V O L U M E 2 • N U M B E R 1 3 1 • 2 0 0 3

Africaat a

Crossroads

“Millions of civilians have been killed in theflames of war...

But there is hope too… in places like

Sierra Leone, Angola and in the

Horn of Africa.”—High Commissioner RUUD LUBBERS

3R E F U G E E S

2 E D I T O R I A L

Africa slips deeper into misery as the world focuses on Iraq.

4 A F R I C A N I M A G E S

A pictorial on the African continent.

12In an era of short wars and limited casualties, events in Africa are almost incomprehensible.By Ray Wilkinson

Africa at a glanceA brief look at the continent.

17 MapRefugee and internally displaced populations.

MilitaryRefugee camps are centers for military recruitment.

BurundiA change of power in a troubled land.

CongoThe legacy of Africa’s worst ever documented war.

BorderA typical hard day at an African frontier post.

AngolaA new start.

28 I R A Q

After the war, what now for Iraq?

30 P E O P L E

Africa’s very own Mother Teresa.

C O V E R S T O R Y

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12Africa is at anothercrossroads. There isplenty of good news as

hundreds of thousands ofpersons returned to SierraLeone, Angola, Burundi(pictured) and the Horn ofAfrica. But wars continued inCôte d’Ivoire, Liberia andother areas, making it a verymixed picture for thecontinent.

30 Some people call hera new Mother Teresa.Italian doctor

Annalena Tonelli has won theNansen Refugee Award fordecades of work amongSomali civilians.

28With the war in Iraqofficially over,UNHCR has turned its

attention to helping to returnsome of the estimated500,000 longtime Iraqirefugees living across theglobe who may now go backto that country.

Editor:Ray Wilkinson

French editor:Mounira Skandrani

Contributors:Millicent Mutuli, Astrid VanGenderen Stort, Delphine Marie,Peter Kessler, Panos Moumtzis

Editorial assistant:Virginia Zekrya

Photo department:Suzy Hopper,Anne Kellner

Design:Vincent Winter Associés

Production:Françoise Jaccoud

Photo engraving:Aloha Scan - Geneva

Distribution:John O’Connor, Frédéric Tissot

Maps:UNHCR Mapping Unit

Historical documentsUNHCR archives

Refugees is published by the MediaRelations and Public InformationService of the United Nations HighCommissioner for Refugees. Theopinions expressed by contributorsare not necessarily those of UNHCR.The designations and maps used donot imply the expression of anyopinion or recognition on the part ofUNHCR concerning the legal statusof a territory or of its authorities.

Refugees reserves the right to edit allarticles before publication. Articlesand photos not covered by copyright ©may be reprinted without priorpermission. Please credit UNHCRand the photographer. Glossy printsand slide duplicates of photographs notcovered by copyright © may be madeavailable for professional use only.

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Cover:Africa: an uncertain future.U N H C R / R . W I L K I N S O N / C S / C I V • 2 0 0 3

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2 R E F U G E E S

While the world was mesmerized by the

war in Iraq, Africa’s refugees have

slipped a little bit deeper into misery and

despair.

When coalition forces moved into Iraq, aid work-

ers and journalists stood by in Jordan, Iran, Syria and

Turkey, ready to receive hordes of Iraqi refugees who

never came.

Meanwhile, nearly 100,000 civilians escaped from

the civil war in Côte d’Ivoire into

eastern Liberia, itself wracked by

another conflict. On the outskirts

of Liberia’s capital, Monrovia,

there were no embedded journal-

ists to cover a rebel attack on a dis-

placed persons camp in which

hundreds of civilians were report-

edly abducted or slaughtered.

Remember Guinea, the West

African country that was in the

news when it was being courted

for its vote on a Security Council

resolution? More than 7,000

Liberian refugees, many with

gunshot wounds, arrived there re-

cently. Aid workers struggled to

transport them to a safer area away

from the border.

In southern Chad, more than 30,000 refugees from

the Central African Republic sleep under trees, wait-

ing to see what will happen at home following the

overthrow of the Patassé government recently (not

much was heard of the regime change there).

Of course, it was hard to mobilize interest in

Africa’s refugees even before the fighting started in

Iraq. On Valentine’s Day the U.N. Refugee Agency

and the World Food Program warned lack of funding

would force a halt in food deliveries to refugee camps

in Africa.

But within a week of issuing an appeal for $1.3 bil-

lion to feed Iraq’s hungry people (who had two

months supply on hand), the World Food Program re-

ceived pledges of $315 million—nearly three times the

amount called for in the African appeal.

