Tran Huu Tiep told me his story in Hei Ling Chau camp six weeks before Hong Kong announced its June policy of repatriation for Vietnam refugees. Since then the camp`s refugees have staged several protests, including setting small fires and, early in August, holding a three-day hunger strike involving 3,000 persons.
The gradual hardening of world attitudes about refugees usually is linked to the long duration of the wars that sent the refugees away from their homes. The humanitarian impulse to care for homeless war victims turns into resentment when, as months become years and years become decades, these victims and their camps somehow never manage to disappear.
The longer refugees remain in camps and the longer the conflicts that sent them running spill yet more victims across borders, the greater the resentment. Refugees become ”economic migrants.” They are called a disruptive force within the countries that give them asylum. Or they are accused of being parasites who live comfortably on the international dole.
At the end of World War II it was relatively easy to identify legitimate refugees among the 17 million homeless wandering around Europe. Those who simply left home to get out of the way were in due course returned. Those who fled persecution for racial, religious or political reasons were resettled in safe countries where they could begin life anew. They were treated by and large on a case-by-case basis.
The post-World War II refugee practice became international refugee law in the 1951 UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. That convention defined a refugee as a person who, ”owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality.”
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The 1951 convention stipulated, ”No Contracting State shall expel or return a refugee in any manner whatsoever to the frontiers of territories where his life or freedom would be threatened” on account of the reasons mentioned above.
Since 1951, there have been more than 30 other international agreements and about 20 regional agreements dealing with refugees in specific parts of the world. The most important of the latter was the 1969 Organization of African Unity (OAU) Convention Governing the Specific Aspects of Refugee Problems in Africa.
Under international law, if any nation wishes to bar its doors to refugees, it can do so because it can exercise its sovereign power to control movement across its borders.
The OAU convention tried to deal with this by pledging that its ”Member States . . . shall use their best endeavors. . . to receive refugees and to secure the settlement of those refugees who (cannot return home).”
The OAU convention also recognized that the changing nature of warfare had made identification of refugees more difficult. The 1951 definition was based on a European concept of ideological totalitarianism in the model of Hitler or Stalin, in which individuals are singled out as enemies of the state. The OAU recognized that 1960s Africa was experiencing new mass movements of people fleeing home not because they were singled out but because they were endangered by random, often mindless violence growing out of post-colonial wars and terrorism.
To deal with that, the OAU broadened its definition: ”The term `refugee` shall also apply to every person who, owing to external aggression, occupation, foreign domination or events seriously disturbing public order . . . is compelled to leave his place of habitual residence.”
Since 1969 the OAU convention generally has become the norm, though a nonbinding one, for refugee treatment worldwide.
The problem with all these international refugee agreements and protocols is that they often are ignored in the heat of conflict. Political expediency and political advantage, usually couched in terms of state sovereignty rights, always take precedence over the rights of refugees.
The refugees` only support in exile is the international bureaucracy created to house, clothe, feed and care for them. These organizations, too, evolved out of World War II and led to the creation of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) in 1951.
UNHCR has a mandate to protect, assist and find ”permanent solutions”
for refugees. For the last several years UNHCR has operated with an annual budget approaching half a billion dollars largely contributed by wealthy Western nations to share the burden with Third World nations who give sanctuary to refugees. Its staff of 1,500 handles funding and administrative organization but provides few direct services to refugees.
UNHCR contracts out the actual work in camps to about 300 nongovernmental organizations. These organizations are a diverse group of large and small units all over the world. They include such church-related groups as Catholic Relief Services, Lutheran World Relief and Quaker, Baptist and Mennonite agencies. Some have been organized specifically to deal with refugees, such as the American Refugee Committee or the International Rescue Committee. Others are humanitarian groups active in a broad spectrum of Third World development, among them CARE, Oxfam, Medecins Sans Frontieres, World Vision and Africare.
By contracting day-to-day services out to other agencies, UNHCR is able to pursue the most important aspects of its mandate-providing protection to refugees and finding permanent solutions to their plight.
No international protocol explicitly prohibits nations from expelling their own citizens or denying them citizenship or livelihood in their own land. But although all human beings supposedly are protected against such depredations by the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, there are 13 million refugees who can testify that that declaration is meaningless.
Mass expulsion has become a worldwide phenomenon, a tool of governments attempting to rid themselves of opposition. According to Alan Dowty, a University of Notre Dame political scientist and the author of a 1987 book on emigration, ”Closed Borders,” Vietnam, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Laos, Mongolia, Burma, Rwanda, Iraq, South Yemen, Iran, Uganda, Cyprus, Sri Lanka, Indonesia and Sudan have engaged in mass expulsions in recent years.
In addition, Dowty cites other nations that have no mass-expulsion policy but have nonetheless viewed the exodus of citizens as a convenient solution to their internal conflicts: Guatemala, El Salvador, the Philippines, Lebanon, Angola, Mozambique, Chad, Zaire and Western Sahara. Dowty`s list is a pretty fair catalogue of the origins of most of the world`s refugees.
