The image of tens of thousands of people fleeing their homes for the sanctuary of foreign borders has become so commonplace that it no longer is big news. Often it is not news at all. Refugees today are usually citizens of Third World nations who flee to other Third World nations, all seemingly insignificant to the developed world. As a consequence, nobody much notices them.
Our governments notice them, however, and have all too often had a direct hand, overtly or covertly, in creating or exploiting the situations that produce refugees.
”In defending their sovereignty and promoting their interests, states do not flinch from pursuing policies which force people into exile and keep them there,” said a 1986 study of refugees by the Independent Commission on International Humanitarian Issues.
”It is no coincidence that the largest refugee movements have taken place in areas where local conflicts have been drawn into the broader struggle for influence at global level: Central America, Southeast Asia, Central Asia and the Horn of Africa.
”It is clear that mass displacements . . . are becoming the norm rather than a deviation from it.”
The commission is a respected body of eminent statesmen from all over the world formed at the behest of the United Nations to consider the most intractable issues facing the UN system. Its members are perhaps too diplomatic to spell out who, specifically, is behind the ”broader struggle for influence at the global level” in the Third World. It is not hard, however, to examine its short list of troubled regions and deduce who is struggling for influence and why.
One could start with the two reigning military superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, and trace their presence in the commission`s list throughout.
Central America has produced 300,000 officially recognized refugees. For the most part, they have fled governments allied with and heavily armed and advised by the United States or Soviet Union. Both powers use them as proxy instruments of war to turn back or advance the tide of revolution they deem vital to their respective interests.
In Southeast Asia, 1.5 million refugees already have fled the region as a direct result of the U.S. war in Indochina. The aftershocks of that war continue to hold 500,000 refugees in camps there today. They are in part confined at the behest of the Soviet Union and the United States, along with China and Vietnam, through direct involvement or by proxy.
In Central Asia, 5 million Afghans live in refugee camps in Pakistan and Iran. They began trickling out in 1978 after a Soviet-sponsored Marxist revolution in Afghanistan and then poured out after an invasion by Soviet troops in 1979. The Soviets` current retreat from Afghanistan is a testimonial to the tenacity of Afghan guerrillas. But billions of dollars in proxy aid from the United States, Saudi Arabia, China and other interested states have profoundly influenced the war, too.
In the Horn of Africa, half a million Eritreans from northern Ethiopia live in refugee camps in Sudan. Another half-million ethnic Somalis from Ethiopia`s Ogaden region live in refugee camps in Somalia. They are displaced because of age-old ethnic enmities within Ethiopia. But the continuing warfare that exploits their displacement is largely financed and supplied by Soviet and U.S. military aid. For the last 20 years the two superpowers have jousted by proxy for strategic dominance of Red Sea oil-shipping routes, one of the world`s crucial trade conduits.
One might add to the independent commission`s list two other world hot spots, southern Africa and the Middle East.
Angola, potentially one of the wealthiest countries in black Africa, has not known a day of peace since it won independence from Portugal in 1975. The nation`s economy is in shambles, and 400,000 of its people live in exile in neighboring countries. Angola`s pro-Marxist government is supported by hundreds of millions of dollars in Soviet aid and military assistance, its war with insurgents fought, in part, by 57,000 Cuban soldiers. The pro-Western insurgent army makes war on the Angolan government with the help of South African troops and is supplied with $30 million annually in U.S. aid.
In Mozambique, fast becoming one of the more tortured, luckless nations on the planet, 4 million people today wander helplessly, without homes and terrorized by an anarchic, brutal insurgent army. Another million have fled to neighboring countries to perhaps the most underfinanced, ill-prepared refugee rescue mission in the world today. The ”insurgency” hounding Mozambique, in the name of restoring democracy, is a proxy army, organized and financed by South Africa.