In recent testimony before the U.S. Congress, even

before news filtered out of another appalling mas-

sacre of nearly 300 civilians in northeastern Demo-

cratic Republic of Congo, the advocacy group

Refugees International pointed out that more people

had died in the Congo in one week due to violence,

malnutrition and disease than died in the war in Iraq

to that date.

Editorial pages and talk shows have been abuzz

with scenarios for the rehabilitation of Iraq. The first

anniversary of the end of Angola’s 27-year civil war

passed virtually unnoticed, as did calls for the World

Bank to extend the scope of its reintegration assistance

to cover not just the former UNITA rebel soldiers, but

also thousands of Angolan women abducted and

forced to become ‘wives’ of rebel troops.

Opening a Model U.N. in Ottawa, Stephen Lewis,

the U.N. Secretary-General’s Special Envoy for

HIV/AIDS in Africa, mused about what could happen

if the Global Fund set up to fight AIDS, malaria and

tuberculosis were fully funded, before telling 800

university students that the fund was nearly

bankrupt.

So while Iraq dominates the world spotlight, spare

a thought for Africa’s silent emergencies and the hope

of one African refugee: “If only a coalition would

come to rescue us.”

JUDITH KUMIN, UNHCR’s Representative in Canada, first wrote this opinion piece for the Montreal Gazette.

The Iraq effect…

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WAR:The conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo has been described as the worst in Africa’s recorded history.

Africanimages

An estimated three million people perished.

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GOING HOME:Some 240,000 Sierra Leoneans have returned home to try to patch the country together again, following a ten year-long war.

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THE FUTURE:Even when refugees return home, the future may still be very tough, as in Eritrea.

12 R E F U G E E S

In an era of short wars, ‘controlled’ numbers of ca-sualties and sanitized images such as those emerg-ing from Iraq, events in Africa seem almost in-comprehensible.

Deep in the heart of the Congo basin, some threemillion people, perhaps many more, perished duringan ongoing war described as the deadliest document-ed conflict in Africa’s history. And even as Americanmarines mopped up last pockets of resistance in Bagh-dad in the full glare of thousands of television cam-

eras, hundreds of people were being slaughtered al-most unnoticed in the latest atrocity in one remotecorner of the Congo region.

During the course of the conflict which began in1998 and which at times involved six armies from sur-rounding countries, countless militias and home-grown gangs of thugs, 2.5 million people were rippedfrom their homes and forced to seek shelter in steam-ing rain forests and neighboring states.

Angola suffered a similar fate. In a civil war lasting

Liberian refugeesflee back to theirown country afterconflict erupted in neighboring Côted’Ivoire.

AFRICA on the The human toll has been appalling, but is the light at the end of

by Ray Wilkinson

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13R E F U G E E S

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almost three decades, an estimated one million peoplewere killed, and anywhere from three to five millionwere again uprooted from their ancestral villages andtowns. They trudged across a destroyed landscapefrom one temporary sanctuary to another, often forcedto eat berries and roots to survive and in constant dan-ger of being killed or maimed, not only by the combat-ants, but also from millions of mines which made oneof the continent’s richest countries a vast and deadlybooby trap.

Far to the north, Sudan has been destabilized bycivil conflict virtually from independence in 1956, andonce more the human toll was one of biblical propor-tions rather than the quick and limited conflicts thepublic in industrialized countries now expect. Twomillion people died, four million roam the northerndesert wastes and southern savannah grasslands ofthe continent’s largest country, and a half millionrefugees were forced to flee even further afield.

Those, of course, were only the largest and longestof a series of upheavals which wracked and thenwrecked large swathes of Africa: Burundi, Eritrea,Ethiopia, Western Sahara, Liberia, Congo-Brazzavilleand most recently Côte d’Ivoire and the CentralAfrican Republic.

Then there was Rwanda: as many as one millionpeople were slaughtered in the mid-1990s in theworld’s latest genocide. And again, images of endlessflood tides of refugees shuffling along in billowingclouds of dust, buffeted mercilessly by the latest chaos.

A SCARThese images are familiar to a global audience. So

much so that British Prime Minister Tony Blair in-sisted in one keynote address that the anarchy couldnot continue and “The state of Africa is a scar on theconscience of the world, but if the world focused on it,we could heal it.”

So, two years after that clarion call, how is Africadoing?

Donor countries, aid agencies, national govern-ments do provide large amounts of assistance to thecontinent. UNHCR’s current annual budget forAfrica, for instance, is nearly $400 million.

And there is other good news. In 1995, UNHCR as-sisted seven million refugees. Today, that figure is lessthan half (though the refugee agency does now alsohelp some other classes of distressed civilians, includ-ing victims of war and persecution living in their owncountries. The overall number of uprooted peoplethroughout Africa is still a staggering 15 million).

