The last decade is rife with incidents of governments sending their armies across borders to attack UNHCR refugee camps on punitive raids. Guatemala has sent expeditions into Mexico against Guatemalan refugees. El Salvador has sent troops after its own citizens in Honduras. Uganda has murdered Ugandan refugees in Sudan. Vietnam has attacked and shelled refugee camps in Thailand. Afghanistan sends terrorist bomb squads and assassins after Afghans in Pakistan.
When such incidents occur, UNHCR can only protest through diplomatic channels and public condemnation through the press.
Public censure, however, is almost pointless when the raids are conducted by rebel groups beholden to no government or international organization, as is the case with Renamo in Mozambique. One seldom encounters armed soldiers anywhere in Malawi, a rare and welcome treat in security-conscious Africa. Certainly Malawi cannot afford to garrison its 300-mile border with Mozambique to protect refugees. That makes the camps easy pickings for Renamo soldiers.
”Renamo sometimes crosses into Malawi to steal food and cows from the refugees,” said a Malawi government official in the Ntcheu District on the country`s western border with Mozambique. ”Two and a half weeks ago the wells on the Malawi side went dry, and a group of refugees went (1 1/2 miles) inside Mozambique to their old wells. They were caught there by a group of Renamo soldiers, and two of them were shot to death.”
The vulnerability of the refugees in Malawi came home personally to me last November when I toured camps in the Ntcheu district with a British journalist and a British doctor. At the end of a long day, we headed out of the area in a government vehicle. I noticed a group of refugee women taking water from a well 20 feet inside the Mozambican border, the road on which we were driving. I asked the driver to stop so I could photograph them. Having done that, I asked one of my companions to photograph me standing in ”war-torn” Mozambican territory.
The doctor, a knowledgeable veteran of several years of refugee work, chided me for my horseplay. Two days later, we discovered that Renamo soldiers apparently had watched our impromptu stop, and 10 minutes after we had left, raided the camp from which the women at the well had come. They took several cattle and half a dozen people back to Mozambique.
UNHCR`s inability to protect refugee groups ironically has led to the most ”successful” solutions of at least two long-standing refugee problems in Sudan and Honduras.
Between 1979 and 1982, following Idi Amin`s downfall, about 350,000 people fled from Uganda`s northwestern provinces into southern Sudan. Many were from the Arua district of Uganda, which happened to be Amin`s home province. Though most were apolitical peasants and tradesmen who had little or no connection with Amin`s government, they were singled out for revenge by the new government of Milton Obote. Arua became the scene of horrendous crimes as Obote`s army stripped the province bare, literally razing entire towns and villages and robbing, killing and raping along the way.
The exodus from Arua to the Sudan was, as all refugee movements are, a harrowing one. People were murdered as they fled from pursuing Obote troops. As they crossed the border, many refugees were robbed by Sudanese border guards of whatever possessions they had managed to bring with them. UNHCR was totally unprepared for the exodus, and it took two years to set up adequate camps.
But the Ugandans happily discovered that they had moved to a vastly underpopulated, fertile part of the world with abundant if untapped water supplies. Through their years in exile, they began to do something that rarely happens with refugees in the Third World. They began to prosper in their new land.
In 1985 a civil war broke out in southern Sudan. The southern Sudanese tribes, Christian and animist alike, rose up in revolution against the Sudanese government in Khartoum, which is dominated by the nation`s Arab Muslim majority. The Ugandan refugees, the majority of whom are Muslim, again found themselves being singled out for violence.
Since 1985, the Ugandans have been running again, trying this time to get back into Uganda. Obote has since been kicked out, and the new Ugandan government has guaranteed their safety, but the refugees understandably have been wary. More than half have already returned, but to all, it has been a painful dilemma: Which side of the border-Sudan or Uganda-holds the most danger?
Early last November Alemi Quick, 30, brought his two wives and nine children back to Arua from Sudan on a truck convoy organized by UNHCR for several hundred returning refugees. He hadn`t been in Uganda since February, 1982, he said, when Obote soldiers raided his village, looting, burning and murdering the occupants, including his grandmother.
In Sudan, Quick said life took a turn for the better. ”I was given some land to farm, and every year we had a good harvest,” he said. ”The soil had different nutrients for crops, better than what we had at home. I had no interest in coming back to Uganda because it was comfortable there.”
On July 17, 1987, however, a unit of the rebelling Sudanese Peoples Liberation Army (SPLA) surrounded the refugee settlement where Quick`s family lived. ”They started grabbing men in the village and beating them up,” he said. ”I was given strokes with a stick and hit with a gun barrel. They took all my possessions and money, and forced me to go with them by foot through the bush to their camp in Zaire. I was taken as a porter.”
