Westerners working with the Hmong in the camps, however, believe that is the compelling reason older Hmong are reluctant to leave for America. ”They get letters from relatives in the States all the time,” said one refugee worker at Ban Vinai. ”The news is bad for the older people. They know the older ones in the States are just too old to master English. They get there, and all of a sudden they have to depend on their children to get by in life. The kids learn the language, the kids dial the phones, do the talking, drive the cars. The kids get the jobs and bring home the money. It flies in the face of their tradition. It means the older ones will have to relinquish family leadership. They will never be the head of their families again. They will not be the boss.”
Chang`s oldest son, Lee, 30, himself married to one wife and the father of five, would not be so brutally frank about the reasons for his father`s reluctance to go to the U.S. Nevertheless, he said he is ready to break tradition-and, perhaps, Chang`s heart-by disobeying his father.
”Right now I`ve decided to go to the U.S. independent of my father. We have been in this camp too long, and I am at an age when I have to make my opportunities in the U.S. before I am too old. I will try to explain to my father the reasons why I am going. If he understands, maybe he will go with me. I wouldn`t want to go without him and my mother.
”Right now he is wavering again. He thinks he can`t go because he can`t speak English, so he won`t be able to work. It is very difficult for him.”
The Hmong experience is one of the more horrible legacies of modern proxy warfare. The Hmong were courted and used in a war by a larger, richer, more powerful society-America. America lost a war; the Hmong probably lost everything. While the U.S. works vigorously to make amends with individual Hmong, the Hmong culture may not survive, not in Thailand, not in the U.S. and possibly not in Laos.
The Hmong reluctance to accept resettlement in the U.S. is odd when viewed against the belief of refugees elsewhere that America is morally obligated to take them in. The streets of Karachi, Pakistan`s teeming port city, can be as mean as any in the world if you are broke, homeless and desperate to escape. Karachi is the home of Pakistan`s ”other” refugee problem, some 10,000 Iranians who have fled Ayatollah Khomeini`s Iran.
Some are legitimate refugees, usually members of minority religious groups singled out for persecution by the Khomeini regime, including Jews, Bahais and Christians. They are relatively easy to resettle in Europe, Israel and the U.S.
Others are far more difficult. Members of two Marxist Muslim sects that have been hounded to near-extinction in Iran, the Mujahideen Khalq and the Fedayeen Khalq, have found sanctuary in Karachi, where they have remained as unreconstructed, violent radicals. Nobody else in the world wants them, though Iran`s archenemy, Iraq, has funded their activities in Pakistan, enabling them to buy houses in some of Karachi`s best neighborhoods.
Their presence last year set off a national debate in Pakistan about the nation`s generosity to the displaced. It came after an Iranian hit squad launched a full-scale bomb, rocket and machine-gun attack on a Mujahideen Khalq house early one morning, rudely awaking the refugees` neighbors, including some of the most influential families in Pakistan. The battle transformed one of Karachi`s wealthiest suburbs into an Iranian battleground for a few brief, bloody minutes.
No matter how well-run a UNHCR operation can be in any given country, people who need services fall through the cracks. Perhaps 200,000 Afghan refugees live in Pakistan without being registered with UNHCR. Many, perhaps the majority of them, do so out of choice, usually because they want to live in a city and find work on their own, rather than being stuck in a rural camp. Tens of thousands of them, however, are in desperate need of UNHCR assistance but are blocked by Pakistani corruption. Nations of first asylum can write their own rules. Pakistan uses its own civil servants in all phases of the Afghan refugee effort, including registration for UNHCR benefits.
Registration officials are thought to charge Afghans ”registration fees” of up to $200 per person at some points on the border. If the refugees don`t pay, they don`t get ration cards or a place in a UNHCR camp.
The knottiest problem here for UNHCR, however, is the thousands of Iranian boys and young men who have traveled dangerous roads to escape the draft and the war against Iraq. Draft dodging is not a legitimate
qualification for refugee status, no matter whose war is being avoided. Most of these young men are from wealthy or middle-class Iranian families who supported Khomeini`s predecessor, the late Shah Pahlavi. Many have family members in the U.S. and desperately want to get there. Their parents have the money to smuggle them out, but once they are inside Pakistan, UNHCR can do little for them.
”The big problem is that UNHCR doesn`t accept draft dodgers as refugees,” said a UN official in Karachi. ”Their cases as refugees are rejected, but Pakistan allows them to stay unofficially to work out their own lives.”
The truly rich get themselves to Europe or the U.S. rather easily. The majority become a sort of nonpeople, prey to all sorts of con artists and Karachi lowlife.
Hamed Reza Hashemi arrived in Pakistan from Mashhad, Iran`s third largest city, in October, 1986, when he was 15 years old. Hashemi is the youngest of seven boys born to a Mashhad businessman. Three brothers already live in New Jersey. Another brother, Saeid, 22, followed him out of Iran in November, 1986, and remains with him.
