When a United Nations big shot told her she was being moved from Geneva to Washington last year, Karen Koning Abuzayd said, hold on, “We don’t usually send people to their home countries.”
Oh, don’t worry, declared her boss, “You’re about the least American American I know.”
That might have slightly pained Abuzayd, who grew up in Canfield, Ohio, and graduated from DePauw University in Greencastle, Ind. But it did reflect a reality that for more than three decades she’d been overseas–preparing her well for the international mess that is the war in Kosovo.
Abuzayd, 57, is the Washington major-domo for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. That’s a $1 billion-a-year, 4,400-person UN agency that tends to take a lead in dealing with such disasters in a theoretically non-partisan fashion.
Probably better than anyone here, she knows the Kosovo situation, especially the challenge of returning home an estimated 700,000 refugees, as well as dealing with the hundreds of thousands of internally displaced ethnic Albanians.
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She did graduate work in Canada, married a Sudanese academic and headed with him in the late 1960s to raise a family and be a teacher of political science in Africa. During a summer vacation in 1981 in Khartoum, she stumbled into working for the UNHCR.
Ultimately, she spent 12 years for UNHCR in Africa. She was stationed as the honcho in Bosnia-Herzegovina during the violent years of 1993 to 1995 and then moved to Geneva to be the highly trusted chief of staff for the High Commissioner for Refugees, Japan’s Sadako Ogata, who asked her to move to Washington.
She is a big player in a significant, if occasionally controversial, agency that had been in the doldrums during the 1980s but which, under Ogata, shined during the Bosnian crisis as it proved to be neutral even amid the UN’s own peacekeeping operation.
Meanwhile, the agency came under fire during the genocide in the central African nation of Rwanda and the flight of 2 million Hutus. It was accused of everything from forced repatriation of Hutus to even somehow assisting some of the killers.
If its Bosnia experience showed its strengths, Rwanda exposed weaknesses. Now there’s the challenge of Kosovo, where the UNHCR, like most everybody, underestimated Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and the refugee toll, taking flak for its early, if inevitable, reliance on NATO military forces to help set up camps and transport refugees.
Critics suggest such a liaison, even if hard to avoid under the circumstances, is a betrayal of its fundamental principle of political neutrality.
Still, given Abuzayd’s experience in the Balkans and in Africa, she may be perfect for managing the dilemmas of Kosovo in a constructive manner.
She is on the phone daily with NATO and the State Department, even looking at satellite surveillance photos to better understand the situation of internally displaced Kosovars. She is drawing up a complex plan to deal with the inevitable return of many to their homes, or at least to where their homes once were.
At this point 30,000 have been evacuated out of the whole area, mostly from Macedonia, to Europe, Canada and the U.S.
History suggests, she said, “the big majority will return home.”
But it will not be easy, even if Milosevic throws up a white flag and his troops exit.
The refugees will only go back if assured of security, which presumably would be in place if an international force is on the ground.
Other elements, such as shelter, are trickier in a more advanced country than for many in, say, Africa. “You could give people sticks and stones and they would build their own houses. In Kosovo, their houses will have been destroyed, not just due to the Serbs but also due to some of the NATO bombing,” she said.
Roads, highways, wells, courts of law, police stations and hospitals are among the infrastructure needs and institutions that the UNHCR may not have to rely upon.
“The institutions we usually depend on to welcome people back aren’t there since so many of those people, the local authorities, are themselves refugees. In most refugee situations, only part of the population leaves. Here, it’s pretty much the whole population.”
The refugees will need transportation. Then they will need shelter once back inside the province. Food is an obvious priority for the UNHCR, especially in mostly rural areas where, because of ethnic purges, people have been unable to plant. Seeds and crops must be provided.
“We then have to rebuild the infrastructure,” she said. “Have all the wells been poisoned or destroyed? What about medical clinics?
“If their old village is no longer there, we need some sort of shelter program,” Abuzayd said. “We know from our previous experience in Kosovo that people went back to their destroyed villages last year after they had been chased out” by the Serbs.
Will the same really be true of those who wind up in the U.S.? Will people return to those battered villages after spying the glories of strip malls in Secaucus, N.J., or Naperville?
“Our assumption is that a high percentage of those who come to the U.S. will return home. A lot of those coming off the planes seem very rural and will probably want to go home.”
As for the raised eyebrows about UNHCR cooperation with NATO, she concedes, “It is unusual for us to work with the military on one side of a conflict . . . But we couldn’t avoid this.” And, she said, while NATO helped build camps and transport
refugees, “we have (since) taken over the camps.”
As it navigates a political thicket, the UNHCR needs money, and has made a special appeal. It seeks $140 million through June. Until last week, Japan had led the way, giving $23 million, with the U.S. government giving a relatively modest $8.5 million, or the same as private donations from Italy.
With House passage of supplemental funds for the American effort, there’s the prospect of an extra $250 million from the U.S., “though we are not sure how much of that we will get.” Overall, her agency gets one-fourth of its annual budget from the U.S.
In a town of pencil pushers, Abuzayd would clearly prefer the field. For sure, hers is a key position, serving as the main U.S. liaison for the UNHCR, overseeing outreach to organizations and universities nationwide, assisting lawyers on matters of asylum and detention, helping with refugee resettlement and shepherding refugee-related legislation in an often UN-wary, isolationist Congress.
But when Ogata broached the subject last year of coming to Washington, Abuzayd’s first response was, “Why not Albania?”
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That’s taking your mandate seriously.
Hot Rod
Well, thank goodness, Jesse Jackson didn’t get all the attention for convincing Milosevic to free the three POWs.
Mission colleague Rep. Rod Blagojevich of Chicago returned home to meet with President Clinton and pitch his plan for a partition of Kosovo. Clinton said it was something to consider, which was diplomatic because National Security Adviser Samuel “Sandy” Berger and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright sat in on the same session and, the congressman concedes, dumped all over the idea.
He had a more tolerant audience elsewhere, with hundreds of media requests, from the British Broadcasting Corp. World Service and small Texas radio stations to newspapers in Norway.
There was a long profile in The Washington Post, appearances on the Fox News Channel, CNBC and MSNBC, as well as a “Today” interview with Matt Lauer.
But his battle plan was to push partition and to be as mindful as possible of local media back home. It explains a long interview with yours truly for WGN-AM 720, as well as interviews with Chicago television reporters Mike Flannery (WBBM-Ch. 2), Andy Shaw (WLS-Ch. 7) and Phil Rogers (WMAQ-Ch. 5), as well as appearances on the morning shows of WFLD-Ch. 32 and WBBM.
It’s easy to get a big head here but, as Tip O’Neill said, all politics is local.
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James Warren and Michael Tackett of the Tribune’s Washington bureau are hosts of “Unconventional Wisdom” at 7:05 p.m. Sunday on WGN-AM 720.