it.
So our two subcommittees have reconvened today in the hope that the administration will be able to tell us all sorts of good news, such as that it has provided the protection necessary to those Iraqis who risked their lives for us -- translators, guides, intel providers. We hope to learn the administration has worked out the bureaucratic kinks between the departments of State and Homeland Security and that the United States is now efficiently processing refugees referred to us. We hope to hear that it takes far less than five months to process a refugee case and as a result the administration is on target to meet the president's goal and the administration's assurance of resettling 12,000 refugees this fiscal year and that the administration has established a mechanism to process at-risk populations of Iraqis inside of Iraq so they don't have to flee to a neighboring country to receive our assistance.
We hope, but alas I don't believe, that our hopes will be fulfilled. I don't want to leave the impression that nothing has happened over the past year -- many things have. Congress increased to 500 and then to 5,000 the number of special immigrant visas available to Iraqis who worked for the United States. Congress also expanded the types of employment that would be eligible. Congress provided new authorities to the administration for processing refugees and required that the secretary of State establish a mechanism for processing Iraqi refugees in Iraq. And, as I mentioned, Congress provided an additional $150 million. So Congress has been very aggressive in dealing with this crisis.
I wish I could say the same for the administration. To its credit, the administration has appointed senior officials from State and Homeland Security to oversee the coordination of U.S. efforts and the administration has issued the full component of 500 special immigration visas available under the earlier law. But according to The Washington Post, the administration has stopped processing those visas, even though Congress raised the ceiling to 5,000. Now, I understand, that we expanded the types of employment eligible for such visas and that guidelines need to be issued for these newly eligible employees, but it seems to me, if there are still Iraqis who need visas and they qualified under the old law, they would qualify under the new law. So I don't understand why the administration is not processing them, unless that was never their intention and all along they were willing to talk a good game but leave these people high and dry.
In terms of refugee resettlement, the administration resettled 1,608 during all of fiscal year 2007, about 134 a month, or four or five a day, not a particularly robust number. Five months into fiscal year 2008, the administration has resettled 1,876 refugees, about 375 a month -- much better but still well below what would be needed to reach the president's stated goal of 12,000 refugees settled during this year.
In order to reach that goal, the administration would have to triple the number of refugees processed each month. If you ask me, that's a tall order for an administration that always seems to be coming up short.
Part of the problem is the Department of State is still puzzling over how to process at-risk populations inside of Iraq. The internal debate has been going on for a year now. The State Department testified last year that they were examining this possibility. The Iraqi Refugee Crisis Act gave the secretary 90 days to come up with a plan for processing inside of Iraq. The clock is running, and I hope our witnesses today can tell us that they will meet the reporting deadline and that such processing will begin promptly thereafter. Paralysis by analysis is just another name for failure.
All of us understand that 9/11 changed a lot of things, and one of those things was that the United States needed to be much more careful about who gets into our country. The departments of State and Homeland Security approached the questions of refugee processing and resettlement with different perspectives and imperatives. But the idea, as I understand it, of appointing Ambassador Foley and Ms. Scialabba to their respective positions was to remove the bureaucratic impediments that previously hindered our nation's ability to respond to the crisis.
Judging from the results over the last year, I don't think the problem has been solved.
The only person in the executive branch who can make all the agencies march in the same direction is the president, yet I can't remember President Bush speaking about the refugee crisis or the need of the United States to respond aggressively to it except in passing. The last refugee crisis he spoke of directly was in New Orleans. Perhaps he thinks this one is going just as well.
It is precisely the lack of presidential leadership on this issue that has led me to propose during the conference on the Iraqi Refugee Crisis Act that Congress create a White House-level coordinator with the authority to resolve the disputes between agencies that have decidedly different interests.
