Last update - 00:00 04/10/2007
UN: Brazil absorbs 36 Palestinians who fled Iraq in 2003
By The Associated Press
Three dozen Palestinians who fled Iraq to Jordan and lived in a squalid desert camp for more than four years were flown to Brazil on Thursday for resettlement, the United Nations refugee agency said.
The refugees were from a group of 108 Palestinians who escaped to Jordan following the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and were put in the Ruweishid Camp, 350 kilometers east of the Jordanian capital Amman.
An earlier group of 35 Palestinians from the camp left for Brazil in late September. UNHCR spokeswoman Rana Sweiss said the latest group of 36 was departing Thursday, and the Brazilian Embassy in Amman confirmed later that they left on an afternoon flight via Paris.
The remaining group of 37 Palestinians will leave for Brazil on October 18, leaving the Ruweishid Camp empty, Sweiss said. The camp was created months before the war started in 2003 to provide shelter to what many feared would be a large wave of refugees from Iraq. It has hosted more than 2,000 refugees of different nationalities, many of whom were resettled in a third country.
But the bulk of refugees came in the past two years, as more than 2.5 million Iraqis fled the turmoil that engulfed their country. They have chiefly flooded into Syria and Jordan and have not been put into camps, instead living in cities and towns.
Brazil, which has a large Arab community estimated at about 12 million, most of Lebanese and Syrian descent, agreed to take the Palestinians and plans to settle them in Sao Paulo and the Rio Grande do Sul region.
The UNHCR has said the families will receive medical care, rented accommodations and assistance for two years. The children will attend language classes, while young men and women will be offered jobs and the unaccompanied elderly people will be settled in a home for medical treatment.