RNA - Sivanka Dhanapala, head of the office for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in Tehran, says Iran’s decades-long effort to house approximately 3 million displaced Afghans is "a story that's not told often enough." Interesting enough, the UN official made the remarks on the same day (March 16) that President Donald Trump sought to reinstate his controversial 90-day ban on travelers from six Muslim countries, including Iran, and a 120-day ban on all refugees, including from Syria.
There is more at work here than meets the eye:
1- Thanks to the never-ending US-led war on Afghanistan, roughly 6 million people are still displaced. Nearly 16 years later, Tehran still shelters 1 million registered refugees, and another 2 million are living here, making it the world's fourth-largest refugee population. To say America’s longest war in history is all for the sake of fighting terror is only partially true; what we are witnessing as well is a colonial thirst, the urge to dominate - wholly in defiance of International Law and International Humanitarian Law, and at the expense of refugees.
2- The UN has also hailed a 2015 directive from Iran’s Leader Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei that called on education administrators to allow all Afghan children, documented or not, to attend Iranian schools. Amid the militarism and callousness of the Trump era, Iran is hosting refugees and keeping borders open. The UN has worked with the government on incorporating refugees into a government-sponsored health insurance scheme which is a ground-breaking development not just for Iran but globally for refugees.
3- Unlike in the United States, refugees in Iran don’t have to make a choice between hunger and deportation. As the Trump era unfolds, fear of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement crackdown is disrupting the daily lives of immigrants, refugees, and their families. Trump’s policy to separate children from mothers and increase deportations is affecting the health and livelihoods of families, even those there legally, by discouraging them from turning to public-assistance programs or from working and going to school.
4- Trump’s Muslim ban on Syrian refugees and dragnet roundup of undocumented immigrants comes just when the world is experiencing the worst refugee crisis since World War II. The ban does little or nothing to protect Americans from terrorism. No terrorist act in the United States has been perpetrated by a Syrian or by anyone from the six nations whose citizens are now banned from traveling to the United States.
5- The sad reality is that the United States is hard wired into neoliberal savagery for absolutely no reason. This is morally repugnant. It violates every ideal the UN has ever cherished. That alone qualifies for consideration of Fascism. No matter how many more refugees Iran takes in, war-party Washington will always find an excuse to increase the operational tempo of its military to invade and destroy - co-responsible for the inception of the current global refugee crisis. On its face, we will continue to see US militarism crushing down states’ functions, and this should be a clue as to what’s at stake.
6- War-party Washington failed to reshape the Mideast map to its own liking, but the impulse for unilateral dominance is as strong as ever. This hasn’t changed since Donald Trump became president. He has just overstressed expansion, both geopolitical and market-oriented. Something more sinister is also involved, a self-fulfilling motivation - the requisite mindset sanctioning attitudes toward war, Islamophobia, fortress-building, intolerance, White Supremacy, and setting America straight on the course of global War on Islam - none of which would be existing, possible, acceptable under an authentic expression of political-economic freedom and democracy.
The list is long and suggests a thoroughness leaving little untouched that could possibly benefit the UN’s global refugee settlement program. In every case, America is internally and globally stripped down, impoverished of its global heritage, far behind Iran in terms of adhering to International Law and International Humanitarian Law.
As maintained by the head of the office for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in Tehran, Iran is now an “exemplary” leader in the global resettlement refugee program. It has accomplished a massive expansion of the program in collaboration with the UN in hosting Afghan refugees and creating jobs for their families. It has also implemented a wide array of programs to take care of their children in public schools and health care centers. With these powerful policies and programs, the country has successfully risen to the challenges posed by America’s bogus War-on-Terror blowback.
Some of this progress will continue no matter what the Trump administration does. Trump’s anti-Iran sanctions and threats, or his Muslim ban and anticipated escalation of the conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Yemen have not and will not slow this progress down. Any doubters should ask the United Nations.
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