”In all the situations taking place during the past decade,” said a 1981 UN Human Rights Commission study on mass exodus, ”violations of the spirit, and frequently of the letter, of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its Preamble must be recognized.”
It is in this totally political and often vicious atmosphere that UNHCR must try to operate as a nonpolitical, humanitarian agency. Even its access to refugees is not automatic. When people begin to flee one country for another, UNHCR can provide its services only after it is invited to do so by the receiving nation.
The politics of refugees immediately came into focus when UNHCR was created in 1951: It was prohibited from taking care of 700,000 Palestinians chased from their homes in Israel. Anti-Israeli Arab nations prevented the Palestinians from falling under UNHCR care and protection because they wanted to keep the Palestinian refugee problem alive.
Under the UNHCR mandate, Palestinians might have been resettled permanently in other parts of the Arab world, making Palestinian claims against Israel academic at best. Instead, a ”temporary” organization, UN Relief and Works Agency (UNWRA), has provided assistance to the Palestinian refugees for nearly 40 years.
Similarly, when Thailand, for its own political reasons, did not want to classify hundreds of thousands of Cambodians living on its eastern border as refugees in 1981, the Thais simply refused UNHCR permission to care for the Cambodians and classified them as ”displaced persons.” Yet another agency, the UN Border Relief Operation (UNBRO), was created to care for those people. UNHCR has no army at its disposal to stop or prevent the cruelties of forced exile or to protect refugees in border camps from further violence at the hands of hostile armies or local residents. It has no power to force countries that become sanctuaries to provide the exiles with even minimal humanitarian treatment.
”Its only weapon,” said the Independent Commission on International Humanitarian Issues in a 1986 report, ”is diplomatic pressure in the form of moral persuasion, protest and, ultimately, public condemnation.”
While it feeds, shelters, clothes and tries to protect refugees, UNHCR also tries to find permanent solutions that will get refugees out of camps and allow them to resume normal lives, ideally back in their home countries or, failing that, either in the host or a third country.
The overall failure to achieve permanent solutions has meant that refugees remain in camps and settlements by the millions year after year. Usually the camps are makeshift affairs, built hastily in the heat of a crisis. Designed as temporary housing, they have, by default, become permanent.
As a rule the camps are woefully overcrowded, slapped together in rural, remote corners of the Third World. The remoteness of the camps, however, can be one of their few positive aspects. It locates the refugees relatively close to where they came from, in familiar landscapes and climates and among local people who share similar cultures and languages.
The basic necessities are generally well met in UNHCR camps, which are run by skilled international technocrats. In fact, the refugees usually enjoy more plentiful and more nutritious food, cleaner water and better medical treatment than do many of the local residents. Physically, most refugees are better off than they were in their home countries.
But sustenance is a spiritual thing, too, and no amount of international aid can mend the wounds of a spirit trapped in exile. Whether it holds 180 persons or 180,000 and whether it is four days or four decades old, the refugee camp has an uncanny sameness about it, be it in the Middle East, Africa, Asia or Central America.
Open garbage ditches carrying raw sewage are the norm, as are communal toilets and spartan housing crammed so closely together there is no room for privacy or space for children to play. Always there are the long lines in front of scarce water taps, in front of food depots, in front of medical clinics. People in refugee camps spend a lot of time waiting for basic necessities.
The crowding of essentially rural people into urban slumlike enclosures, the rigid routine of camp life and the constant worrying over an uncertain future combine to make refugee existence a sort of stale, sterile half-life. Refugees spend a lot of time just sitting around and brooding, wards of international welfare.
Refugees and refugeedom have become institutionalized, despite the best efforts of UNHCR. There are now UNHCR experts in camp construction and management. Nutritionists who can devise exact diets for a given refugee population in a given climate. Medical specialists who can set up hospitals overnight and inoculate refugees by the thousands in a day. Logistics experts who can calculate the precise wear and tear on local roads and bridges from trucks supplying the camps and who can then marshal the materials and the people needed to rectify the problems. Unfortunately, there are no experts in the UNHCR or anywhere else in the world who can end the wars that create the camps and send the refugees home.
”The problem of institutionalizing refugees is due to the absence of solutions to their plight,” said Jean-Pierre Hocke, the high commissioner for refugees who oversees UNHCR`s operations, based in Geneva. ”By allowing camps to crystallize, to become semipermanent, we allow the people inside them to become increasingly dependent on our aid.
”We try to initiate some things that will bring about some amount of self-sufficiency. Even if a farmer in a camp is only given enough land to grow 15, 20 or 25 percent of the food that he and his family needs, it allows him some dignity in life. To get out of emergency assistance in the camps as soon as possible, even if we cannot get the refugees out of them, is a goal that is important to us.”
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Hocke`s theories on refugee self-sufficiency are not mere bureaucratic rhetoric. In camps all over the world, UNHCR administrators push the theory with hard-nosed determination, even in the face of opposition from the refugees themselves. Despite these efforts, self-sufficiency is rare.
