Why Iraqis abroad are reluctant to return

It is hard to slip a word in edgeways when Hind Rassam and her two sisters get together. They work in offices only a few hundred yards from each other, but they are so busy they can go weeks without meeting, and they have a lot to catch up on.

Hind, Amal, and Shamim Rassam are an unusual trio of Iraqi-American sisters who have returned to Baghdad since Saddam Hussein's fall to help rebuild their country. There are an estimated 3 million or more Iraqis living abroad, of which at least 500,000 are fellow exiles waiting and watching but still reluctant to come home.

With most of Iraq nowhere near back on its feet, the Rassam sisters understand the hesitation gripping Iraqi émigrés worldwide.

"Most people's relatives here are telling them to wait", says Shamim. "The ones abroad can send a few hundred dollars a month to their families: if they come here they won't be able to find work."

Hind and her sisters, though, are fulfilling their father's dream. "Our father asked us to promise that we would go back to a free Iraq," says Hind. "It was my parents' wish that we should return to benefit our country."

And each has found a job with the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) that currently runs Iraq. Hind - a university lecturer - works with a US consultancy trying to breathe new life into Iraq's school system. Amal, an anthropologist, is advising neighborhood councils in Baghdad on the rudiments of democracy. Shamim, once a well-known literary chat-show hostess on Iraq TV, is running the new government-sponsoredFM radio station.

Their skills and enthusiasm are in great demand at the top end of Iraq's social structure, as the CPA struggles to reorganize the country after decades of dictatorship. But at the other end of the spectrum, ordinary Iraqis do not yet feel the country is ready to welcome them home.

Of the half a million Iraqi émigrés living in the Middle East, for example, under the protection of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), only a thousand or so have trickled back. "We are not encouraging people to go back", says UNHCR spokesman Peter Kessler. "The security situation and the general humanitarian situation are not conducive to a mass return.

"The majority of the 300,000 Iraqis in Jordan are there not just because of persecution but because of the availability of work, education and general prospects, and that's what they need to find back in Iraq" if they are to be tempted home, Mr. Kessler adds.

Though international press reports of rampant crime and regular attacks on US troops do not encourage émigrés to venture back home, says Mowaffak al-Rubaie, a member of Iraq's Governing Council, "it's not the security situation that keeps people away, it's the salaries. People are earning a lot of money abroad, and here a cabinet minister gets $500 a month."

Mr. Rubaie, who spent years in political exile in London, says he has thrown in his lot wholeheartedly with the new Iraq. (He has already paid for that commitment: he was wounded in the arm last Sunday by the car-bomb that blew up outside the Baghdad Hotel, where he is living.)

"I sold my [medical] practice, I sold my house and my car and everything, and I threatened my wife that if she didn't join me I would remarry," he laughs. "But there are a lot of top class people abroad and they cannot come because they have children to bring up."

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