I think the results show how unfortunate it is that my proposal was not included in the final agreement. I'm sure that Ambassador Foley and Ms. Scialabba are doing their best, but as long as they report to different Cabinet secretaries, instead of one official managing the issue for the president, I fear that our efforts to help Iraqi refugees will continue to stagnate in the administration's bureaucratic swamp.
I still think, actually, I very strongly assert, that the president needs one official to ride herd on this issue, and I will continue to push for that as Congress considers additional legislation to address the crisis.
At the hearing last year, one of our witnesses noted that the U.S. response to the refugee crisis could be the first step towards rehabilitating the image of the United States in the Middle East and indeed globally. Here we are a year later; at a minimum I would say we have yet to seize that moment.
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REP. ACKERMAN: Thank you all for your opening statements.
Let me begin with Ambassador Foley and focus for the moment on those Iraqis who have helped us. How many such people are there?
MR. FOLEY: Mr. Chairman, those are statistics that we're in the process of gathering. I'd be happy to take the question and get you the answer for the record, but the fact is that government agencies right now are putting those numbers together.
REP. ACKERMAN: Do you remember saying that at our last meeting or somebody did from -- we were told exactly what you just said.
MR. FOLEY: Well, I can tell you how many people have worked for the Department of State and --
REP. ACKERMAN: Okay, let's start with that.
MR. FOLEY: In rough numbers, it's in the 300s. I have the exact number here. Right now it's a little more than 100, so we know that. We know that the numbers of employees of the Department of State, of USAID both direct hire and contractors are in the thousands, in other words under 10,000. They're in the thousands. The numbers of employees of the Defense Department, these would be mostly contractors, are certainly in the tens of thousands, but the Department of Defense will be providing that information. As you know, under the Refugee Crisis in Iraq Act, the different government agencies are under remit to produce databases and to tally those numbers up. So I can give you certainly the ballpark estimates of currently employed, as I just did.
REP. ACKERMAN: And how many have been processed?
MR. FOLEY: We have processed -- altogether we have interviewed USCIS has interviewed 11,800 Iraqi refugees. We've had some --
REP. ACKERMAN: That have worked for us?
MR. FOLEY: No, no. These are the overall figures.
REP. ACKERMAN: How many have you interviewed that have worked for us that have indicated that for whatever reason they have to leave?
MR. FOLEY: Well, I'd have to get you that figure -- specific figure for the record to the extent that we can establish it because, Mr. Chairman, most of the referrals, most of the Iraqis that we process for admission to the U.S. refugee program are referred by the United Nations under 11 separate criteria. One criterion for referral from UNHCR is indeed association with international efforts with employment with the coalition forces and the like. So a certain percentage of referrals com from UNHCR in that category; also, we receive direct referrals of Iraqis who were employed by us or associated with us directly from our embassy in Baghdad, and we receive those and we can tally those numbers for you if you'd like.
REP. ACKERMAN: Well, we've tallied a list that the subcommittee staffs have just placed before you. There's 1,000 names sitting in front of you right now of Iraqis who have worked for us, according to the list project that I think you might be familiar with. I understand this list has been presented to you before, and of the 1,000 names that are on this specific list, only 40 have been processed. Could you explain that?
MR. FOLEY: Well, I'm not sure that the facts are as such.
REP. ACKERMAN: Okay. Help us with the facts.
MR. FOLEY: We have indeed cooperated with those who put the list together. They brought us names at different stages. We compared them to the list that we have. We have a service called Ref Questions where we entertain inquiries from Iraqis in the region inside Iraq, those indeed who have been associated with us, so that we can compile information and we can begin to enter them into our caseload; we can begin to process them if they can access our program.
REP. ACKERMAN: How many --
MR. FOLEY: The difficulty, excuse me, Mr. Chairman, is the fact that we weren't able to operate refugee processing inside Iraq. That's the chief limitation until this point when, as I indicated in my opening statement, we're moving to do just that.
