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Wednesday, May 05, 2010

UNRWA starts funding UNHCR Iraq refugees

I cannot find details yet, but Palestine Today quotes UN Radio as saying that the European Commission of UNRWA is donating a million euros to help the 2300 refugees of Palestinian Arab ancestry who fled Iraq and are now on the Iraqi-Syrian border.

These refugees do not fall under UNRWA, but rather under UNHCR, which has been diligently trying to resettle them in other countries - the way a UN refugee agency should act.

Their Arab brethren have treated them as pariahs.

Since their grandparents lived in Palestine in 1947, Arab nations refuse to let them become citizens. Syria took in hundreds of thousands of Iraqi refugees but refused to support the ones who are termed "Palestinian" because of Arab League rulings that they should always be treated differently to enforce their fake nationalism. So Arabs who lived in Iraq for generations are not Iraqi nor are they Iraqi refugees.

Arabs have not been happy with UNHCR's resettling hundred of these refugees to the West, preferring that they stay in misery in order to strengthen the "Palestinian" cause.

The question is, is UNRWA contributing out of humanitarian considerations or is this the beginning of a power play to take over the refugees from UNHCR?