Hashemi said he was arrested by Iranian secret police a few months before he fled to Pakistan. He had been attending high school in Mashhad and had joined a pro-shah underground protest group after 36 boys from his school had been forced to join the army. He said he was arrested one night when he was caught placing photographs of the shah`s son on windows of parked cars. He was detained for 24 hours and beaten severely, he said, then released to a hospital with broken cheekbones and whip lacerations.
After a week`s recovery, he said his parents told him he would be safer if he left Iran. They scraped together $2,000 to pay a Baluchi tribesman to take him into Pakistan. The escape routes, however, are well-traveled not only by draft dodgers but by bands of smugglers operating on both sides of the border, and it was Hashemi`s bad fortune to stumble into a running, three-day gunfight between drug smugglers and border guards as soon as he got into Pakistan.
”We kept trying to avoid the fight by running from one mountain pass to the next,” Hashemi said, ”but each time we arrived at a new place, the fight would come our way. One day when we were running, I became separated from my guide. I became lost and wandered for four days by myself. A car full of Pakistani border police found me the first day and arrested me. They told me they were taking me back to Iran and drove for half an hour toward the border. When they stopped, they asked me how much I had. I took off a shoe and showed them an American $100 bill. They took it and let me out of the car.”
Hashemi was lucky. UNHCR accepted the documentation he had brought with him that showed his arrest and subsequent hospitalization in Iran and proved that he was not just a draft resister. He received a coveted ”blue” card from the UN identifying him as a refugee and granting him a living allowance of $60 a month and the chance to seek third-country resettlement by legitimate means.
Hashemi studied English in Islamabad for 17 months, then joined his brother in Karachi. They get a little money from home, but they must stretch their budget by sharing an $11-a-night room in a third-class tourist hotel with four other Iranian boys. There are no jobs for them, and they cannot finish school in Pakistan, so they idle away their time.
Nobody much wants them. Hashemi had an unsuccessful interview with Swedish authorities, but he and his brother most want to go to the U.S., where three older brothers got asylum while attending colleges. The U.S., however, won`t interview them.
”The U.S. says they will only take Bahais, Jews and Christians but no Moslems,” Hashemi said. ”We don`t need America to pay us anything. Just to go there as refugees and go to school so that we can be with our brothers-that is all we want.”
The Iranian draft dodgers are fair game in Karachi. Pakistanis and Baluchis approach them in hotel lobbies and coffee houses, offering them forged and stolen travel documents ($350 for a Pakistani passport, $1,100 for a European one). Most Pakistani immigration officials can spot the bogus travel papers, so bribes-as high as $1,500-are arranged to get them through the gates.
The whole process has bankrupted many families in Iran. Usually the exercise is for naught, anyway. European airline personnel, trained to spot phony travel documents, refuse to take the boys on board. Should they get through to Europe, most are caught by immigration officials and returned to Pakistan and end up with a jail sentence. Worse still, many of the document peddlers are in collusion with Karachi airport officials, who arrest the boys there (after bribes change hands, of course) and send them to jail for six to nine months.
With legitimate refugee papers, Hashemi and his brother eventually have a chance for a bona-fide resettlement offer. But hundreds of draft dodgers live in seedy rooming houses in an area of Karachi called Lee Market. A burly Iranian army deserter named Asghar lives there, sharing a 40-square-foot room with five other Iranians. None has a UN refugee card, so they pool whatever resources they have to pay the $50-a-month rent and buy food. They share three cots, taking turns sleeping on the floor. A filthy toilet and washbasin are in the hall, shared with other tenants in the roach-infested building.
Asghar remains in Pakistan illegally as he tries to get to Amsterdam, where he says he has a wife and two children who emigrated legally in 1985, a year before he deserted from the army. At 34 he is the patriarch of his room. The next oldest man is 24.
Asghar takes a paternal interest in the two youngest, who are brothers, 15 and 19 years old. Their parents happened to be in England when the shah left Iran, and they remained there, he said. They finally arranged their sons` escape to Pakistan in 1986, but the boys arrived with no documentation or passports, so they are trapped in Karachi.
”I am going crazy sitting in this place, but I am even more worried about those two,” Asghar said, nodding at the youths. ”There is a lot of heroin in this neighborhood, and I am afraid they are giving up on hope. Right now I won`t let them out of the building. Last week the younger one got into trouble on the street. A man offered to give him 1,000 rupees ($60), asking the boy to go with him.
”Somebody told me what was going on, and I ran down to the street and tracked them down. I found this Pakistani, this pimp, who was going to take this boy and turn him into a prostitute. I handled that my own way. You can`t go to the police here if you don`t have a UN blue card. That will just draw you into deeper trouble.”
