CMI REPORT
Review of the Information, Return, and Reintegration of Iraqi Nationals to Iraq (IRRINI) Programme
R 2011:4
(ibid). Norway received five per cent of the applications, whereas Sweden, with its liberal refugee regime to Iraqis, experienced a dramatic increase in numbers around the summer 2007. 50 Figure 5: Asylum seekers from Iraq to the five main destination countries, 2002-2008 51
Iraqi Kurdish migration Much due to a turbulent political history, 22 per cent of the population of Iraqi Kurdistan had close relatives abroad in 2004, mostly in Europe (COSIT 2005: 56). Quite a few have returned since then and quite a few have subsequently emigrated, although comprehensive data are not available. Around 200,000 Iraqis, many of them Iraqi Kurds (though the precise number is obscured by their statistical invisibility as “Iraqis”), applied for asylum in Europe during the period 2002 – 2008 (JD 2010: 93). The first contemporary wave of migration from Iraqi Kurdistan was of young, relatively well educated and politically active, middle class men in 1975 till 1991, associated with the defeat of a major Kurdish rebellion against the Government of Iraq (GoI), state persecution and the Gulf War against Iran (King 2008: 210; Emanuelsson 2008: 6). Transnational contact was kept at a minimum before 1991 in order to avoid persecution and punishment of the emigrants’ relatives by the GoI (King 2008: 212; Gran 2008: 124). The Kurdish autonomous region was established as a rather unintended consequence of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1991: the brutal response from the Baghdad government to the popular uprising in the Kurdish region lead to a displacement crisis and then to a UN Security Council Resolution (UNSCR 688) and the establishment of a “Safe Haven” in Iraqi Kurdistan. Most of the refugees returned to what now came to be administered by the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) (Leezenberg 2005). While most refugees returned for some time, concrete plans to return permanently among Kurds in the diaspora were soon replaced by transnational migration, import marriages, chain migration of relatives and by a rise in the number of Kurdish asylum seekers in Western Europe, where Iraqi Kurds by far constituted the largest group of refugees by the late 1990s (Leezenberg 2005: 636). Internecine fighting and continued insecurities in the mid-1990s contributed to this. During this time, remittances 50
Conspicuously few Iraqis were granted asylum by the states that invaded and occupied their country. The U.S. only accepted a few thousand asylum applicants up to 2007, as reflected in Elizabeth Ferris’s article called “Iraqi Refugees: Our Problem or Sweden’s?” Available at: www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/17/AR2007061701030.html (accessed 23.11.2010). 51
From Stortingsmelding 9 (2009 – 2010). “Norsk Flyktning- og Migrasjonspolitikk i et Europeisk Perspektiv”, table 2.10. Downloadable at: http://www.regjeringen.no/nb/dep/jd/dok/regpubl/stmeld/2009-2010/Meld-St-9-2009-2010/15/2.html?id=597931, accessed 20.07.2010.
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