The Middle East is a world unto itself, a region of war and ethnic conflicts with roots that sink into ancient times. In the last 40 years, no other group of nations in the world has seen such heavy trafficking of arms and confusing alliances as the Middle East. Its ancient rivalries suddenly have become major foreign-policy concerns for most nations of the world, which jockey for favor and influence with the governments that control the most important supply of oil in the world.
If there is one simple lesson that the world should have learned from the 40 years of Palestinian refugee camps in the Middle East, it is this: Refugees are not a humanitarian problem, they are a political problem. Most refugees are the products of warfare, and war is a political action.
Yet the world likes to think of refugees mostly in humanitarian terms as poor unfortunates, innocent victims displaced from their homes who need help in feeding and clothing themselves. That attitude is a generous one, as far as it goes. The United Nations has created agencies to deal with refugees, and 13 million people worldwide are being fed and clothed in refugee camps. Knowing that, the rest of the world has a tendency to feel relieved, as though the problem has been solved and can be forgotten. Yet the most conservative estimates say that there are at least 25 million additional people who are similarly victimized, chased from their homes but displaced inside their own countries with very little international assistance to feed, shelter, clothe and protect them.
Most refugee problems are not easily solved, precisely because the politics that forced these people into exile have not been dealt with. While the rest of the world chooses to ignore or manipulate the political issues that create the camps, the refugees inside them face years and decades of living something that is really not a life at all.
To understand the effects of global political struggle on refugees, you need only consider the life of one: Sam Neang Moul.
Twelve is supposed to be a magic age for girls, the delicate first passage from childhood to womanhood. And so it could have been for Sam Neang Moul. She was the middle child in a family of eight children, the daughter of a railway station agent. When she was 12, Sam was an extremely bright 6th-grader and had set her sights on going on to the university, perhaps even becoming a doctor. The dream wasn`t so far-fetched back then. Her two oldest sisters already were attending the university, and her father was committed to sending all his children to college.
But Sam was 12 at the wrong time, 1975, in the wrong place: Phnom Penh, Cambodia. For the previous five years she had lived through the uncertainty of a war that crept its inexorable way toward her. The last year was a hellish one as communist Khmer Rouge artillery periodically shelled the city. In April, 1975, victorious Khmer Rouge soldiers surged into Phnom Penh, knocking on the doors of every household and telling everyone to leave the city. Immediately.
Fear is a great teacher, and Sam had to learn the lesson instantaneously. If you are on the wrong end of a deadly weapon, you do as you`re told. She watched her mother and father pack a few belongings and gather their children, and they left home. They walked north on country roads for weeks, alongside legions of distraught, bewildered, terrified city-dwellers such as themselves. When their Khmer Rouge guards told them to stop, they stopped. When they were given their watery rice gruel, they ate. They slept when they were told. They woke up when they were told. They began marching again when they were told.
Their destination was a forest in Battambang province, Cambodia`s richest rice-growing area. Pol Pot, the leader of the Khmer Rouge, had a mad dream of purifying Cambodia by eradicating every last taint of Western culture and creating the purest communist state in the world. He closed every school, abolished money and religion, broke up the tradition of family unity, shut down hospitals and murdered every educated person his army could discover.
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Pol Pot divided the survivors into three categories: worker, peasant and soldier. It was an absolute slave-labor nation. If you didn`t work, or if you complained, you died by execution or starvation.
Sam and her family were designated as peasants. They and a group from Phnom Penh were taken to the Battambang forest and left there with tools, little food and armed overseers. They were told to clear the land and convert it to rice paddies, though the people were not farmers.
The work was grueling, and the rations small. Everyone in Sam`s family fell ill from the poor food and the resulting dysentery. In October, 1975, one of her younger brothers died. In November another younger brother died. In the following weeks an older brother died, then another, then her father.
After five months in the forest, the Khmer Rouge issued new orders. The remaining members of Sam`s family were moved to a village, Prey Lean, in Battambang. Her sisters, the former university students, were moved to a commune of young adults, but Sam, her mother and an older brother stayed in Prey Lean. They were supposed to split their time between growing rice and constructing new dams and irrigation systems.