REP. ACKERMAN: Well, the reason that we couldn't process them inside of Iraq is a problem of our creation because we didn't want to process them inside of Iraq, were unprepared to process them inside of Iraq and did not process them inside of Iraq, and just wished the problems go away and sent them elsewhere. No, it's not the fault of these people that you didn't process them or we didn't process them; it's to our shame that we didn't, I believe.
But insomuch as you've had the list and now have the list, I fail to understand why 40 people, if that number is accurate -- or have they all been processed and found ineligible for whatever reason? Could you tell us what those 960 reasons might be?
MR. FOLEY: Yes, sir. First, I would say though that, indeed, it's not the fault of the Iraqis whom we want to help that we've not been able to process them inside Iraq. To my knowledge, we've never processed refugees anywhere in the world in a war zone, and the fact that the security situation has improved is a significant reason --
REP. ACKERMAN: You processed 50,000 refugees within Kosovo and thereabouts and admitted them into the United States under President Clinton's special order during the time of war.
MR. FOLEY: Yes, we did, but we processed them in Macedonia. We processed them outside of the -- of Kosovo, outside of the war zone. The difficulty until now has been to access these Iraqis inside of Iraq, and we're planning to -- with the improved security situation, we're planning to stand that up. As I indicated, we've started doing that on a modest scale, but we intend to scale it up substantially now.
I can answer your question about the list though, if you'd let me continue.
REP. ACKERMAN: Please.
MR. FOLEY: As I was saying, we have been in contact with the -- those who have been compiling the list, and we found that many of the names on the list we've already had in our system. We found names that weren't in our system that we have entered into our system, and this is an ongoing dialogue. There are probably new names that we're not familiar with, but at the same time, we are receiving such information from multiple sources, including through our own communications facility that I mentioned. And so it's an ongoing iterative process, but the fact is that until now we've had to process them in neighboring countries and we're hoping now to be able to process them, if we can scale up our processing entity --
REP. ACKERMAN: Well, what's --
MR. FOLEY: -- this year inside Iraq.
REP. ACKERMAN: I keep hearing about adding lists and putting people on lists and making lists, but nothing gets done with the lists. I mean, it's almost like you're in the computer list data business that politicians keep and just making lists.
But if you don't do anything with them, I mean, the mission here is to help refugees. We don't seem to be helping many at all, do we?
MR. FOLEY: Well, to the extent that we have the capacity to do so, we have been doing so. As I indicated, many of the people on the list have been in our system. Some of them are being processed -- have been processed. The main difficulty for many of them is how to access our program. As you may know, Mr. Chairman, last year --
REP. ACKERMAN: They have difficulty accessing the program?
MR. FOLEY: Yes, because --
REP. ACKERMAN: These people all found us on the Internet.
MR. FOLEY: I'm sorry, to access our processing program. They can access it by communication, but in terms of our abilities to process them as refugees, they had to have been in either -- in one of the neighboring countries, and --
REP. ACKERMAN: Well, that's a shame --
MR. FOLEY: -- and that's been impossible for many indeed.
REP. ACKERMAN: Well, that was a tremendous discouragement for them. And I -- you know, my view is that was the whole reason was to discourage them. But now that we've taken a new look at that, I don't understand why these lists are not moving.
MR. FOLEY: Well, I must say that, Mr. Chairman, that I agree with you fully that is to these Iraqis that we have our highest obligation, and we --
REP. ACKERMAN: Yeah, but when they came to and told you that they're -- came to us and told us that their lives were in danger because they served as interpreters or turned people in or gave the U.S. information as to where bad guys were hiding and now they have targets on their back, why didn't we assist them to go to other countries? Why do we tell them, "Run for your lives, maybe the Syrians will help you," that great bastion of democracy and human rights?
MR. FOLEY: Well, it's --
REP. ACKERMAN: I thought it was we who had the great heart.
MR. FOLEY: Of course, that's where the bulk of the refugees did go to. They are in Syria.
