The Foreign Service Journal, March 2008

friend,” an Iraqi man named Yagh- dan who worked with USAID during Johnson’s time in Fallujah. Yaghdan desperately wanted to get out of Iraq. He’d been working for the State Department for two years when insurgents targeted him. “The next day,” Johnson wrote last year in an article in the Los Angeles Times , Yaghdan “found a note on his front steps that said, ‘We are going to cut off your heads and throw them in the trash.’ Beside it was the severed head of a small dog.” The threats weren’t idle. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has referred more than 15,000 Iraqis to the United States for resettlement. In order to get on that list, they had to prove that they were at imminent risk if they remained. And though little hard data exists, anecdotal evidence about the killing of U.S. affiliates in Iraq is legion. In his L.A. Times piece, for example, Johnson cites a 2005 cable from the U.S. embassy in Baghdad reporting that two Iraqi employees had been killed in the weeks preceding the memo and that “employees live in fear of being identified with the embassy of the U.S.” Even so, it took Johnson’s intervention, lots of public- ity — including another article about Yaghdan’s plight in The New Yorker — and months of waiting before Yaghdan was resettled in Illinois last September. At first, Johnson recalls, “USAID told him we’d give him one month unpaid leave. It seemed totally beyond the pale to abandon someone like that.” Since then, Johnson —who is no longer a government employee — has created what he calls “The List,” a com- pilation of names of Iraqis who worked for the United States, believe their lives are in danger and want to be resettled here. After various other news outlets picked up Johnson’s story, he’s received hundreds of tips from U.S. government employees who’ve served in Iraq trying to help those who helped them. The list now has more than 600 names on it. Johnson says he gives an updated version to State Department officials every month. Yet only a tiny fraction of those on it have been resettled. In Fiscal Year 2007, the United States resettled only 1,608 Iraqi refugees. About 250 of these were so-called P1 cases, Iraqis who worked at the U.S. embassy or with a U.S. government-affiliated entity and were referred directly by embassy officials. Another 330 were part of State’s direct access program for interpreters and locally employed staff in Jordan and Egypt, and the rest were referred by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. The latter is the typical process the United States uses for selecting refugees for resettlement throughout the world. Some of those Iraqis referred by the U.N. also worked for U.S. agencies but many were not affiliated with the government and were referred for other rea- sons, such as being from a religious or ethnic minority group. State will not disclose details about each admis- sion for privacy reasons. Another 800 or so Iraqis were given special immigrant visas under a program created by Congress in 2006 and expanded last year to allow translators who worked with the United States military another option for getting out of Iraq. State officials aren’t sugarcoating their progress. “There’s no reason to be satisfied, none whatsoever,” says Ambassador James B. Foley, a 25-year career Foreign Service officer. The U.S. ambassador to Haiti from 2003 to 2005 during the fall of the Jean-Bertrand Aristide gov- ernment, since September 2007 he has been State’s senior coordinator for Iraqi refugee issues. Foley has set a goal of 12,000 admissions for this fiscal year, ending Sept. 30, 2008. More than a quarter of that total had been settled as of February, but he’s making no predictions about whether the goal will actually be met. Forces outside of State’s control may stand in the way, including continuing disputes with the Homeland Secur- ity Department over in-country processing of U.S.-affili- ated Iraqis, continuing concern about the security situa- tion in Iraq, and intransigence by the Syrian government, which has impeded the ability of interviewers from the Homeland Security Department to enter the country, where an estimated 1.5 million Iraqi refugees are located. Even so, it’s clear that Congress is fed up with what it perceives as slow progress. In January, both the House and Senate cleared the fiscal 2008 National Defense Authorization Act to which Democratic Massachusetts F O C U S M A R C H 2 0 0 8 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 29 Shawn Zeller, a regular contributor to the Journal , is a senior staff writer for Congressional Quarterly. “There’s no reason to be satisfied, none whatsoever.” — Ambassador James B. Foley, Senior Coordinator for Iraqi Refugee Issues