”We worked from 6 until 11 every morning, and 1 until 5 every afternoon, every day, with . . . never a day off,” she said. ”I suffered from malarial fever and constant hunger, but you had to work anyway. If I was too sick to work, they cut my rations even more.”
Life became a cycle of working and being watched over by the Khmer Rouge. Death was a constant, by disease and starvation or by the hands of the guards. People were taken away by guards and never returned. No one dared ask where they had gone.
Sam turned 13, then 14, and in January, 1977, Sam`s mother received word that one of her two oldest daughters had died in the commune. In December she received word that the other had died.
”When they died, we were so weak, we couldn`t cry,” Sam said. ”We had to ask a neighbor to help bury them.”
Sam, her mother and her brother continued to work and to survive. They had no way of knowing that Pol Pot`s butchery was a way of life throughout Cambodia, accounting, by the end of 1978, for more than a million deaths in a country of 7.5 million people. Nor did they have any idea that Pol Pot had tried to invade Vietnam, giving the Vietnamese an excuse in turn to invade Cambodia.
Sam turned 15. She had no idea that the Vietnamese had routed Pol Pot`s troops. But one day in December, 1978, the Khmer Rouge soldiers disappeared from the village. Shortly after, a man appeared one evening and told Sam`s mother that the entire village must move away. Immediately.
”If we didn`t leave, he said the Khmer Rouge would return and kill us all,” she said. ”We decided we had to go, even though we didn`t know why. We joined people walking on the road. There must have been thousands of them. We walked to the mountains in Poasat province, where we lived for the next four months in a forest.
”We had nothing to eat but plant leaves and roots. We had no shelter, so we lived in the shadow of the trees. We had to keep moving all of the time. Nobody helped anybody else. Sometimes my brother would sneak into a village to bring some food back to us.”
The Vietnamese eventually caught up with the fleeing hordes and sent them to Battambang City to join communal farms run by Vietnam`s Cambodian puppet regime.
Arriving in the provincial capital, Sam found a male cousin who had survived Pol Pot and had a house there. She, her mother and brother moved in with him.
Sam turned 16. Life became a bit less sinister but no less hard. The war and Pol Pot`s destruction of Cambodia`s agricultural base meant unrelenting food shortages and continuing hunger. Three months after her family moved in, Sam`s cousin sneaked off and headed for the Thailand border just 50 miles away. A month later, Sam, her mother and brother followed.
”All of us were very weak,” she said. ”We weren`t able to walk for very long or very fast, but in seven days we were at the border.”
The border in 1979 represented freedom to the ravaged Cambodian population, and more than half a million of them gathered there. It represented refuge from the endless warfare and purposeless death. It represented their first contact in five years with the outside world, the re- establishment of ties with people who operated with some sense of sanity and order.
At least that was the hope.
But the forces that had flung Sam and her family into Cambodia`s maelstrom were not about to let her go free. By 1979 the rest of the world had become aware of Pol Pot`s butchery, but the initial euphoria over Cambodia`s
”deliverance” by Vietnam through its Cambodian invasion soon turned sour. After its successful war against America and its final unification in 1975, Vietnam had become something of a rogue country. Superb as warriors, the Vietnamese communists proved less adept at managing their own economy and people in peacetime.
The successful Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia did not sit well in many nations. Having a bellicose, militarily superior Vietnamese army sitting on its border frightened Thailand deeply. It did not please the Western alliance, either, which had visions of the domino theory at last coming true, with Vietnam poised to take the entire Malaysian peninsula. Most of all, it angered China, which saw a hated, pro-Soviet Vietnamese regime encircling its own soft underbelly.
Short of direct foreign intervention, the only conceivably effective deterrent that could dampen the Vietnamese parade was the Khmer Rouge. Initially, Pol Pot and his forces quickly crumbled in the face of superior Vietnamese firepower. But as they began their hasty retreat to the Thai-Cambodian border, the Khmer Rouge took along at gunpoint as many hapless civilians as they could.