They do risk their lives to leave Iraq, Lori. They're doing it all
the time. This is why Europe, particularly London, has so many
Iraqi exiles living in it. You need an exit visa from Iraq, or else
you need to sneak through the border, and they usually go to Jordan.
Once there, you have to persuade another country to give you a visa.
The British Embassy does officially offer visas to Iraqis seeking
political asylum, but there have been many occasions over the years
where the Brits have manned their embassy with only one visa officer,
so a queue of a thousand Iraqis can take months to process. They did
this during the Gulf War, for example, to try to keep numbers down.
Sarah
At 3:02 PM -0800 01/17/2003, Lori Fye wrote:
> Lori, people are not allowed to leave Iraq without exit visas, and
these are not normally given.
Okay Sarah, but East Germans weren't allowed to leave either. Yet many
of them found life in East Germany so unbearable that they risked their
own lives and the lives of their families to crawl over and under the
Berlin Wall. I'm not saying that Iraqis should do something similar,
or that they're cowardly for not doing so. But I wonder why they don't.
I'll send you a couple of links to British government reports - one
on the weapons and one on torture. Maybe you'd find them interesting.
Yes I would. Thank you.
Lori