The West African nation of Sierra Leone sufferedthrough a decade of civil war in the 1990s where thesevering of the arms and limbs of civilian victims be-came a loathsome signature of that brutal conflict. To-day, the country is enjoying a fragile peace.

Anywhere between one million and 1.5 million in-ternally displaced Angolans and another 100,000refugees from one of the world’s longest wars have re-turned home ‘spontaneously’ following a peace accordsigned last year. Hundreds of thousands will followsuit this year if the guns remain silent.

In a vast swirl of peoples constantly on the moveacross the length and breadth of the continent, around440,000 longtime refugees returned to their formerhomes in the Horn of Africa in the last couple of years.

Nearly two million refugees from Burundi, Sudan,Somalia and the Congo region are pinning their ownhopes of seeing their homes again in the near futureon various peace negotiations currently underway.

EDGEthe tunnel a little brighter?

IN 1995, UNHCRASSISTED SEVEN MILLIONREFUGEES.TODAY, THATFIGURE IS LESSTHAN HALF.

Countries such as the United States which tradi-tionally offer to resettle particularly vulnerablerefugees, are paying increasing attention to Africa(though Washington’s overall resettlement programhas still to recover from the aftereffects of the terror-ist attacks there in September, 2001).

A project called the New Partnership for Africa’sDevelopment (NEPAD) which aims to promote conti-nental peace and stability through sustainable devel-opment has received an enthusiastic global response.In any new era of calm, a majority of displaced personswould also be able to restart their lives.

A CROSSROADSBut Africa undoubtedly remains on a knife-edge. High Commissioner Ruud Lubbers said: “Africa is

again at a crossroads.” While “millions of civilianshave literally been killed inthe flames of war, there ishope too… in places like Sier-ra Leone, Angola and in theHorn of Africa.”

David Lambo, the headof UNHCR’s Africa Bureau,insists that on purely hu-manitarian issues, “We are alittle further down the roadthan six months ago. Thelight is getting a littlebrighter at the end of thetunnel. But it is equally truethat the continent is at a newdivide.”

Why, when an increas-ingly smaller world can lav-ish such attention and assis-tance—at least short-term—on places like Afghanistanand latterly Iraq, does Africastill seem so desperate andso ignored?

The continent continues to produce its owndespots and misguided policies, but the malaise goesdeeper than that. Africa is still viewed as far away, hu-manitarian crises are ‘over there’, both donor capitalsand refugee hosting countries suffer from ‘refugee fa-tigue’, what help is provided simply is not enough and

the continent is appar-ently no longer strate-gically important.

Only a few yearsago, such places asZaire and Angolawere prized for theiroil and minerals. ButCuban and whiteSouth African troops—proxies for the bigpowers—have long

since departed Angola. This outside involvement wasa catalyst for many of the continent’s problems, butwhen the foreigners walked away, Africa was left tosuffer largely in silence and without the help neces-sary to clean up the mess.

Economies, which could be self-sustaining, areshort-circuited by rules made in distant capitals.African farmers could help feed the world, but agri-cultural subsidies granted to producers in the world’sindustrialized countries undercut one of the few vi-able options the continent has to break out of its cycleof deprivation and poverty which in turn help to fuelwars and refugee flight.

Wealthy donors and international institutionshave spent millions of dollars on short-term humani-tarian relief, especially when thousands of peoplewere dying in front of the television cameras as hap-

pened in Rwanda, but theyhave little appetite to helpunderwrite long-term devel-opment.

Health, education and so-cial services crumble.HIV/AIDS has reached epi-demic proportions in manyAfrican countries and morethan two million people diedfrom the disease there in2001 alone. Another eightmillion succumbed to othereasily treated ailments suchas malaria, measles and diar-rhea. At that rate of mortali-ty, the population of a mod-estly sized European coun-try such as Britain or Francewould be totally wiped out inless than a decade.

But some of the above as-sumptions may be wrong.

Africa is no longer ‘far away.’ Tens of thousands ofAfricans trudge thousands of miles each year to thenorthern shores of the continent where they embarkon leaky boats to try to gate-crash Europe. WarnsDavid Lambo: “There is a sense of total desperationamong many Africans and these kind of people willliterally fight their way” into Europe and other pros-perous regions.

Africa may also turn out to be the soft underbellyin the industrialized world’s fight against global ter-rorism. Refugee camps and the chaos of such places asSomalia provide not only effective shelter for existingterrorists such as Al Qaida, but are breeding groundsfor future gunmen. East Africa has already beenscarred by lethal attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenyaand Tanzania and against Israeli tourists in Kenya.

