In past posting in the FPA Migration Blog, Rich Basas and Cathryn Cluver have made several postings on the issues regarding Iraqi refugees and the response by the international community. While meeting in international bodies have done much to address the existence of the issue, the result was to place further onus on countries like Syria and Jordan, who have gone beyond their humanistic responsibility in trying to accommodate and adapt many Iraqi refugees into their societies. This failure of the international community comes with actions taken in Iraq since 2003, lacking in any response or much media coverage on the displaced 2 million. Only when Iraqi government initiatives have sought to create some sort of incentive for its citizens to return has media responded to the issue, still lacking in urgency through much of the narrative however.
It is not the first time media and the international community has failed displaced people in the region. Many reports on the Israeli response to Darfuri refugees had criticized Israel, like Jordan and Syria with Iraq's refugees, for not allowing more African migrants to settle in Israel. While the Israeli government did settle many people and continued to take in Sudanese refugees and place them under protection, many of Sudan's neighbors have killed Darfuri refugees with no response towards the shooting of dozens of Darfuri refugees at the Egyptian-Israel border by Egyptian border security by media or the EU and US. Placing the onus of large international refugee problems on smaller nations, while taking no effective response themselves lead many to believe that the international community will allow another Rwanda with little effective response. While this point of view is the source of much debate, the effect of not responding to Darfur, or having the US in Iraq is that many Western powers may not legally allow an Iraqi to claim refugee status as the US already is present in that nation, which is considered as protecting Iraqi people inside Iraq itself. Iraq cannot prosper and Darfur will become a symbol of poor international leadership unless effective policies are created in the region. While the ICC and Den Haag can ask for extraditions of Karazdic and Sudan's leaders, law without enforcement becomes another failure in global justice.