It is the longevity of so many refugee situations around the world that makes refugees a different issue today than they were in the past. There have been refugees as long as there have been wars, and war predates history. In the past, however, the world was underpopulated. When people in ancient times were driven from their homes into exile, it was generally to uncivilized, wilderness areas. They became not refugees but settlers, sinking roots in new lands and serving the function of spreading civilization.
In more recent times, even with the invention of national borders, people forced out of their lands were treated more like immigrants than alien chattel to be kept separated in guarded compounds. That has been true from the expulsion of 250,000 French Protestants, the Huguenots, from Catholic France into the rest of Europe 300 years ago to the dispersion of 17 million displaced people in Europe after World War II. It might have taken a few months or years, but for the most part they were resettled equitably into societies that offered them a new future.
Since World War II, however, enforced movements of masses of people have shifted from Europe to the Third World. In part that is because of the decolonization movement after the war. Left inside artificial boundaries drawn by their former European masters, the newly independent nations have been riven ever since with internal strife and war as opposing tribal and ethnic groups fight for supremacy and the right to rule.
Normally these struggles would be considered local wars and conflicts. With distressing frequency, they have ended with the victors chasing the vanquished tribal or ethnic groups entirely out of their countries. Even more distressing, however, is the way outside powers have exploited local conflicts to their own advantage.
Mao Tse-tung`s revolutionary dictum that ”power grows out of the barrel of a gun” has found wide appreciation in the Third World. The history of relentless revolution, coups and countercoups that characterizes the general political instability of the Third World is in part a product of that dictum. In a Third World nation, there often is no shortage of sizable factions wishing and willing to take control of their country by force of arms if given the opportunity.
Those factions are attractive as potential ”allies” to superpowers and regional powers such as the United States, the Soviet Union, China and South Africa. That is the stuff of proxy wars. If you arm and support a faction engaged in a struggle for power in a Third World nation, you are betting that your side will win. And if your side wins and becomes the ruling group, you will be allied to a government that favors your interests and embarrasses your enemy. It is a relatively cheap and risk-free form of war if you are the rich sponsor, one in which you supply the arms and ammunition, but somebody else, a ”client” army, suffers the casualties.
”The character of conflict has changed,” said Roger Winter, director of the U.S. Committee for Refugees, a nonprofit group based in Washington, D.C., that is one of the more effective refugee-advocacy groups in the world. ”You now have long-term international commitments in localized wars in which each faction in the war is `adopted` by one or the other of the superpowers.
”There is hardly such a thing as a local conflict anymore because one faction vying for power in a country will reach out for help from anyone who`ll give it. One side of the superpower configuration will see some strategic advantage in `adopting` the faction, then the other superpower will rush to adopt an opposing faction in the same country.
”All of a sudden, what might have been a localized problem that would have petered out in a few months` time is a long-term conflict that drags on for years or decades. One side falters, and somebody from outside rushes in and props it up with arms and military support. Nobody gives up, so the civilians are hung out to dry for longer and longer periods.”
The byproducts of such conflicts, unfortunately, are the refugees, who remain in the camps as long as the conflicts that sent them there remain unresolved.
In the Mbarara district in southern Uganda, Claver Kambanda told how he, then a 28-year-old farmer, had to flee 27 years ago from his native Rwanda with his wife and two children, an infant and a 2-year-old. He is now 55, an elder of the refugee community in which he lives.
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Kambanda is a member of the Tutsi tribe, a branch of the regal Watusis. In the late 1950s, when Rwanda was still a Belgian colony, the Belgians ruled the tiny, mountainous country through the Tutsis, though they made up only 10 percent of Rwanda`s population. Just before granting Rwanda independence in 1959, however, Belgium switched its backing from the Tutsis to the numerically dominant Hutu tribe, liberally arming it with modern Belgian weapons.
Immediately after independence, the Hutus went on a rampage against the Tutsis. The five-year massacre left 100,000 Tutsis murdered and forced 300,000 to flee to neighboring countries.
”I left Rwanda in September, 1961,” said Kambanda, recalling his trip into exile. ”We had stayed on my farm after the trouble started in 1959 because it was not so near to us. But we knew about the trouble, and it kept getting closer and closer to us until finally it came to our area: a group of Hutu, armed with Belgian weapons, burning houses.
”Their system was to destroy property, burn houses and kill resisters. You can see it was like a current of water, and we were swept before it. Those who fled came here. Those who resisted are carcasses in Rwanda.
”For me and my wife, there was no time to prepare for anything. We just took the two children on our backs and started running. It took us three days to reach Uganda by walking. It was a maze of people running in any direction that felt safe.”
Kambanda arrived in Uganda when it was still a British protectorate. Eighty thousand Rwandans found refuge there were given land, assistance and seeming security. The next year, however, Uganda was granted its independence, and the Tutsis in Uganda never have felt a moment of security since.