THE DOUBLE STANDARDAnd then there is the reputed double standard: up-

14 R E F U G E E S

DEEP IN THEHEART OF THECONGO BASIN,AN ESTIMATEDTHREE MILLIONPEOPLEPERISHEDDURING ANONGOING WARDESCRIBED ASTHE DEADLIESTDOCUMENTEDCONFLICT INAFRICA’SHISTORY.

AFRICA ON THE EDGE

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Algerians: Africa’s first refugees.

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AfricaGlobal

1951-1955 ‘56-‘60 ‘61-‘65 ‘66-‘70 ‘71-‘75 ‘76-‘80 ‘81-‘85 ‘86-‘90 ‘91-‘95 ‘96-‘00 2003

Millions ofrefugees

B There are an estimated 15million refugees, internallydisplaced and other uprootedpersons throughout the Africancontinent. UNHCR cares fornearly 4.6 million of them witha regular 2003 budget of nearly$400 million.

B Overall, this was a slightincrease compared with 4.2million people the previousyear. The agency’s assistancepeaked in 1994 when it helpedseven million refugees, many ofwhom had fled the Rwandangenocide of that year.

B In 2002, more than onemillion people fled their homes,while an estimated 600,000refugees and IDPs returnedwith UNHCR assistance.However, in Angola alonebetween one million and 1.5million internally displacedpersons also returned homespontaneously.

B Africa’s largest refugeepopulations came from thefollowing countries: Burundi570,000; Sudan 490,000; Angola421,000; Democratic Republic ofCongo 395,000; and Somalia357,000.

B African countries hosting thelargest refugee populationsinclude: Tanzania 690,000;Democratic Republic of Congo330,000; Sudan 328,000; Zambia247,000; Kenya 234,000; andUganda 217,000.

B Since the end of the colonialera, Africa has been the scene ofsome of the longest and worstglobal conflicts. Sudan waswracked by civil war betweenthe mainly Muslim north andAnimist and Christian southvirtually since independence in1956. An estimated two millionpeople were killed, four millionpeople displaced internally andhalf a million people fled toneighboring countries.

B Angola suffered a similar warstarting in the 1960s. At leastone million persons werekilled, four million weredisplaced internally andanother half million fled asrefugees.

B Conflict in the DemocraticRepublic of Congo starting in1998 was described as Africa’sfirst ‘World War.’ It involved ahalf dozen armies, reputedlykilling between three and fivemillion people either as a directresult of war or because ofdisease and malnutrition. Twomillion people fled to nearbyneighborhoods and 300,000civilians became refugees.

B The entire West African regionwas destabilized after civil warerupted once more in Liberia in1989. Nearly 70 percent of thatcountry’s population, anestimated 2.4 million people,were displaced and 150,000killed. Neighboring Côted’Ivoire, once one of thecontinent’s most stable nations,toppled into civil war in late2002, displacing up to 800,000people and forcing 400,000more to flee the country.

B Burundi is one of the world’spoorest and smallest countries,but a decade-long conflict therekilled more than 200,000people and produced nearlyone million uprooted persons,or nearly 14 percent of the totalpopulation

B Politically, there wereencouraging developments.Following the signing of a peaceaccord in early 2002, civiliansbegan returning to their homesin Angola and the pace of returnwas expected to increase incoming months. Tenuous peacedeals were signed in Burundi andCongo. Following a decade-longcivil war in Sierra Leone, thatcountry continued to stabilize.

B Wars and displacement havebeen fueled by economic andsocial upheaval. The number ofpeople living in absolutepoverty in sub-Saharan Africais likely to rise from 315 to 404million in the next 15 years,making the continent theworld’s poorest region.

B Half the population surviveson less than one dollar a day,more than 50 percent has no

access to clean drinking waterand more than two millioninfants die annually beforereaching their first birthday

B HIV/AIDS reached epidemicproportions in many countriesand in 2001 more than twomillion died from the disease.Eight million others died frommalaria, measles, tuberculosisand diarrheal diseases.

B An estimated 40 millionAfricans in Ethiopia, Eritrea, theSahel and West Africa facestarvation according to theWorld Food Program.

B Refugees are people who havefled their country in search ofsafety from war and repression.Internally displaced persons left forsimilar reasons, but remain in theirown countries. UNHCR assists allrefugees globally. It began to helpsome, but not all, internallydisplaced persons in the 1990s.Thus, statistics in the charts andtables accompanying articles in thisissue are sometimes available foronly one of these groups duringcertain time periods.