REP. ACKERMAN: I know they did. That's where we were sending. I mean, they were desperate. Why -- we didn't help them get to Syria.
MR. FOLEY: No, we certainly did not. They went there on their own, but unfortunately in the last year we weren't able to interview them in Syria for about four or five months. Now, we are able and that's why our numbers of those -- we're interviewing those who arrived in the U.S. are going up substantially.
REP. ACKERMAN: What happens when we -- I don't want to prolong my time, but I don't understand: You interview somebody; how long does an interview take? I interview people too. I seem to interview more people for a job in my office than you do of all Iraqi refugees. I don't --
MR. FOLEY: Well, I would --
REP. ACKERMAN: I don't have that many positions.
MR. FOLEY: I would turn to my colleague from Homeland Security to tell you about the interview process itself, but the interview is one part of a multistep process that involves, as you know, security vetting and out-processing as well. It's a process that takes as much as eight to 10 months around the world that we have compressed significantly in the case of Iraqis.
REP. ACKERMAN: I seem to recall under President Ford, who some people thought was inefficient maybe or bungling or whatever, it took him a half a year to process about 160,000 refugees and get them here and provide for them and relocate them. Did he have some magic formula or -- I mean, what's happening? I don't understand what's happening. It seems to me that if I didn't want people here, I would find deliberate ways to throw sand in the gears and come up with reasons. You know, putting them on lists and processing them and questioning them and vetting them, you know, that's all important, but it shouldn't take forever to get a couple of people.
MR. FOLEY: I agree with you, Mr. Chairman. This is exactly the direction we need to be moving in, and I'm --
REP. ACKERMAN: I don't want people to agree with me. I would like to see results. I mean, we've helped to create a mess. At best, we should help clean up our mess. You know, we owe it to these people, if nothing else.
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REP. ACKERMAN: Not to quibble with the distinguished gentleman from California, but I think we both find it flattering that most of the world would like to come to this country because of the values we have and the opportunities that we provide. But it seems to me the whole issue of refugees is a humanitarian one, and refugees by definition are people who have a well-founded fear of being persecuted or fearful of their lives being taken if they return to or remain in their homeland.
It also seems to me sometimes we have particular obligations, specifically to certain peoples. Certainly the gentleman and I stood shoulder to shoulder demanding in the old days that the Soviet Jews be allowed to leave the Soviet Union and demanded their right to migrate and even to come to this country, and they were welcomed. Certainly we have a policy for Cubans demanding freedom, escaping from harsh times or tough circumstances or political persecution and grant them refugee status, you know, once they arrive on our shores.
Those were not necessarily circumstances entirely created by ourselves, and neither is Iraq but certainly we bear major responsibility for the disruption and displacement of people both internally and in the neighboring countries. And we have a specific obligation in the minds of some that those who risk their very lives to do things that were, of course, in their own interests in the long run, but certainly immediately risk their lives to save our troops to show them where and why and how and lead them in the right directions that others new about who now find themselves and their families threatened, murdered, attempted murdered, attempted murders committed upon them and their families because people know who they are and we know who many of them are. In that case, I think we have a specific obligation.
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REP. ACKERMAN: I thank the gentleman, who makes a very compelling argument on the side of the ledger that says refugees should stay in place, back where they would like -- from whence they would like to depart because they have contributions to make to democracy and rebuilding their own country. I presume it was the argument made by the Apaches and Comanches, and thank God -- (laughter) -- the Pilgrims feeling the compelling notions --
REP. DELAHUNT: It wasn't the Pilgrims, Mr. Chairman.
REP. ACKERMAN: -- democracy were strongly desirous didn't heed that argument.
Chairman Delahunt.
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REP. ACKERMAN: Thank you for your major contribution to the hearing.
(I only ?) to regret that 70 or so years ago, certainly before Saddam Hussein, there wasn't the Congressman Fortenberry to look out for the interests of minority populations in so many places in the world such as Iraq. And I would just make historic note that around I think it was about 70 years ago, there was a thriving, flourishing Jewish community that numbered some 700,000 in Baghdad alone.
