Wars create refugees, and refugees prolong wars. If there is a truism about late 20th Century warfare, that is it. Wars of independence, civil wars, border conflicts, internal revolutions and full-fledged declared wars spill people across borders every day.
If there is a truism about refugees in the late 20th Century, it is this: Most refugees will never have a chance to return to the places they once called home. That is a frightening prospect for the world`s 13 million refugees but one that seems increasingly likely through the passage of years, even though all refugee camps are built to be ”temporary.”
The temporary camps set up 40 years ago in the Middle East now hold four generations of people, two of which have never known any other kind of life. Temporary camps in Africa will soon mark their 30th anniversaries. Southeast Asia, South Asia and Central America are pockmarked with camps turning almost 10 years old. Refugee camps have a way of building their own permanency in these peace-forsaken days when ”small” wars can drag on for 10 years and set no duration records.
I first encountered refugee camps as a journalist in 1972 during the latter stages of the Vietnam War. I ran across numerous refugee camps in trips to Africa in 1974 and 1975. In 1977 I watched the first refugee outpourings into Thailand from Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. In 1978 I met refugees coming into Somalia from Ethiopia and visited Palestinian refugees under fire in their camps during the Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon. In January, 1980, I saw the great flood of Afghan refugees inundating Pakistan`s western borders as they fled the Soviet invasion of their country.
I thought I had seen those people when they were at their lowest, coming across borders grief-stricken and battered. But as the years dragged on and so many of those people were never able to go home, I began to have nagging thoughts about them. I wondered if there was some factor or pattern common to all refugees globally that might explain why the refugee camp has become such a perniciously enduring institution around the world. I wanted to go back.
Most of us will never have to make a decision to drop everything and flee all we know and cherish. The hundreds of people I talked with during my journey through refugee camps new and old did have to make that decision, and they crossed borders for the soundest of reasons-they and their loved ones were threatened with lethal violence. The stories of their escapes were harrowing. Even more harrowing, however, were the stories of endless years of lives on hold, of never having a life to call your own, of never having a claim on your own future.
If there was one overriding impression that I carried away from my nine-month tour, it was the stunning cruelty of keeping people in camps and in limbo, away from home and normal life, for so long.
We think of refugees as having reached safety when they make it to a refugee camp. But they never really escape the conflicts that sent them running. The longer they live as exiles, the more likely the conflict they escaped will come to swirl around them once again. It may come at the hands of the countries of asylum, when residents rebel at the burden placed on them by refugees. It may come at the hands of the refugees` enemies, who follow them across borders to continue old battles. It may come from the refugees themselves, when they turn on one another as the years of incarceration take their toll. One way or another, it will come.
We of the Old and New Worlds ask Third World nations to take on the burden of accepting millions of refugees, and then we are puzzled when those nations eventually rebel against shouldering the burden year after year. Before the world can solve its refugee problem, it must understand that the problem is not logistical-how to care for refugees-but political. Millions of human beings around the world want a place to call home but are denied fulfillment of that want. Denied long enough, they will do anything that promises an escape from their current situation. Life in a refugee camp provides the refugees with hours, days-years-to mourn what they have lost and to hate those who have driven them away from home. Let someone offer them a chance to fight back, and the takers line up.
More than 5 million Afghan refugees in Iran and Pakistan form the nation- in-exile that sends men into Afghanistan to fight the Soviet invaders and the Marxist regime they support in Kabul. Camps and settlements throughout the Middle East for decades have been the breeding ground for Palestinian insurrectionists and terrorist cabals. A million Ethiopians-half in Sudan and half in Somalia-send their young men home to fight a Soviet-backed regime there. A coalition of insurgent armies holds 300,000 people in Thailand to form a guerrilla army against Vietnamese occupation troops inside Cambodia. Tens of thousands of Nicaraguans, backed by the United States, send their men from refugee camps in Honduras and Costa Rica to fight a Marxist regime in Nicaragua.
For the various United Nations agencies charged with providing humanitarian care for 13 million refugees around the world, the refugees as combatants pose a dilemma. UN aid is supposed to be strictly humanitarian. The activities in the camps and settlements that the UN provides for refugees are supposed to be, if not nonpolitical, at least nonmilitary.
That is a difficult standard to maintain. For the most part, the refugees, fueled by their painful memories, are willing participants in these armed struggles. They openly manipulate and in turn are manipulated by outside political forces that have a stake in whatever conflict sent the refugees fleeing from their homes.