Africa at a glance

Temporary shelter in Chad.

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R E F U G E E S 15

16 R E F U G E E S

r o o t e dAfricans sim-

ply do not get as muchcomparable aid as refugees in

other parts of the world, a problemhighlighted by the Iraq crisis.

As that war loomed, Afghan President HamidKarzai pleaded with Washington: “Don’t forget us ifIraq happens.”

His country had seen a Soviet invasion and a sub-sequent big power struggle, virtual abandonment foryears by a disinterested global community, anotherforeign intervention and, finally, renewed pledgesthat the past would not be repeated and the industri-alized world this time would stand by Kabul.

Realpolitik being what it is, Karzai was not con-vinced.

For critics of the current global humanitarian set-up too, the Iraq conflict has been a litmus test. Forthem, it vividly underlined the so-called double stan-dard: the willingness to commit massive military, eco-nomic and financial resources in the Middle East insupport of goals which could equally apply in Africa—supporting freedom and democracy, providing hu-manitarian assistance to a desperate population, up-rooting terrorism.

The United Nations system launched its biggestever appeal for $2.2 billion in humanitarian assistancein Iraq, a target which undoubtedly would have beenmet had the conflict been a prolonged one.

In the same period, fund raisers trying to find cashfor Africa uniformly reported that early in the yeartraditional donors ‘sat on their hands’, refusing tocommit to other goals until it was clear which way the

war in Iraq would go. One European delegation point-edly remarked that “Angola is a country rich enoughto fund its own repatriation” this year to which a des-perate aid official asked aloud if the same rules wouldbe applied to Iraqi refugees.

African commentators pointed to the huge butempty tent cities on the desert fringes of Iraq waitingfor refugees who never arrived and compared that tothe low level of interest and media coverage as tens ofthousands of people fled the West African state ofCôte d’Ivoire.

High Commissioner Lubbers insisted: “I am con-cerned that the interest being shown in Iraq has di-minished the interest in Africa. Whenever money isneeded for Africa, the funding is going down, not up.”

Projections suggest that the refugee agency’sAfrica budget this year will fall at least 15 percent

short, an amount Lubbers called “less than the costof an hour’s war in Iraq”—but which nevertheless

will necessitate painful cuts in education, self-sufficiency and other basic programs.

The World Food Program estimated 40 mil-lion Africans faced starvation and James Mor-

ris, WFP’s Executive Director recently told theU.N. Security Council: “As much as I don’t like it, I can-not escape the thought that we have a double stan-dard. How is it we routinely accept a level of sufferingand hopelessness in Africa we would never accept inany other part of the world? We simply cannot let thisstand.”

Noting that at the start of the Iraq war each familythere had one month’s supply of food, Morris said theAfricans facing hunger “most of them women andchildren, would find it an immeasurable blessing tohave a month’s worth of food.”

SHORTCHANGEDSo are Africans being shortchanged? Comparing

how much money is spent on each refugee in differ-ent parts of the world can be a slippery business andmay not necessarily reflect the ‘effective’ amount ofhelp each person receives. The cost of building shel-ters in the Balkans, for instance, may be higher thanin Africa and would undoubtedly distort any directdollar-per-refugee comparison.

But UNHCR has approved a minimum standard ofassistance every refugee should receive and eventhese basic benchmarks covering such necessities asfood, water and shelter are regularly breached inAfrica because of lack of adequate financial and man-power resources.

The World Food Program reduced already border-line rations to some refugee camps by half. Displacedpersons in the Horn of Africa, one of the most inhos-pitable places on earth in the sweltering summermonths, should receive a minimum 20 liters of waterper day, but in the 1990s emergency some were forcedto survive on less than three liters. Similar shortagesare common today. In some camps only around 30 per- Ã

“THE LIGHT IS GETTING A LITTLEBRIGHTER ATTHE END OFTHE TUNNEL.BUT IT ISEQUALLY TRUETHAT THECONTINENT ISAT A DIVIDE.”

UNHCRbegins itsinvolvementin Africa in 1957.