And I believe it was Mark Twain who coined the phrase and likened New York City to Baghdad on the subway because of the thriving merchant community that both cities enjoyed, lending so much to the culture and success and richness. And I'm afraid in the case of Iraq, having had nobody protecting or looking after the interests of minority communities, I suspect that that community might be gone forever, which if I might make a point before turning to Ms. Jackson Lee, knowing that two of our witnesses have to leave, there has been a major difference in perspective between some of us, in which I count myself and our good colleague Mr. Rohrabacher from California on how we see refugees and what our responsibilities might be, with Mr. Rohrabacher making a claim, which is a legitimate point of view, that Iraq would be better off, as would other countries, if their refugees stayed in place because so many of them carry the burden of the intelligentsia, the well educated, the more mobile who have so much to add to their culture and society, and myself who believe that, all that being probably very true, but people have a right to make determinations for themselves as to where they can move about, especially populations that are under severe threat and do have a right. And we have a responsibility in particular to those refugees, especially in this case with the Iraqis.
The administration expresses themselves in terms that would indicate that they would agree with me and those who share that view, but their actions are more supportive of a position that would endorse the ends that Mr. Rohrabacher would like to see. I don't know if that's because that's the real end that they desire but want to put a better face on it and have some doubts about refugees migrating and what our responsibilities are, or indeed the bureaucracy is just too slow in effectuating what the administration really wants to do.
And I would pose this just to our two ambassadors knowing they have to leave, and then we'll turn to Ms. Jackson Lee.
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REP. ACKERMAN: Have we identified people who we think we would rather have staying there to fight and rebuild their society and therefore not viewing them as vulnerable as they think they are?
MR. BUTLER: I do not think that we ought to be in the business of making lists of people that -- of people who ought to stay behind, but we are in the business of changing the circumstances on the ground so that those who want to stay behind can stay behind. And it's my experience, and I think for those of you who traveled to Iraq, that 99 out of 100 Iraqis, if not higher, do not want to leave their country. It's a huge -- you know, to be uprooted, to be pulled out of your home away from your family and be dropped into some other place and have to learn a new language and new ways. I mean, that's been my experience every place we've been. They want to go home. They're staying in the neighborhood. UNHCR, USAID, others are doing, you know, just incredibly humane actions to help sustain these populations for the day when they can return to Iraq in safety and in dignity.
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REP. ACKERMAN: Thank you very much.
What is it that this Congress can provide to make the president's goal of 12,000 refugees processed within a year and resettled within a year possible? Is there something that we haven't done or could do to make that happen? And are we going to see that happen? I don't want to have another hearing where somebody winds up saying well, you didn't give us this or that or we needed something else.
MR. FOLEY: Mr. Chairman, if I may, I would hark back to my statement at the beginning of the hearing that we believe that we actually have the means and the plan in place to produce the requisite number of interviews of Iraqi refugees to be able to move 12,000 this fiscal year. It's challenging. There are, as I said, a few weak links in the chain that we don't control.
We don't have an ideal processing situation in all places, but I am confident that we are doing everything we can in order to meet that goal. And I'm not sure that it's at this stage a question of resources or a lack of resources.
I would say, though, in one respect that resources will play a role, and that has to do with the new legislation that does create a broad number -- increased number of SIVs per year, 5,000 per year. The legislation also gives -- provides refugee benefits to Special Immigrant Visa recipients, and that I think has been estimated to be around $48 million that would come out of our current refugee admissions account, and that ought to be funded, in our view.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
REP. ACKERMAN: You know, I have a certain skepticism with fully appreciating the answers and the good intentions and hopefulness of being able to fulfill what the answers expressed. But when you have the capability and actually are able to process all of that, that doesn't translate into refugees being resettled; are we going to hear that Homeland Security couldn't clear all these people or any of these people or most of these people?
