Even the UN is having difficulty getting sufficient food and other supplies into Malawi to care for the refugees. Renamo continues to sabotage two main rail lines that once carried 90 percent of Malawi`s freight from Mozambican ports into and out of Malawi. Most supplies now must go on a circuitous truck route through the war-contested Mozambican province of Tete down to Durban, South Africa. Last November the number of army-protected convoys over that route were cut from six to three because of Renamo attacks. At that time the UN was importing 950 metric tons of corn every week to feed the 400,000 refugees, only about half the amount needed to feed so many people adequately, says one international relief official.
In Nsanje, the southernmost district of Malawi, the 220,000 Mozambicans settled there actually outnumbered the native Malawians by 30,000. In the shade of an enormous banyan tree there last November, I met one of the most recent arrivals.
”I arrived today, walking,” said Madeza Misikeni, a 33-year-old Mozambican farmer. He shared the shade of the tree with his two wives, three children and dozens of other refugees who, like him, had arrived that morning nearly naked and wracked with exhaustion. They were waiting to be registered by local officials.
Misikeni said he and his family walked for four nights from their home to get to Malawi.
”Renamo soldiers were in our area for a long time, fighting government troops,” he said. ”Renamo people were asking for food from the villages, and if you failed to give them any, they would torture and sometimes kill you. They came to my house one day, and I gave them food. I was afraid of their guns. Many, many people were being killed. I was afraid I would be killed.
”Nobody was working in their gardens anymore because if you were found by Renamo, they might force you to work as their porter. The day I left for Malawi the Renamo people were in our village forcing people to prepare their gardens. We were forced to give them seeds and plant their gardens, and we were forced to carry their dead after their fights with the army.
”We had knowledge that there was a big refugee camp here. Last Wednesday I just simply slipped away with my family. Soldiers were in the bush looking for people trying to escape, so we slept during the day in the bush and walked all night.”
Misikeni and his family sat with all of their worldly possessions in two baskets at their feet. They contained some tin cups and kettles and some metal farm tools. His youngest child, a 6-month-old baby, was covered with scabies. ”Most of the children are malnourished and sick,” he said. ”We just came with our baskets, with no blankets, no clothes and certainly no food. I expect more and more people to come.”
Misikeni was right. From November to last July, 200,000 more Mozambicans arrived in Malawi, and the rate of their arrival has increased from 20,000 to 30,000 a month. By Christmastime there should be 750,000 Mozambicans in Malawi.
The additional competition for Malawian food, land, water and medical facilities deeply worries refugee and development experts working inside the country. Malawi until four years ago was generally considered self-sufficient in food and-an oddity in black Africa-a thriving, free-market economy free of international debt.
Now it appears Malawi may be sliding into a status similar to Ethiopia`s-that of a chronically food-short nation that will in the future depend heavily on international assistance to avoid famine. It has an annual birthrate of 2.4 percent but less than one acre of arable land per person, and most of its farmland is only marginally productive.
The country has one of the highest child-mortality rates in the world;
151 children out of 1,000 die in their first year, and 320 out of 1,000 die before their fifth birthday. Child-malnutrition levels in the rural areas are among the highest in the world, with 55 percent of the children under 5 showing symptoms of chronic malnutrition. In some parts of the country, the figure is as high as 65 percent. The addition of 750,000 destitute Mozambicans to an already impoverished people could spell tragedy for Malawi.
”The refugees are camping out on farm fields, taking already very limited land out of production,” one aid official said. ”They are cutting down wood for fuel and accelerating deforestation and degradation of land, creating long-term problems for the government. The health concerns the refugees bring with them are very serious for Malawi.
”Few of the Mozambicans, when they arrive here, and only 40 percent of all Malawians are covered by inoculations. The government health services responded magnificently to the refugees, diverting much of the country`s primary health-care resources to them. But that has compounded the problems of an already inadequate health-care system for Malawians. There are only 18 Malawian doctors in the country, and very few trained health workers.”
