THEY WERE PERSECUTED IN THEIR HOMELAND because of their ethnic identity. As they fled to the safety of a nearby country, many were stripped of identity papers and other documents that could prove they were citizens of the country that no longer wanted them. They congregated in refugee camps and waited for the world to take up their cause.
But, unlike the Albanian Kosovars who were similarly targeted for expulsion, the 100,000 ethnic Nepalese who fled to Nepal from the tiny Himalayan nation of Bhutan did not return to their homes after only three months as refugees. Instead, they have spent the decade stuck in the limbo of refugee camps, stateless orphans whose lives are on hold.
Their fate is more typical of the estimated 13.6 million refugees in the world, the human byproducts of wars and ethnic struggles that, in some cases, occurred decades ago. If, as Stalin said, one death is a tragedy but a million deaths is a statistic, the same seems to hold true for the world’s ability to focus on the mass of humanity living year after year in crowded camps or squeezed into the homes of friends or relatives.
Kosovo was a tragedy. But chronic refugee situations such as Bhutan, the countries of west Africa, Ethiopia, Afghanistan? The human misery in those and other parts of the world is cloaked in large, impersonal numbers.
In addition to the ranks of refugees, as many as 22 million people are thought to be “internally displaced,” driven from their homes but still living within the borders of their native country, often in even worse conditions than official refugees. With the rise in deliberate displacements of whole populations, the 1990s have witnessed the greatest number of uprooted people than any decade since the United Nations started tracking statistics after World War II.
“In many ways, it has been a depressing decade,” said Rachael Reilly, refugee policy director for the New York-based group Human Rights Watch.
Although the speedy return of the Kosovar refugees is unusual, Kosovo has many of the distinguishing features of 1990s refugee crises. It was an ethnic conflict. It involved the attempted expulsion of an entire group of people. And the nations of the world found it difficult to respond at first because it occurred within the boundaries of a sovereign country.
“It’s a very extreme situation,” said Robert DeVecchi, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “But it points out all the major themes.”
The end of the Cold War has helped ignite ethnic and religious conflicts in Europe and Asia that were once kept under restraint by communist regimes or Western-supported dictators. Those conflicts have produced a flood of refugees and displacements. At the same time, wave after wave of upheavals in Africa seem unrelated to the fall of the Berlin Wall 10 years ago, several experts say. Turmoil in Africa has turned many nations into not only the source of refugees but also havens for people fleeing from other countries.
In west Africa, more than 400,000 Liberians have fled the country to escape a murderous civil war, some of them heading to Sierra Leone. At the same time, a civil war in Sierra Leone uprooted more than 300,000 people in that country. Some of them sought refuge in Liberia.
“There’s almost no country in Africa that isn’t affected,” Reilly said. “There are whole generations who have spent their lives moving back and forth across borders.”
These recent upheavals come on top of long-standing refugee problems, such as the more than 3 million Palestinians in the Middle East who have been uprooted by wars stretching back to the creation of Israel in 1948. And more than 2.6 million Afghan refugees are still in Iran, Pakistan, India and Western Europe; many of them left Afghanistan in 1979, when the Soviet Union invaded.
Given the long-running struggles in some parts of world, some refugees have raised their families from infants to adults in the harsh conditions of refugee camps. An estimated 165,000 ethnic Sahrawi refugees from Western Sahara have lived in camps in the Sahara in Algeria since the mid-1970s.
“They’re stranded in limbo, and they lose life skills,” said Reilly. “You have teachers and doctors and engineers, and they find themselves with no outlets to use those skills.”
That could be the best of it. In Guinea, camps for refugees from Sierra Leone are so close to the border that forces from Sierra Leone have attacked the camps, killing many refugees, Reilly said. At a United Nations conference on population issues in New York last week, a UN official noted that it is not uncommon for female refugees in many parts of the world to be forced to trade sex for food.
For the children of refugees, opportunities for education are often limited as scarce funds are spent on food and shelter. Refugee children have a greater risk of drifting into lives of crime and of being recruited for rebel groups that perpetuate cycles of violence and turmoil.
Negotiations to allow refugees to return to their homes often drag on for years, with officials from the source country sometimes refusing to acknowledge that the refugees fled or were forced to leave. Bhutanese officials have said, for instance, that the ethnic Nepalese left because they want to shirk work and were attracted by the free food at the Nepalese refugee camps.
The children born in refugee camps often become bargaining chips in such negotiations. Because they were not born in the country their parents fled, one line of reasoning goes, they cannot be citizens entitled to return.
Still, many refugees eventually make it back to their native lands. One of the success stories of the decade was the repatriation of about 1 million people to Mozambique following the internationally mediated agreement to end its civil war.
But, if the nations of the world helped resolve that long-running conflict, many developed countries have displayed a tougher attitude about admitting refugees, experts note.
In previous decades, refugees were often seen as the innocent victims of Cold War struggles between the United States and the Soviet Union, such as the South Vietnamese and Laotians who fled Southeast Asia at the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. Many of those refugees were resettled in the U.S.
“There was a certain sense of responsibility,” said DeVecchi, a former director of the International Rescue Committee, a private refugee aid organization. “There was a sense that these were good guys who had been harmed by bad guys and that has all gone by the board now.”
Worried about being inundated by refugees and asylum-seekers, the U.S. and many West European countries have adopted entry restrictions. Some European countries now require that refugees have visas, a kind of Catch-22 condition.
“If you’re fleeing for your life, you can’t very well apply for a visa before you leave,” Reilly said.
These new barriers have been one reason that the number of people who are internally displaced has risen during the 1990s. With nowhere to go, people who have been driven from their homes have little choice but to seek whatever refuge they can find within their country’s borders.
Because they do not cross national boundaries, the people who are refugees inside their countries are hard to count. Estimates range from 5.9 million to 22 million, the number that Human Rights Watch cites. The U.S. Committee for Refugees, a private international aide group, estimates that 4 million people have been uprooted inside Sudan by that country’s long-running internal struggle. A million or more people may be displaced inside Angola, Afghanistan, and Colombia.
“In some cases, these people are in even worse situations than refugees because they are not able to get to a zone of safety,” said Andres Ramirez of the UN High Commissioner on Refugees. Because of reluctance to override a nation’s sovereignty, “the international community is not able to protect them very easily and some of them fall through the cracks.”
Even in countries that seem sympathetic to their displaced population, conditions can be grim. An estimated 300,000 Ethiopians have fled to other parts of their homeland to escape the trench warfare and artillery duels that have marked that country’s war with Eritrea. About 1,000 people have sought shelter in the caves and amid the rocky overhangs of the cliffs outside the city of Adigrat, according to a report last week by Refugees International. They have neither plastic sheeting nor blankets, two of the basic materials of refugee life. But, the report notes, they consider themselves safer than others who have moved in with relatives in Adigrat, which is subject to Eritrean shelling. The cliff dwellers are out of artillery range.
Refugee advocates worry that the Kosovo crisis may exhaust the world’s attention span for refugees. On the other hand, it has shown what developed countries can do when they want to. Reilly notes that refugees in Guinea get about $35 worth of aid a year. By comparison, if the aid that Kosovar refugees received for three months were to continue for a year, it would amount to about $450 a person.
“For the first time since the Indo-Chinese refugee crisis, the international community is once again willing to share the burden,” she said. “Our real concern is not that we begrudge the attention to the Kosovars. (But) it would be very sad if that attention were only restricted to European refugees.”