After several days in captivity, he was allowed to return to Sudan, he said, where he immediately went to UNHCR and filled out an application for repatriation to Uganda. The convoy he and his family returned with was laden with hundreds of bicycles, generator motors, tools, pots and pans-ample evidence of the prosperity the Ugandans had found in Sudan. Quick was not so fortunate; most of what he had accumulated in exile had been stolen by the SPLA. He was grateful for the survival package UNHCR gave to each returning family: pots, pans, soap, buckets, machetes, axes, scythes, blankets and plastic tarpaulins to make temporary shelters while they repaired their old homes in their Ugandan villages.
The returning refugees were brought to a processing center in Arua, where UNHCR personnel registered them with Ugandan authorities. They arranged for the refugees to recover the lands they had abandoned when they fled Obote`s troops and for transport there within a day of their return to Uganda. It was a neat and quick operation, an efficient end to several years of exile, though most of the refugees displayed little overt jubilation about being back.
”I have been told there will be no problem recovering my old farm,”
Quick said as he stood in line waiting to pick up his survival package. ”I`m happy to be home, but now I have to start all over again for the third time in my life.”
A similar repatriation process is now underway in Central America. In this case, however, the repatriation is by boat and canoe, as Miskito Indians return from exile in Honduras across the Coco River to their traditional lands in Nicaragua.
The Miskitos are a tribe of 100,000 Indians who live along both sides of the Honduran-Nicaraguan border. Until the Sandinista regime came to power in Nicaragua in 1979, the Miskitos had remained relatively untouched by the long series of Central American revolutions.
Once in power, however, the new Marxist Sandinista government embarked on a clumsy program of reorganizing and collectivizing the Miskitos. The Indians resisted this move, and many of them joined the U.S.-backed contra forces fighting the Sandinista regime.
The Sandinistas reacted quickly and harshly against the Miskitos, running large-scale military operations through the Indian tribal areas inside Nicaragua and forcing whole villages at gunpoint to move to ”resettlement”
villages far from the tribal lands. By 1983, 30,000 Miskitos had fled Nicaragua, settling among their fellow tribespeople in Honduras. About half settled in UNHCR camps, and the rest in their own jungle communities supported, at least in part, by the contras.
By the end of this year, UNHCR officials in Honduras think that most of the 30,000 Miskito refugees will have returned to Nicaragua not so much because they think the Sandinista government will leave them alone but because Honduran soldiers began harassing them early this year.
As thin a veneer as it sometimes proves to be, protection is at least part of the UNHCR mandate. For political reasons, protection was pointedly left out of the mandate of the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which cares for displaced Palestinians in the Middle East. Politics, too, left protection out of the mandate of the UN Border Relief Operation (UNBRO), which cares for the 300,000 Cambodians inside Thailand.
Palestinian refugees were excluded from UNHCR`s jurisdiction when the agency was being formed in 1950. The Palestinian question was so politically volatile that organizers feared it would corrupt the ”purely humanitarian role” envisioned for UNHCR. By creating UNRWA and denying it a protection mandate, the 2,300,000 registered Palestinian refugees living in their Middle Eastern diaspora have had, at best, only second-class citizenship in the world.
Since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, 650,000 Palestinians have lived under Israeli military occupation in the Gaza Strip with no citizenship at all. They have no rights; they have no representation in any body that enacts laws governing their life; they have no access to appeal when they feel they have suffered legal or physical injury from the Israeli military government.
Mota Jeidi is a 61-year-old shopkeeper in Rafah Camp on the southern end of Gaza Strip. As a young husband of six months in 1948, he fled with his wife from his native village in what is now Israel during the Israeli war for independence. He had fought as an irregular against the Israelis, drawing on his previous experience as a police railroad guard for the British Palestinian protectorate government.
Having fought on the losing side, Jeidi and three brothers had to abandon their 60-acre family farm. Three of the brothers ran for Gaza; the eldest, for Jordan. They have been separated ever since. For the first few years, Jeidi and his family lived in a series of tents, eventually building a more substantial house in Canada Camp near Rafah, raising three sons and a daughter. In 1982, when the Israelis wanted to build a road as a demarcation line between southern Gaza and neighboring Egypt, the surveyor`s line went through Jeidi`s house, and it was condemned.
”They paid me $1,000 for a house that had cost me $30,000,” Jeidi said, ”and they gave me an empty lot of 200 square yards in another housing project. I had no choice but to build a new house there.
”On the 20th of December, 1986, the Israeli security forces came at 3:30 a.m. to my new house. They found me and my children home, except for one son, Khalid (then 20 years old). They asked me for Khalid, and I told them I didn`t know where he was because I had gone to bed early. They told me they were taking me to jail and leaving me there until he showed up.”