Is that going to be -- I mean, I have cases in my office that are immigration cases that have nothing to do with Iraq or the Middle East, people from anywhere else in the world, of countries that have a much more normal, if I can use that word, profile where people are just waiting years and years and years to be cleared, some of whom I know personally that have nothing to do because their first name was similar to the first name of somebody else and they were born in the same year that's on some list. And it just seems to me that we're not moving any of these. So are we going to have that come back to us as the answer when we say how come of the 12,000 people that the president pledged to have here can't get here because something else?
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REP. ACKERMAN: Thank you very much.
What is it that this Congress can provide to make the president's goal of 12,000 refugees processed within a year and resettled within a year possible? Is there something that we haven't done or could do to make that happen? And are we going to see that happen? I don't want to have another hearing where somebody winds up saying well, you didn't give us this or that or we needed something else.
MR. FOLEY: Mr. Chairman, if I may, I would hark back to my statement at the beginning of the hearing that we believe that we actually have the means and the plan in place to produce the requisite number of interviews of Iraqi refugees to be able to move 12,000 this fiscal year. It's challenging. There are, as I said, a few weak links in the chain that we don't control.
We don't have an ideal processing situation in all places, but I am confident that we are doing everything we can in order to meet that goal. And I'm not sure that it's at this stage a question of resources or a lack of resources.
I would say, though, in one respect that resources will play a role, and that has to do with the new legislation that does create a broad number -- increased number of SIVs per year, 5,000 per year. The legislation also gives -- provides refugee benefits to Special Immigrant Visa recipients, and that I think has been estimated to be around $48 million that would come out of our current refugee admissions account, and that ought to be funded, in our view.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
REP. ACKERMAN: You know, I have a certain skepticism with fully appreciating the answers and the good intentions and hopefulness of being able to fulfill what the answers expressed. But when you have the capability and actually are able to process all of that, that doesn't translate into refugees being resettled; are we going to hear that Homeland Security couldn't clear all these people or any of these people or most of these people?
Is that going to be -- I mean, I have cases in my office that are immigration cases that have nothing to do with Iraq or the Middle East, people from anywhere else in the world, of countries that have a much more normal, if I can use that word, profile where people are just waiting years and years and years to be cleared, some of whom I know personally that have nothing to do because their first name was similar to the first name of somebody else and they were born in the same year that's on some list. And it just seems to me that we're not moving any of these. So are we going to have that come back to us as the answer when we say how come of the 12,000 people that the president pledged to have here can't get here because something else?
Ms. Scialabba.
MS. SCIALABBA: Mr. Chairman, that's not been the case with this population. We have been able to interview the cases as they've become ready for us to interview. At this point, since the beginning of the program, we've approved 7,422 refugees for resettlement, and at this point 3,559 have been admitted. That indicates there are still 4,000 in the pipeline to be resettled already, and we are continuing with the State Department to plan for a rigorous interview schedule in the third quarter.
We expect to interview another 8,000 Iraqis at that point. We haven't had problems keeping the interview schedule staffed, and we haven't had significant problems with background checks or clearances either. Right now I think we have a total of 45 cases on hold for security reasons, and that's all out of the entire population that we've been processing.
REP. ACKERMAN: I think I know the answer to this question, but I have to ask it of you for the record. In your testimony you talk about the department's application of waivers to those who have -- might have been otherwise denied; the situation of people who paid money for ransom of their relatives to get them freed of terrorist groups and then the claim was made that they fell into the category of providing sustenance to the terrorists, when of course these people weren't looking to cooperate with terrorists; they were just looking to get their relatives free from the terrorists. So is it my understanding that that problem has been resolved?
MS. SCIALABBA: It has been resolved, and most of those are duress cases and we are exercising the exemption for material support provided under duress in those cases.
REP. ACKERMAN: What about those who solicited the money?