The first 10 years of independence for Uganda were under the rule of Milton Obote. Obote constantly badgered refugees from Rwanda, using them as scapegoats for the shortcomings of his own inept rule. When Obote was ousted in 1971 in a military coup, the Rwandans faced the madness of another reign of terror, presided over by Idi Amin.
In 1979 an invasion force mounted by the Tanzanian army sent Amin into exile. The brunt of the early invasion swept through the southern districts of Uganda, across the very land settled by the Rwandans, sending them scurrying again.
If there was rejoicing at Amin`s departure, it did not last long. Obote soon found his way back to power and turned out to be even more murderous than Amin. Between 1980 and 1985, the second Obote regime butchered or starved to death an estimated 500,000 Ugandan civilians, outclassing Amin, who had murdered an estimated 300,000 Ugandans.
Again Obote singled out the Rwandan refugees. All property owned by the exiles was seized by the Obote regime and redistributed to Obote cronies. Fifty thousand refugees were forced at gunpoint back to Rwanda, which didn`t want them and herded them into camps. Another 30,000 were herded into camps in Uganda, where the inmates, including Kambanda, were periodically tortured.
”It was sort of a concentration camp,” Kambanda said. ”It was very hastily put together. The conditions were bad, and this caused epidemics such as measles and worms. Many children and livestock died.”
Uganda is struggling to put itself back together under a new, benign military ruler, President Yoweri Museveni, whose peasant army dislodged the second Obote regime. Museveni is given high marks by international human-rights advocates for his efforts to end the Ugandan nightmare of tribal revenge politics. He has allowed those Rwandans chased out of Uganda by Obote to re-enter, and he has restored property ownership to all Rwandans victimized during Obote`s regime.
But the explosive tribal rivalries still fester, making Museveni`s hold on the reins of power tenuous at best. If he should disappear from the scene, there is every likelihood that violence and butchery would return, leaving Rwandans again at the mercy of chaos. Though Museveni is willing to grant them full Ugandan citizenship, there is no guarantee that another regime would recognize them as citizens. Rwanda already has demonstrated that it wants nothing to do with them, so there is no possibility of their going home after 30 years of exile.
Kambanda, who now has eight children, graduated from high school in Rwanda. In Uganda, none of his children has gone beyond grade school. Though he said he eventually would like to go back to Rwanda to live, he doesn`t think he ever will be allowed to.
”I`ve told you my age (55),” he said. ”You`ll have to guess whether I`ll go back or not.”
As for his children, he said he believes they`ll never go back.
”They don`t know Rwanda, and they probably wouldn`t go unless they were forced to. They don`t know anything other than refugee life. I don`t know. I think about life back home and what is happening here. I am missing everything. This question affects me very deeply.”
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On the morning of March 15, 1975, Hamid Faid Humed, then a prosperous 44- year-old farmer and shopkeeper in Eritrea, Ethiopia`s northernmost province, awoke to the sound of an army on the move. It was a sound he had dreaded but had felt was inevitable since a separatist movement began fighting for Eritrean autonomy in 1961. Hamid was living in Um Hajar, a market and garrison town of about 15,000, and the sound that woke him that morning was the Ethiopian army garrison moving out in full battle gear.
”We realized from the movements of the garrison that there would be a fight that day,” Hamid recalled, ”and there was, just outside the town.”
The battle lasted all morning, and there was nothing for Hamid and his fellow townspeople to do but wait for the outcome. He stayed home with his wife and his five children. At noon, he said, the government troops came streaming back into the town, defeated and full of rage.
”They were shooting and killing anybody they could get their hands on,” Hamid recalled. ”Every building they came to, they set fire to it and burned it to the ground. The Eritrean fighters had defeated them, and we were Eritreans, so they were angry with us.”
Hamid said that as soon as he saw the smoke rising from neighboring houses and the soldiers running amok, he and his wife gathered their children and began running across the fields. There was no time to gather belongings.
”Everybody was running,” he said. ”We weren`t far from the (Sudan)
border, and everybody was like us, running with their children and the clothes on their backs. I left everything in my house-my tractor, my Land Rover, 400 sacks of sesame seed, 1,500 sacks of sorghum and my clothing shop.
”A few days after the fight, I walked back by myself to see what was left. Everything was ruined; my buildings were in ashes, and my tractor, Land Rover and crops were gone. The zinc roof of my house was gone, too.”
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Hamid never has gone back to Ethiopia since 1975. He is living in Um Gargur, a camp for 7,000 Eritrean refugees in eastern Sudan. Travelers who have been through his hometown in recent years have told him it is now totally resettled by southern Ethiopians.
He and his wife have had two more children while living in Sudan. Hamid, once considered somewhat wealthy, drives a tractor for a Sudanese relief agency in the camp`s parched, unproductive fields. His fate is the same as that of 500,000 Eritreans living in Sudan, 20 percent of Eritrea`s population. Most have been in exile for 10 years or more, and the 27-year-old war that drove them there still has no end in sight.