Inevitably the countries who give sanctuary to refugees get sucked into the deadly game. Usually the host countries also are willing participants because they fear the governments that sent the refugees into their midst.
Honduras and Costa Rica fear the leftist Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. Thailand fears the ambitions of the Vietnamese regime whose army is occupying Cambodia. Sudan and Somalia are bitter, historic enemies of Ethiopia, as are the Arab nations of Israel. Pakistan lives in the shadow of Soviet power plays in South Asia. In each case, the host governments not only give sanctuary to the refugees but to some degree also allow their countries to be used as bases for continuing attacks on their neighbors` governments. Obviously this is a risky situation. When things go wrong, the host countries can suffer horribly, but eventually the refugees will suffer more because no one will take them in anymore.
On July 9, 1987, a car bomb exploded in the middle of a busy bazaar in Peshawar, the Pakistani city that is the center for Afghanistan`s exiled resistance movements. The bomb killed 72 people, most of them Pakistanis. Last Feb. 19 another car bomb went off in Peshawar at a Pakistani political rally, near a public school. A dozen people were killed, including two children.
”Eighty percent of the world`s state-sponsored terrorism occurred last year in Pakistan,” says a Western diplomat in Islamabad, Pakistan`s capital, ”killing about 500 people in all. It`s almost a daily occurrence. There`s no secret about who`s setting off these bombs. It`s KHAD (the secret police of Afghanistan`s pro-Soviet regime) and the KGB (the Soviet secret police). The bombs follow a very consistent pattern, set off in crowded public places with the intention of killing and maiming as many people as possible. Bus stations, cinemas, bazaars-that sort of thing.”
The main target of the bombs, he says, is not the 3 million Afghan refugees in Pakistan. It is Pakistani public opinion, which has approved of the ongoing war against the Soviets in Afghanistan and has given a generally warm reception to the hordes of refugees in their midst.
”It`s no surprise that there are calls for public order by Pakistanis after the bombs explode and the casualties are counted,” says the diplomat.
”There are two or three levels of response to the bombs. One is a call to remove all refugees from cities and towns, to isolate them in camps so that Pakistanis won`t get caught in the violence. In other instances Pakistanis have beaten up refugees after bombing incidents, blaming their presence in Pakistan for the violence. Another response has been to attack the
government`s policy on Afghanistan, that if the government withdrew its support of the resistance, the bombs would stop, and the refugees would go away.”
Many Pakistanis are uneasy about the increased violence refugees have brought to Pakistan, but they remain supportive of the refugees` cause.
”There is only a shift in degree of uneasiness about the refugees,” the diplomat continues, ”but certainly it`s not anything that has gotten out of control.”
The impact of the sudden influx of more than 3 million people into Pakistan and their prolonged stay-now up to eight years-will not easily be erased.
Ecologically the refugees have been a disaster to Pakistan, especially to the North West Frontier and Baluchistan, the provinces to which most of the Afghans have fled. In searching for firewood, they have so denuded the forests and scrublands in which they have built their camps that the World Bank has invested $60 million in reforestation projects to try to undo some of the damage.
Economically the refugees have been a mixed blessing. They have been a plentiful source of cheap labor to Pakistani farmers and businessmen, especially those in the construction industry. In other sectors, however, the refugees have been direct competitors for jobs. For example, the many refugees who came into Pakistan driving their own trucks have gone into the trucking business on a large scale. As refugees, they were not obligated until recently to pay Pakistani taxes, so they could undercut the Pakistani truckers` rates. This has led to several bloody riots.
Perhaps most serious, the enormous amount of sophisticated weapons being funneled through Pakistan for the benefit of Afghan rebels will likely alter domestic political equations in Pakistan for years to come. The North West Frontier and Baluchistan are semiautonomous tribal areas that have never been fully under the control of Pakistan`s government. The history of the two provinces is one of almost constant armed feuding with the central government and among the tribes themselves.
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Tribal and clan feuding within Pakistan used to be mostly minor affairs of murder and kidnaping during small-scale raids with single-shot rifles on neighboring villages. Now whole sections of rival villages are being reduced to rubble by long-range mortar and rocket attacks as tribal rustics familiarize themselves with the advanced 20th Century weaponry pouring into Pakistan to arm the Afghan resistance.
The atmosphere of violence and military bravado that the Afghans brought with them into the North West Frontier and Baluchistan has permeated nearly every level of Pakistani society there.