Thus far the Malawians have been extraordinarily accepting of the Mozambican refugees. Perhaps that is because most of the early arrivals are from areas close to Malawi`s border, which means they are ethnically related. As the war grinds on, however, the newer arrivals are coming from deeper and deeper inside Mozambique, and thus have no tribal or family claims on Malawian hospitality. Most refugee officials in Malawi believe resentment will eventually show its face to the refugees.
”How long Malawians are going to continue to be tolerant is a matter of speculation,” one UN official said. ”We don`t expect them to be always hospitable when their own situation continues to get worse.”
A catastrophe similar to that of Malawi is building in tiny Swaziland, another landlocked country, which shares borders with South Africa and Mozambique. A nation of 720,000 people and smaller in area than New Jersey, it now has 60,000 Mozambicans and 7,500 black South Africans living in refugee camps and settlements.
Swaziland and Mozambique share an 80-mile border, and so far Renamo has not operated heavily there. International relief workers believe that if Renamo became more active near that border, more people would come to Swaziland. Already 250,000 Mozambicans have fled into South Africa from areas close to Swaziland.
”There are a million people in rural areas inside Mozambique that are within a five-day walk from here,” said a UN official in Swaziland. ”If Renamo brings the war into that area, the Mozambicans would go either for . . . South Africa, or they would come here. Even if only 10 percent came this way, it would overwhelm us, and it would overwhelm the country.”
Already Swazi newspapers are filled with stories blaming Mozambican refugees for the rising crime rates and increasing disease in the country. At a public meeting of top government officials in July this year, the Mozambican refugees emerged as the issue that most concerned Swazis, who demanded to know how long the country would have to continue ceding land to refugees. The government itself has for more than a year refused to earmark additonal land for UN refugee camps.
So far, however, neither Malawi nor Swaziland has turned away refugees who appear on their borders. But increasingly other nations in the world already saddled with long-term refugee problems are going to extraordinary lengths to keep out new arrivals.
Mozambicans trying to escape into South Africa, for example, have to overcome a macabre series of lethal barriers to get through. The refugees are trying to reach the black ”homelands” created by South Africa. Mozambique does not want its citizens to flee to the hated South African apartheid regime and has built a no-man`s-land to stop them. It is a narrow strip running along the border of the two countries that has been heavily seeded with land mines. Those who succeed in crossing this barrier must then choose between two obstacle courses. One is a series of three parallel fences, erected by the South African government in 1986, that runs from Swaziland for about 40 miles north to the southern edge of the Kruger National Game Park. Two lower fences with a higher one between them run along the length of the border. The two lower fences are there to keep stray wild animals from running into the higher center fence, which, topped with razor-sharp concertina wire and carrying an electric charge, is designed to discourage refugees from crossing over. In its first year of operation, the charged fence has proved fatal to at least 36 would-be refugees, according to the United Nations.
Refugees who don`t want to risk the fence can cross into South Africa through the game park. No fences there, but they face two other obstacles-South African authorities and the wild animals, especially lions and crocodiles.
Refugees caught inside the park by South African authorities are immediately arrested and dumped back into Mozambique. As a result, refugees hide in the bush during the day and try to cross the park at night.
More Top Picks How To Handle Homework Meltdowns Without Yelling
”If they get into the park,” says a refugee official in Swaziland,
”some get eaten by the animals. The rivers are jammed with crocodiles, and the lions are developing a taste for human flesh because they`re such easy prey.”
Deaths in the park are common enough that they rate only a paragraph or two in South African newspapers. Last Dec. 3, in a section deep inside the newspaper devoted to local news, the Star, a Johannesburg English-language daily, ran the following account:
”On Sunday a group of people, thought to be Mozambican refugees, scattered when a large crocodile grabbed a woman and disappeared with her under dense growth in the Crocodile River.
”The woman`s body was seen later alongside a large crocodile, which became aggressive when they approached.
”A search later brought in only pieces of clothing.”