Africa’s Uprooted Peoples

MoroccoAlgeria

Tunisia

Libya

Egypt

Rwanda

Eritrea

Ethiopia

SierraLeone

Kenya

Tanzania

Guinea

Mauritania

Niger

WesternSahara

Nigeria

Republicof Congo

Central African

Republic

Chad

Malawi

MozambiqueZimbabwe

Zambia

South Africa

Namibia

Sudan

Angola

Burundi

Uganda

Côted’Ivoire

LiberiaSomalia

DemocraticCongo

Tanzania 690,000

Democratic Congo 330,000

Sudan 328,000

Zambia 247,000

Kenya 234,000

Uganda 217,000

Guinea 182,000

Algeria 169,000

Ethiopia 133,000

Republic of Congo 109,000

Major Displaced Populations

RefugeesIDPsReturnees

5,000,000

2,500,000

500,000

Major Refugee

-Hosting Countries

The recruiters came at sundownwith fistfuls of cash and promisesof adventure, power and women.Within three hours, 150 young

Liberian men at the Nicla refugee camp inwestern Côte d’Ivoire had signed up tobecome government mercenaries in a unitnicknamed the Lima force.

They each pocketed 10,000 local CFAfrancs ($17), jumped aboard two trucks and,led by a fighter wearing a red bandana andbrandishing a 50-caliber machine gunmounted on the back of a jeep, roared out ofthe camp telling other refugees whowitnessed the incident, “We want money.Here we are nothing and we have nothing.”

After training, these new guns for hirewere expected to fight on behalf of thegovernment against other Liberians in severalinvading rebel groups who were operating inand around the highly volatile border areabetween the two West African countries.

Nicla had been a sleepy backwater kindof place, a rural village similar to surroundingIvorian hamlets, offering sanctuary to just asmall pocket of the hundreds of thousandsof refugees who had fled neighboring Liberia35 kms to the west following more than adecade of renewed turmoil in that country.

The great majority of the Liberiansintegrated easily into Ivorian villages ratherthan moving into refugee camps, but whenCôte d’Ivoire itself was wracked by civilconflict in September 2002, many of theseuprooted civilians were forced to flee again.Between 6,000 and 8,000 packed into Nicla,seeking the safety of an internationalsponsored camp rather than run the risk of atide of xenophobia sweeping through thecountryside.

Unsurprisingly, however, given itsproximity to a highly volatile border, nearbyconflict and a ready pool of able-bodiedmale and female refugees, the camp becameinstead a hotbed for recruitment.

There have been regular confrontationsbetween humanitarian ideals and militaryimperatives for many years, Nicla being justone of the latest and most blatant examples.

An estimated 300,000 underage childsoldiers, 3,000 in Côte d’Ivoire itself, are

currently serving in armies and militiasaround the world, some of them pluckedstraight from refugee camps. Untoldnumbers of older, but still vulnerable youths,have also been recruited. Girls areparticularly vulnerable, becoming footsoldiers or sexual slaves, or both.

National governments, not humanitarianagencies, are responsible for the security ofrefugee camps, but when they cannot or willnot enforce proper security, organizationssuch as UNHCR or Caritas, which is presentin Nicla, face difficult choices.

When more than one million Rwandansfled from that country’s genocide in the mid-1990s, the dreaded Interahamwe militiasused camps in then eastern Zaire not only torecruit, but also to launch raids back intoRwanda. With the national security apparatusdisintegrating, UNHCR unsuccessfullyappealed to U.N. member states for militaryassistance and then paid for its own securityforce—with limited results.

Effectively, it took the controversialdecision to continue caring for hundreds ofthousands of genuine refugees, knowing atthe same time that the gunmen were alsobenefiting from the aid and internationalhumanitarian presence.

For months the agency has been workingon ‘solutions’ for Nicla, ranging from localprograms to promote education and smallself-help projects to trying to relocate thecamp away from the immediate fightingzone and asking other countries to acceptthe most vulnerable Liberians forresettlement.

WILD WESTBut though the site was named Peace

Turning refugees into gunmenPower and adventure versus poverty, boredom and isolation in a battle for the hearts and minds of the young

Nicla camp–military recruits take heed.

THERE IS NO WORK, NO MONEY, SPREADING POVERTY, LITTLE EDUCATION AND FEW OTHERACTIVITIES FOR THE REFUGEES—ONLY STIFLING BOREDOM AND GROWING RESENTMENT AND FEAR.

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18 R E F U G E E S

Emergency distribution.

Returning fishermen in Jaffna.

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cent of children receive any type of education.Jeff Crisp, the head of UNHCR’s evaluation unit,

said that desperate conditions in some camps deterio-rated the longer they remained in existence, reflect-ing general ‘fatigue’ with protracted crises and the di-version of scarce resources to other projects.

The agency has now begun to compile a compre-hensive ‘gap analysis’ between the minimum estab-lished targets and the reality on the ground.

Continent wide, conditions vary and the surveycovered only refugees in established camps or transitcenters and not those living in local communities.

And the shortfalls are hardly the stuff of interna-tional headlines, but do underscore the point madeby WFP’s James Morris that the daily living condi-tions of many uprooted peoples are unacceptable byany international norm.