The countries that have accepted refugees are most often destitute themselves, land-poor and lacking basic resources. Whatever land is made available to refugees is usually marginally productive at best. Often camp sites are totally barren, and for lack of land or water or both, refugee farmers find it difficult to raise crops. As for traders and businessmen in exile, they are too isolated from the normal channels of commerce and industry to find a job or nurture a small business.
The refugees` plight is complicated by their sheer numbers. Once processed and placed in a camp, they are dealt with by the numbers as nameless, faceless hordes. Despite its efficiency, UNHCR simply cannot afford to deal with them individually, as European refugees were treated after World War II. Individuals with special problems, as in any large bureaucratic undertaking, often fall through the cracks.
Idris Adem Ali, 60, is a refugee who fled to Sudan from Ethiopia`s northern Eritrea province in 1976, when the Ethiopian army attacked his village. A farmer, he escaped with his wife and five children into Sudan, which was just a few miles from his home. The day after the raid he returned to his village and discovered that the army not only had burned his and every other house in his community but also looted all his possessions and walked off with his 10 cows.
Ali has been living in Sudan refugee camps ever since, the last several years in Um Gargur, a camp in an arid plain on the eastern side of the country. UNHCR and Sudanese refugee officials have been trying for some time to get the camp`s 7,000 people off the dole by encouraging them to plant gardens.
Motivating the refugees was easier said than done. Most people were willing to grow crops that would supplement the boring UN food rations, according to Eritrean officials inside the camp. But they were not willing to make the gardens into a full-blown self-sufficient enterprise.
”People here do not want to make something permanent out of the camp,”
one of the officials said. ”People want to work with community development and improve their lives, but it is a contradiction. They want to go home, and every year they hold out for that in their hopes and dreams, thinking that maybe in six months the trouble will be over and they can return. They don`t want to work hard and build up a stake in this place when their primary thought is to leave it behind. If I tell somebody to think of long-term projects, they say, `No, I don`t want to stay here a long time.` ”
To encourage the garden project, UNHCR gradually began to cut the rations it gave to the Um Gargur refugees. In June, 1987, Sudanese refugee officials declared the camp entirely food self-sufficient, and all rations were terminated except for ”at risk” groups such as widows and the elderly. The refugees tried to grow enough, but three successive 1987 plantings withered in a drought, and the fourth was destroyed by insects.
By the time I talked with Ali in October, 1987, he and many people in the camp were complaining of chronic hunger. Ali, who has a family of nine to feed, receives a monthly bag of sorghum, which the Eritreans call dura, from the UN.
”Here they give me this dura, which is not good quality at all,” Ali said, sitting in his mud hut with a half-eaten bag of the grain in front of him. ”I used to feed my cows at home with dura like this. Smell it. It`s no good. How can I expect to be healthy with this sort of food in such small amounts? It`s only enough for 10 days for all of us.
”Usually I try to find work outside the camp with local farmers. If I can`t find work, I ask friends to help me. If they can`t help, we go hungry. It happens every month. When there is no food and I am very hungry, sometimes I sit up at night and drink as much water as I can until I vomit.
”At home I had lots of butter, milk and good crops. A person my age should be fat and strong.”
The Eritreans insist that self-sufficiency projects are unrealistic. The areas in which their camps are located are marginal croplands in the best of times but are so vulnerable to drought and insects that getting sufficient harvests each year is nearly impossible.
”There are many people here who are now malnourished,” said one Eritrean camp official, ”and they get no assistance from anywhere. The majority of the families are in some sort of difficulty.”
At its Sudan headquarters in Khartoum, a UNHCR official did not dispute that statement. The garden projects in the camps have become more policy than experiment, she said, both to cut expenses and to force refugees to take charge of their own lives again. Hard-nosed as the cutting of rations seems, she said it was the only realistic way to get people to take their farming work seriously. The drought and insect problems were just bad luck, even though they left refugees hungry.
”Under our system it can happen from time to time,” she said. ”We do have safeguards built in, and the adjustments eventually are made. We do a major food assessment in the camps every November, and if we discover that people are in trouble, we will increase the rations.”
Pakistan is home to more than 3 million refugees from neighboring Afghanistan who live in 328 refugee ”villages” of sundried-mud-brick huts. The settlements, some of them with 30,000 to 170,000 people, are more populous than all but four or five of Afghanistan`s largest towns. A huge concentration of refugees lives in and around Peshawar, the main city in Pakistan`s North West Frontier Province. But the majority live in camps in remote,
ecologically fragile desert and mountain areas.
The UNHCR effort to feed and care for so many people is the biggest and one of the best-run refugee operations in the world. Throughout the decade-long presence of Afghans in Pakistan, there have been no famines or epidemics and little acute malnutrition.
Part of the credit belongs to the Pakistan government. The camps are completely open, with no fences surrounding them, and Pakistan allows the refugees complete freedom to enter and leave. Refugees can work for local farmers, merchants and industries to supplement their rationed existence in the camps. Pakistan, which has a well-developed federal bureaucracy, supplies 3,000 administrators of its own, who do much of the refugee assistance distribution. In addition, Pakistan itself pays 48 percent of the daily operating costs of $1 million a day.