That Mozambicans still try this harrowing trek to get into South Africa is a testament to their tenacious will to survive. The same could be said for hundreds of thousands of refugees elsewhere in the world who have had to overcome enormous odds in their flight from danger.
Untold thousands of Vietnamese have died anonymously in the last 10 years in small, unseaworthy boats in the South China Sea. They have drowned when their boats capsized. Or they have been murdered by pirates. Or they have starved to death when their boats` engines failed and they drifted aimlessly on an endless, watery void.
The exodus of the ”boat people” from Vietnam reached its peak in 1979, when as many as 50,000 people were fleeing by sea each month. Thailand, by virtue of its geography, was the hardest-hit country of first asylum. At the same time that Vietnamese boats were piling up on Thai beaches, tens of thousands of Cambodians were fleeing over Thailand`s eastern border, and like numbers of Laotians were fleeing across its northern border.
Faced with feeding and housing this increasing accumulation of unwanted humanity, with little meaningful help from the outside world, Thailand took drastic measures. Thai naval vessels began towing Vietnamese back out to sea in their leaky boats, condemning many of them to certain death. In June, 1979, the Thais rounded up 40,000 Cambodian refugees and forced them at gunpoint to re-enter their own country down a steep escarpment into a heavily mined field. Ten thousand people died in the exercise, either from exploding mines or from Thai gunfire when they tried to turn back.
In this, Thailand was not alone. Other nations in the region also began turning Vietnamese boat people back out to sea. As cruel as the policy was, it succeeded in getting the international community to react. A special UN session was called in Geneva in July, 1979, to alleviate the plight of the refugees and to assure the Southeast Asian nations of first asylum that they would not be saddled with a permanent refugee population. Thus began the remarkable effort to resettle Indochinese exiles in third countries.
To date, more than 1 million Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians have been resettled in the U.S., Canada and Australia. Another 150,000 have been resettled in such Western European nations as France, Great Britain and the Scandinavian countries. By 1981, however, the initial burst of welcome for the Indochinese refugees had waned in the West.
Refugee experts began to worry that the wide-scale resettlement of Indochinese was exacerbating the problem, luring more and more people across borders with the promise of new lives in rich, industrialized countries. This fear has been mixed with so-called Western ”compassion fatigue,” brought about by years of seemingly endless crisis intervention in Third World famine and refugee situations. Together those forces have gradually curtailed Western resettlement programs for Indochinese.
Cambodians, Laotians and Vietnamese are highly distrusted and disliked by the Thais, and to give them refuge year after year is a continuing dilemma for Thai politicians. The idea that the Thais might allow Indochinese refugees to settle permanently in their country is totally out of the question. The idea that the rest of the world will default on promises to empty the camps through resettlement is a recurring political nightmare for Thailand.
A country of first asylum like Thailand becomes paranoid as it watches Western commitment to refugee resettlement fade. In 1981 Thailand instituted a new policy to dam the continual flow of Indochinese. Under ”humane deterrence,” the Thais deliberately make life in the refugee camps difficult. Housing is barely adequate, and refugees are restricted throughout their stay from leaving their cramped, guarded compounds. Some refugees are refused the right to apply for resettlement in other countries, as is the case with 300,000 Cambodians housed in Thai-Cambodian border camps. The idea is to make the lot of the refugees so miserable that no more will come.
Humane deterrence has not worked. Though the numbers of people fleeing Indochina dwindled initially, they increased again in 1987. By last January, new arrivals of Vietnamese boat people in Thailand had reached 2,500 a month. The upsurge in boat people has meant a renewed source of prey for Thai pirates, who have been a constant source of torment for refugees. More and better naval patrols on refugee sea routes have curtailed piracy somewhat but not stopped it.