The next day, he said, the security forces jailed his wife, his two other sons and his daughter as well because Khalid still had not appeared.
”After a week they came and told us that they had caught Khalid, and they released us,” he continued. ”Nobody told us what he was wanted for, where he was being held or what was happening. We were told nothing. On Feb. 11, 1987, the Israeli forces came back to my house and cordoned off the whole neighborhood at about 1:30 p.m. I had been at home waiting that day for the ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross) to come and give me news about where Khalid was being held and what was happening to him.
”They (the Israelis) came in Jeeps, along with a bulldozer. They told me they had orders to demolish my house. I was told, `You have only one half hour to remove what you want to save, otherwise everything that is left inside will be destroyed with the house.` I asked them: `Why? What was my crime to deserve this?` They said they had to punish me as the father of Khalid because he had commited several crimes against the security of Israel.”
Jeidi started pulling out what he could from the house, and precisely half an hour later, he was ordered to stop, and the bulldozer went to work. It took 15 minutes to pulverize his home. Five more months passed before Jeidi learned the charges against his son, he said. In July, 1987, Khalid was tried, convicted and sentenced to life in prison for stabbing two Israeli settlers to death in an open-air market in Gaza.
The Israeli military government in the Gaza Strip is a grim, no-nonsense presence that looms over every facet of life of the territory. There is no pretense of civility when Israeli soldiers issue out of their heavily guarded, fortified quarters inside Gaza to make their daily patrols. The soldiers treat the Gazans with withering contempt and stop them randomly. The Gazans are mute, but there is deadly fury in their eyes as they produce identity cards on demand. For 20 years Gaza Strip was an untended pressure cooker waiting to explode. And last December it exploded with a force that shocked not just the rest of the world but the Israelis and Palestinians themselves.
The rest of the world was stunned by the severe Israeli crackdown inside the occupied territories after refugee youths rose up in Gaza last December. Led by students, the Palestinian intifada against Israeli occupation troops continues.
More than 250 Palestinians and six Israelis have died in this conflict. Hundreds of Palestinians have been severely beaten by Israeli troops in a deliberate pattern designed to quell the unrest. Scores of Palestinians believed to be leaders of the uprising have been separated from their families and expelled. Thousands have been imprisoned under a policy of preventive detention whereby they can be held up to six months without formal charges. Dozens of Palestinian homes have been bulldozed by Israeli troops because an occupant of the house was suspected of ”crimes against the security of Israel.”
Israel has used each of those instruments of suppression in Gaza throughout its 21-year occupation. More than a year before the Gaza uprising erupted last December, the Independent Commission on International
Humanitarian Issues urged that more attention be paid to protecting the dispossessed Palestinians. The commission went so far as to suggest having UNHCR replace UNRWA so it could protect Palestinians from Israeli abuses.
”The events of recent years have illustrated a desperate need for the physical protection of civilian refugees, a role for which neither UNHCR nor UNRWA is adequately equipped,” a 1986 commission study said. ”The protection needs of the Palestinian refugees are not limited to physical protection. They include the protection of their fundamental human rights, and some very complicated problems stemming from the statelessness that many of them suffer. . . .”
Late in September, 1987, more than two months before the intifada, a Western administrator of refugee programs in Gaza described his suspicions of a coming Palestinian revolt. For more than a year Gazan youths had been engaged in escalating civil disobedience, and Israeli troops in turn had escalated their responses.
”UNRWA is charged with maintaining the status quo in Gaza,” the administrator said. ”It spends about $40 million annually here, 70 percent on education, 20 percent on medical and 10 percent on welfare. With the way the Israelis are administering the occupied territories, all they are doing is building more and more sheer, spontaneous, homegrown Palestinian hatred towards them.
”Gaza is the worst of the occupied territories because of the high level of education attained by Palestinian children, but they cannot get any work other than low-paying manual labor inside Israel. Israel uses Gaza as a labor pool and has effectively stopped economic development in Gaza.
”We have had absolute frustration on the part of the young. They see no point in studying when all they are going to do is end up as laborers in Israel. The young are angry at their parents, who are resigned after so many lost wars and have sullenly accepted the status quo. They (Palestinian youths) pay little attention to the traditional Palestinian leaders such as the PLO, which they feel has never adequately fought for their rights.
”They have instead formed their own groups of 16- and 17-year-olds who roam the streets and lead even younger kids in confrontation with the soldiers. If children throw stones, the soldiers open fire, even on kids as young as 8 and 9 years old. The soldiers have no riot training or gear, but they open fire with standard infantry weapons. The children are arrested and put into prison, and new ones spring up. These kids don`t give a damn, and they don`t give a damn about dying.”