The moment a person steps across a border to seek asylum in another nation, he is supposed to be protected by international protocols. In theory, such a person cannot be sent back against his will, at least until his case is examined. In practice, with so many of them coming continuously, most refugees don`t get individual hearings.
Most of those granted asylum are protected by UNHCR against forcible repatriation, military attacks from their home countries and legal and economic exploitation by the host nation-theoretically. In practice, it rarely works that way.
International legislation drawn up after World War II assumed that the countries granting asylum would also provide the same legal, police and military protection they extend to their own citizens. But today`s host countries often are too poor to provide such services even to their own citizens. When refugee camps are attacked by military forces or local citizens, UNHCR can do little but protest.
Officially there are about 500,000 Eritrean refugees living in Sudan. Unofficially the figure is far higher, as tens of thousands of Eritreans move into larger cities and towns without documentation, seeking work in the local economy. For the most part they are the urban, better-educated, better-trained Eritreans who were never farmers and for whom extended stays in isolated, rural camps is a form of ghastly torture.
In Port Sudan, a city of 300,000 and the nation`s major seaport, for instance, 60,000 Eritreans live and work without direct UNHCR assistance. They live mostly in segregated refugee slums, cramped shacks and hovels without sewers or water, eking out a living from low-paying jobs. The UN helps by funding schools, hospitals and health clinics in the city, which is supposed to offer services to refugees as it would to citizens.
”The refugees are in fact sharing everything with the Sudanese people in the city,” said a Sudanese refugee official. ”Even the job market is open fully to them to compete equally with people in the town, and people complain that wages stay low because of the big labor market. The city`s infrastructure was very fragile to begin with, and the refugees have overburdened it.
”It can`t handle the additional sewage problems and the demands on electricity. The additional population drives up prices on everything. During our recent drought, everybody was looking for safe drinking water, and the sellers were getting (75 cents) for each pail. Rent for a house that should be ($14) a month now costs ($70) a month.
”At first refugees were accepted warmly in Port Sudan, as it is in the tradition of the people here. Now, after all these years and the worsening of economic conditions for Sudan, this warm welcome has changed. Now there is resentment against all refugees, especially in the towns.”
In Khartoum, Sudan`s capital, police periodically round up Eritreans without residency or work permits. Eritrean community leaders complain that their people are regularly shaken down by corrupt police officials. Refugee women in the city, they say, are sometimes gang-raped by police and told not to complain under threat of deportaton to remote camps.
”Any man on the street can come up to you and identify himself as a policeman,” one Eritrean said. ”He can harass you and even rob you, and you have no recourse. Policemen can come into your house and rob you, and you have no recourse. You can`t go to the courts and charge them because you yourself will be charged with having no papers and no right to be where you are. So you just keep your mouth shut and try to stay out of people`s way.”
On May 27, 1987, six off-duty Sudanese soldiers in civilian clothes entered an Ethiopian refugee camp not far from Gedaref, a busy market town in the eastern part of Sudan. The soldiers went to the camp to get what they cannot get on the Sudanese market-liquor. Under Sudan`s Islamic law, the sale and consumption of liquor are strictly illegal, but in the camps, the refugees make a traditional Ethiopian wine for their own consumption.
According to all accounts, the Sudanese soldiers had a good time at the camp drinking much of the night away in a makeshift bar set up by a refugee. At the end of the night, the soldiers left the bar without paying but were surrounded by angry refugees before they got out of the camp. After an argument, the military men were soundly beaten for their arrogance but allowed to leave.
On May 28 rumors began to spread in the area that six Sudanese soldiers had been murdered in the camp by refugees. When the rumor hit Gedaref (a town of about 75,000 people with 7,000 unregistered Ethiopians who get by working in tea shops and as house servants), angry mobs of Sudanese began to gather.
”That night a mob gathered outside the local cinema,” said an Ethiopian refugee who works for a European humanitarian agency in Gedaref. ”When people came out of the cinema after the last film, they began to single out and beat any refugee they could find in the crowd. They used fists, stones and sticks. ”The next day it spread throughout the town. Any refugee found on the street was beaten. No refugees dared leave their homes, even to go out and buy food. In some cases, the mob was joined by soldiers, who went right into refugee houses and beat and robbed the people, raping the women. On Saturday, May 30, a man was beaten to death by a plainclothes policeman, and dozens of refugees were picked up and thrown in jail without charges.
”The violence continued for 15 to 20 days. You couldn`t move on foot or by vehicle. The official toll was one person killed in the town, and hundreds were injured. It got so far out of hand that finally the governor of the province had to come to the city to tell the local people the truth, that no soldiers had been murdered in the camp. But he did nothing to punish them for the violence they did to the refugees here. No Sudanese were arrested, no investigation was made. Instead, he blamed the refugees for the problem because they made the liquor.”