Last January, for example, 8 of 157 refugee boats landing in Thailand encountered pirates during their escape. Refugees in six boats were simply robbed of gold, jewelry and other belongings. The other two refugee vessels were rammed by pirate ships, killing five in one and seven in the other; six more refugees were lost at sea. Seven survivors of the latter boat also reported that two women were plucked from the water and abducted by the pirates. Since piracy statistics in the Gulf of Siam were first compiled in 1981, 659 refugee women and girls have been similarly abducted by pirates, 357 of them never to be seen again.
Alarmed by the growing new influx of boat people, Thailand in January reinstituted its policy of towing refugee boats back out to sea. The small boats then head for other Southeast Asian nations, usually Malaysia and Indonesia, both of which also have a history of refusing refugee vessels. In April a boat carrying 125 Vietnamese was fired upon by Indonesian soldiers as it tried to land, killing one refugee and wounding another. The boat eventually landed in Malaysia.
The U.S. has led the Western nations` protests against these dangerous
”push back” policies of Southeast Asian first-asylum nations. Such criticism from the U.S. is viewed by the Thais as sheer hypocrisy because in 1981 President Reagan signed an executive order directing the U.S. Coast Guard to intercept boats with would-be Haitian refugees headed for Florida. The policy is still in force, and Haitian boats, when caught, are still towed back to Haiti by the Coast Guard.
”In recent years it has become quite clear that it is not wise to preach what one cannot practice,” says Zia Rizvi of the Independent Commission on International Humanitarian Issues. ”You can`t tell the Third World to open their doors to refugees while you are slamming your own.”
Thailand and other Southeast Asian nations argue that many Vietnamese now fleeing their homes are not legitimate refugees. They claim that recent arrivals are less victims of persecution than ”economic” refugees merely escaping grinding poverty under Vietnam`s communist system. Of the refugees landing in Thailand last January, however, 73 percent of the families either included somebody who had been jailed in Vietnamese ”re-education” centers for political beliefs or were ethnic Chinese who had suffered racial persecution.
Who is a political refugee and who is an economic migrant is an increasingly blurred issue, particularly in Southeast Asia. Conditions must be excruciating any time people feel compelled to leave home, abandon their society and all that they know and love and risk death to reach an alien and inhospitable land.
Cao Thi Phi Sa and Cao Dang Ra made their wrenching farewells to Vietnam in November, 1987, arriving in Thailand safely last Dec. l. Their boat didn`t sink, they weren`t attacked by pirates and they arrived a month before Thai naval vessels began towing refugee boats back to sea. Moreover, they stand an excellent chance of jumping to the head of the line to emigrate to the U.S.
That is because Sa, 12, and her brother, Ra, 10, arrived in Thailand without their parents or other close relatives. They are housed in Phanat Nikhom refugee camp in Central Thailand, in a special compound that stands as an example of how ”Band-Aid” refugee policies, no matter how well-intentioned, often turn into something verging on the perverse.
Sa and Ra live in what is called the ”unaccompanied-minors compound” in the camp. In March the two long, tin-roofed buildings in the compound housed 307 children, all of them 14 years old or younger. The youngest was 4 years old. All of them arrived from Vietnam without parents or family, either sent away from home deliberately by their parents or separated from them in one way or another during their escape.
The children are well-looked after by nurses, missionaries and Vietnamese lay workers, but the emptiness of life without their parents, especially for the younger ones, is heartbreaking.
”The children are supposed to go to sleep at 9:30 at night,” said a Vietnamese seminarian, also a refugee, who works in the children`s compound.
”I go into the dormitories and check on them about 11. Some of the children just sit by themselves and cry. They tell me they are homesick. They have no relatives, and they feel lonely. They worry because they don`t have enough clothes. They worry about resettlement.”
Sa said she and her brother were living in Saigon when their father arranged for their family to leave by boat last Nov. 11. They had gone with their parents from Saigon to Ha Tien, a coastal town near the Cambodian border, and gathered on the beach at nightfall with other Vietnamese who had paid for their passage. She and her brother were put into a rowboat and taken to a larger vessel moored offshore. They then waited on deck for their parents, who were to come out in a later rowboat, she said.