Before the refugees came, few private citizens walked around carrying arms, says a Western-educated Pakistani economist in Peshawar. ”There were no more than 500 or 600 automatic weapons in private hands in the province,” he says. ”Today you can brush up against a man accidentally in the street, and you can feel a weapon underneath his clothes. An American M-16 rifle costs about $1,250, and ammunition for it is about 60 cents a round. A Russian-style AK-47 rifle is about $900, and ammunition for it is only 3 or 4 cents a round. Everybody has one, and, of course, the American gun is the prestige firearm, the one everybody wants.
”Our tribesmen today have antiaircraft guns, mortars, rockets and rocket launchers. In the Kurram Agency tribal area last year, there was a clash between the Shiite and Sunni communities, something that has always happened. This time, however, unofficially 200 people were killed. After a few days, pictures appeared in the local press. They were pure and simple war photos, not of a communal riot. Houses were collapsed from six or seven miles away by exchanges of rocket fire.”
The economist admits he is himself in the market for an M-16 rifle.
”I`m going to buy one for my 16-year-old son,” he says sheepishly.
”He`s been after me for months, arguing that all of his friends have one. I`ve run out of arguments. It`s a status symbol, something to shoot off into the air at weddings and special functions. I`m not a rich man, and I`m not willing to buy a useless piece of metal that I hope I myself or any member of my family will never have to use. However, it comes to a point when you have to bow to societal pressures.
”The upshot of it all is that the initial feeling of goodwill for the refugees here has undergone a change. Today I think Pakistan still has the best refugee situation in the world in terms of treating them equitably. But if you ask a Pakistani man on the street, he will tell you, `I wish them well, but I wish them gone.` The Pakistani welcomed the Afghan as a guest, but after three or four years, it wasn`t exactly a guest-host relationship.”
The welcome mat is wearing thin for refugees in many countries of first asylum. Underlying the lessening of hospitality for refugees is the sheer length of the time they remain in exile. The changing patterns of geopolitical alliances since World War II have meant that refugees remain in camps for years and decades. They are unable to go home, but they are also undesirable candidates for permanent resettlement elsewhere. For the first-asylum nations that must house them, the refugees create nearly impossible physical, economic and political strains.
First-asylum countries are those directly in the path of refugees looking for a haven. Because most refugees are from the Third World, most countries of first asylum are in the Third World, too, and are themselves quite poor.
There are 25 countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America that now have refugee populations of more than 50,000, according to the Independent Commission on International Humanitarian Issues. The 20 nations with the highest ratio of refugees to their own populations have a per-capita income of less than $700 annually.
Malawi is just such an accident of geography, inundated by hundreds of thousands of refugees. About the size of Pennsylvania, it is a long, narrow, landlocked country of 7.5 million people in south central Africa. With a per capita income of $200, it is one of the most densely populated countries in Africa and one of the poorest. In the best of times, about 85 percent of all Malawians eke out a living from subsistence farming. In the last three years drought and plagues of insects have brought widespread hunger and illness to the population.
Coinciding with those economic disasters is the human disaster of the civil war in Mozambique, Malawi`s southern neighbor, with which it shares a 300-mile border. In 1986 Mozambicans, hungry and terrorized by war, began arriving in Malawi by the tens of thousands.
By November, 1987, when I arrived in Malawi for a tour of its refugee camps, 400,000 Mozambicans had already been registered in camps operated by the UN High Commission for Refugees, and they continued to arrive at the rate of 20,000 a month.
A 40-mile drive down Malawi`s main highway connecting Lilongwe, the country`s capital, with its southern districts, is one of the more eerie drives in the world.
On the Mozambican side of the road, which marks Malawi`s western border with Mozambique, every town, village, hamlet and farmhouse stands empty and gutted by the insurgent Mozambican army called Renamo. Doors are gone. Window casements are empty. The corrugated tin roofs have been carted away. Not a living soul stirs in the abandoned landscape.
Just a few yards away on the Malawian side of the road, every town, village, hamlet and farmhouse is jammed to overflowing with life. Of these, many are older settlements of Malawians who, linked closely to the fleeing Mozambicans by family and tribal ties, have taken in the refugees on their own. Others are brand-new communities made up solely of refugees, set up by the UN on Malawian farmland.
One side of the road represents death or enslavement to an unpopular uprising. The other side offers life itself, albeit a precarious one. The Malawian settlements are targets of frequent raids by Renamo fighters, who steal food supplies and often kidnap refugees and force them to work as porters or field hands for the rebel forces inside Mozambique.