MS. SCIALABBA: We are not considering -- that's not considered to be solicitation; it's considered to be material support under duress. We had some issue over whether that would be the interpretation, but that's the interpretation we've taken.
REP. ACKERMAN: Mr. Edson, in your testimony, you describe efforts to make the U.S. embassy in Baghdad a post that can issue Special Immigration Visas. Where are you in that process, and once the process has been established, how many SIVs will you be able to issue?
MR. EDSON: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We have issued a -- we've processed a completion and issued a handful now, I believe it's under five or six, with family members. We are -- we have a resource plan for Baghdad timed to coordinate with the startup of a new program, the 5,000 program, and their move into their building so that they could begin processing as many as we're estimating, 1,500 perhaps.
We're simultaneously keeping an eye on resources in Amman, Damascus and other posts in the region because with our -- with the special immigrants they could actually -- we do initial processing through the National Visa Center here in the United States communicating with these applicants by e-mail so that they can actually in the end apply for a visa at the place that is most convenient for them or most possible for them to physically get to for the visa interview.
REP. ACKERMAN: And Mr. Gottlieb, in your testimony, you note that a majority of returnees find that their homes have been occupied by others. What happens to the returnees in that instance, and does the Ministry of Migration have the capacity to provide or find housing for these families or for the families that they displace when they reclaim their property?
MR. GOTTLIEB: Mr. Chairman, most people that -- I think I said about 60 percent of at least IDPs are in what we call -- in rented housing. What we saw for returnees, though, was that only about half found their property in habitable condition, so for a lot of people who are returning, their finding their houses either not in a condition in which they can live or, for many others, that others are inhabiting those places.
If I can describe a little bit more of the picture, though, I think that what we've seen because of the splits between communities, those that had resources have moved into houses that they could rent or some an apartment or something, 20 percent. The ones who are most vulnerable are in some kind of public building, the ones who have the least services, and we've targeted most of those. Those are the ones we've targeted mostly.
What concerns us, however, is that those who are renting and because of the difficulty of employment in Iraq, many of those families are using up their resources on rent, and rents are going up. So that -- we are trying to watch what's happening with that population because we anticipate that we may have to serve more folks who can no longer afford to rent and may have to abandon those places.
So for those who return, if they've exhausted their resources, the government has tried to have some limited programs where they provide -- for instance, those that came in December, I think it was around $800, but for the (members/numbers ?) of families, it was very small, they actually were able to target with that money. And now that that has dried up, there are very few returning now.
So the government does have a program, it's just been very, very limited.
REP. ACKERMAN: Let me, in the interest of mercy if nothing else -- (laughter) -- say that the -- this very distinguished panel has earned the gratitude of a very aggressive and interested pair of two subcommittees of the Congress. You've exhibited much patience through -- as everything else in this room was going on, our passage of three suspension bills, tabling one motion to bring up the privileges of the House, beating back three motions to adjourn, and the adding and swearing in of a new member of Congress from Illinois. That patience is greatly appreciated as we try to juggle, you know, our responsibilities.
I say in their absence, I'm very proud of our subcommittees for their keen interest in this very important matter. And I speak for all of the members of our entire committee when I thank each and every one of you for the job and the efforts that you put forth. Our prodding and criticism are offered only in the intent of spurring you on to greater heights and being able to more quickly and efficiently achieve the goals that we have collectively set, that the president has cited, and to try to restore some of the good word, good will and good image of our country.
We stumbled a lot with our own people in Katrina, and nobody could say that anybody did that on purpose, and we've had a lot of unprecedented -- some to be expected, others not to be anticipated -- problems that we have faced and still face in Iraq and Afghanistan, and someday elsewhere I'm unfortunately sure. But we have to learn from those things. But we have good people working collectively on our behalf, and five of the best ones among them are before the committees today.
The witnesses are dismissed with the thanks of the committee. We stand adjourned. (Sounds gavel.)
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