Waves of Refugees

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Dec 25, 2000 | by Tom Carter

People are moving, but not because they want to. Millions of displaced people fleeing political and religious persecution are swamping efforts to help them survive their living nightmares.

The numbers are staggering and fail to express the depth of human misery they represent. Some 3.6 million Palestinian refugees are scattered in a 50-year diaspora around the world. Some 2.5 million Afghans are living in Iran and Pakistan. More than 1.5 million Africans have been displaced from their homelands.

Yugoslavia has nearly a half-million refugees and internally displaced persons. Germany hosts nearly 1 million refugees, mostly from Yugoslavia, Turkey, Iran and Iraq. India is accommodating more than 100,000 Tibetans, 66,000 Sri Lankans and 15,000 Bhutanese fleeing political and religious persecution.

According to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), created in 1951 to help settle displaced people after World War II, more than 22 million people in the world today have been forced from their homes by war, famine or other disaster. They are living in camps, seeking asylum and wandering in deserts.

"We have been very busy -- it is a reflection of a very messy world," says Sadako Ogata, the current high commissioner who will step down at the end of this year after a decade on the job. "I hope we do not have to be as busy during the next 50 years."

Speaking at the National Press Club in Washington, in conjunction with the publication of The State of the World's Refugees: 50 Years of Humanitarian Action, Ogata describes her job as rewarding but frustrating. "The problem is: How do you protect real people, in real danger?" she asks.

In 1951, the UNHCR had a staff of 33 and a budget of $300,000. Today, it employees more than 5,000 people, has a budget of nearly $1 billion and assists some 26 million refugees. Its early focus was on Europe, but it has grown to assist people in 120 nations.

"My 10 years was a rather turbulent 10 years" says Ogata, 73. "To have over a million refugees in a crisis, starting with Iraq, going to Yugoslavia, the Great Lakes region in Africa -- all of them more than a million -- was quite a strain. At least our input made a large difference for a lot of people to survive."

The State of the World's Refugees, a chronicle of human misery, begins with the problems faced by European refugees right after World War II and after the failed Hungarian revolution of 1956. The book continues to the intractable problems that refugees in Africa face today--from genocide to the militarization of camps to HIV/AIDS.

The world's richest countries give money to areas where they perceive a national interest, but they are less generous to more remote regions, says Ogata, who underlines the difference between the world's generous "over-response" to Kosovo as opposed to the scant attention paid to parts of Africa. "I had a very hard time getting international attention on the refugee issues in Africa, and there was a lot of resentment on the part of African leaders," she says.

African leaders charge that the international community gave as much as $120 per refugee for the Kosovo crisis, but less than $30 for each African refugee. While Ogata dismisses the figures as comparing apples and oranges, she acknowledges that racism may have been part of the problem. The West responded to Kosovo because it was "in Europe's backyard."

"In a crisis, I get a lot of money," adds Ogata. "It is on television in front of everyone. But when the camera no longer looks at the misery, that is when the funding drops. But that is when I need it most."

Currently, the UNHCR is concerned about Afghanistan, Angola and Congo. More than 2.5 million Afghans are living in camps in Pakistan, Iran and India; these refugees are reluctant to return to their homeland dominated by the fundamentalist Islamic Taleban, which restricts human rights, especially women's rights to education and employment.

But the host nations are struggling with declining economies. "They are tired of having these people and want them to go home," says Ogata. In Angola, for example, the long civil war created an "enormous internally displaced population and there is a feeling of giving up." Likewise, the war in Congo has created an internally displaced population of about 1 million. Additionally, 300,000 Congolese are refugees in neighboring countries, and 200,000 refugees from neighboring countries are in Congo.

One of the more difficult problems facing the UNHCR are "militarized refugee camps," says Ogata. "Most of today's wars are internal, and the militarized people are part of the group that has lost the war and moved out with the victims of the war." Tanzania has about 400,000 refugees from Burundi -- many of them ethnic Hutu combatants. The UNHCR came under harsh criticism from the government of Burundi, which accused her agency of housing, feeding and protecting terrorists. Ogata's response was to bring in Tanzanian police to prevent the use of the camps as rebel bases. The plan worked. "This is the first year the president of Burundi did not accuse me," she says.