Kenya’s Kakuma and Dadaab camps are amongthe largest in Africa, sheltering between them180,000 people. The survey showed even such mun-dane items as blankets, jerrycans and kitchen uten-sils were last distributed on a large scale seven yearsago and those items have probably long since per-ished. The report warned: “The non-renewal of(such items) will aggravate the already precarioussituation in camps. This will result in the outbreak ofa number of diseases associated with cold, lack of hy-gienic facilities, etc.”

In Dadaab, where summer temperatures canreach above 40 degrees Celsius, refugees currentlyreceive 17 liters of water per day, but they are also ex-pected to feed their livestock from this amount.There is only one toilet available for every 275 stu-dents at school compared with a target of one for ev-ery 20; there are 144 children for every classroomand one teacher for every 60 children. Because offunding constraints, the gap will not be bridged in thenear term and the report said the agency “will nothave fulfilled its duty of addressing the basic rights of

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Town by the refugees, it has more theappearance of the Wild West.

A recent visitor was startled to seedozens of wildly cheering youths,accompanied by the inevitable machinegunner and his red bandana, careeningthrough the camp on trucks in broad daylight(similar military activities in other refugeecamps are often carried out moresurreptitiously under the cover of darkness).

Bursts of gunfire often rupture dailyroutine when the ‘soldiers’ return to camp tovisit their families. One group of schoolchildren tumbled out through both doorsand windows in panic when bullets whizzedpast their school house recently.

Refugees said they lived their lives on aknife-edge in such conditions. “Just talking toyou like this could get me killed,” onerefugee said in refusing to be identified. “It islike a huge cattle barn here,” anothercomplained to a camp official. “Whathappens when there is a massacre? You willcome back in the morning (UNHCR workersdo not live in the camp overnight) to collectthe dead bodies. And that will be ourbodies.”

It is easy to understand the military lurefor young refugees. Ivorians, often with thesame tribal background, who once welcomedthem, now look on most Liberians as ‘rebels’and areas surrounding Nicla have become ‘nogo’ areas. Cooped up in their camp, there isno work, no money, spreading poverty, littleeducation and few other activities for therefugees—only stifling boredom and growingresentment and fear.

In such circumstances many feel theyhave no alternative but to ‘join up.’ Othersare attracted to the excitement and the rawpower afforded to anyone with a gun.

Young girls have been recruited and areaffected in other less direct ways. Some cannow earn money through a flourishingprostitution racket, servicing the newlyaffluent young fighters. There is sexualharassment (a 12-year-old who was beingritually abused by men was recently movedto new foster parents), but other young girls,who should be in school, willingly becomedrinking partners in the camp’s six or sevenbars and then girlfriends of the gunmen.

Jette Isaksen has worked in Rwanda,Afghanistan, Kosovo and Liberia, but hercurrent job as a field officer visiting Nicladaily is different to those other frontlineassignments. “I’ve never been so scared ashere,” she said walking around the camp. “Idon’t like the mood.” B

ABIGAIL ISLIVING THEULTIMATEREFUGEENIGHTMARE.SINCE THE AGEOF 13 SHE HASBEEN ON THERUN SEEKING ASAFE PLACE TOLIVE…HOWEVER, SHEJUST KEEPSBUMPING INTOAFRICA’SLATEST WAR.

R E F U G E E S 19

the child to primary education.”Seventy-five percent of pregnant women are

anaemic. The space available to each refugee is lessthan three square meters—minimum standard is 3.5square meters—and “shelters are in pathetic condi-tions.” The report added that “failure to upgrade liv-ing conditions of the refugees... would hinder their

protection from respiratory and other associated dis-eases, privacy and emotional security.”

FIGHTING FOR FUNDSExcept for high profile emergencies such as Iraq,

money for any of the nearly 22 million people UN-HCR helps is increasingly difficult to obtain from tra-

Violence and upheaval since independence

It has been convulsed by violent conflictfor 30 years. Though it is one of Africa’ssmallest countries, in the last decadealone around 150,000 civilians were

killed and 1.5 million more uprooted in thelandlocked state of Burundi. The world atlarge paid little attention.

And like the continent as a whole, Burundiis again at a crossroads. After years of patientdiplomacy, first by Tanzania’s late PresidentJulius Nyerere and latterly by former SouthAfrican President Nelson Mandela, the coun-try in early May reached the mid-way point inthe life of a three-year transitional nationalgovernment.

To mark that occasion, President PierreBuyoya, an ethnic Tutsi, handed over the of-fice he seized in a coup in 1996 to his VicePresident, Domitien Ndayizeye, an ethnic

Hutu.The two populations have competed for

power virtually since national independence in1962 and a peaceful transfer of power was a rareevent. The future of the country and its six millionpopulation will now depend on the success of thislatest attempt to forge a lasting peace.

Even during the transition, there have beenmixed signals. Clashes between the Tutsi dom-inated army and two major Hutu rebel groups,the Forces for the Defense of Democracy(FDD) and the National Liberation Forces con-tinued in parts of the country.

LARGEST REFUGEE POPULATIONBurundians comprise the largest single

refugee population in Africa. Some 570,000civilians are officially recognized refugees,the great bulk of them living in neighboring

Tanzania, while there are several hundredthousand others who have lived abroad forseveral decades and are not officiallycounted.

In the bizarre climate of central Africa,even as negotiations and fighting continuedside by side, so an estimated 40,000 Burundi-ans returned to peaceful parts of the countrywhile a similar number fled the ongoing fight-ing elsewhere to seek refuge in a neighboringstate.

“I feel deeply that I had to come home,”Nduwimana, a 25-year-old mother of onechild said, reflecting the optimism of the re-turnees looking forward to a more peacefulfuture. “I saw that other people from my areawere coming home and I didn’t want to missthe chance,” she said after hitching a ride on atwice-weekly UNHCR convoy from Tanzania,organized to help anyone wanting to take achance on peace.

The refugee agency has tried to bolster thelong-term chances of a successful outcome byalso building schools and health centers forboth refugees and local communities, assist-ing the vulnerable and elderly and even help-ing to launch a ‘judicial clinic’ that travelsthrough northern Burundi trying to settle dis-putes between local residents and returningrefugees.

At the presidential handover, UNHCR’s se-nior regional official, Wairimu Karago said themove was “very welcome and raises hopes fora solution for the refugees. It may mean theycan come back home and end many yearsspent outside of Burundi. I would like to seethis saga come to an end.”

The country has been here before, how-ever, and the future continues to hang in thebalance. B

Seeking safety in neighboring Tanzania.

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But Burundi is again at a crossroads

AFRICA ON THE EDGE

21R E F U G E E S

ditional donors in the industrialized world.Some critics charge humanitarian agencies them-

selves have contributed to Africa’s funding problemsby anticipating what donors are prepared to offerrather than realistically assessing actual needs on theground—effectively self-censoring requirements.

That may be a good, levelheaded business ap-proach. A massive and ‘unreasonable’ increase in de-mand for ‘regular’ African funding from levels thelenders have come to expect, might have the oppositeeffect and could conceivably trigger a backlash affect-ing other global programs.

But three years ago, Julia Taft, then the U.S. Assis-tant Secretary of State, Bureau of Population,Refugees and Migration, effectively America’s toprefugee official, told REFUGEES: “The dichotomy ofhow refugees were treated in say, Guinea, versus howthose from Kosovo were treated, was totally unaccept-able for all of us; unacceptable to spend less than $20million on 500,000 refugees from Sierra Leone andthen ask for $240 million for an equivalent number ofrefugees in Kosovo. It is not fair and it is not right.”

Taft then outlined an approach Washington hasurged ever since in funding discussions on Africa: “Ifnecessary, the donors should be the bad guys—UN-HCR ought to tell us what is really needed and forcethe donors to say ‘We can’t afford that’ rather than set-tling on the standard to what you think donors will bewilling to give.”

Despite that rejoinder, little has changed and over-all funding levels have continued to shrink. Regionaloffices throughout the world are forced to fight andbarter for every scarce dollar available in a bruisingannual process. One recent arrival in West Africa, un-used to this cut and thrust, came away from his firstbudget session literally shellshocked. “The field of-fice originally had targeted around $185 for every dis-placed person to be helped,” he recalled. “This was cut

down to $70. Eventually we settled on something inbetween. I felt I was in a bazaar in Istanbul bargainingfor a carpet rather than trying to save people’s lives.”

HOPE AND DESPAIRWest Africa is a microcosm of both the hope and

despair gripping the entire continent. It offers a warn-ing that things in even the most seemingly stable ofsocieties can quickly spin out of control or conversely,that with the right help, countries can be patchedback together again.

In 1998 a village tailor and father of seven childrencalled Alie K. was captured by rebels in Sierra Leoneand in a gruesome ritual which became commonplacein a decade-long civil war, the guerrillas slashed offhis left hand. “Three of them did it, one pointing agun, the others cutting,” Alie said. They also slashedhis right hand and whipped him before he fled intothe bush. Because of profuse bleeding, “I ripped awaythe rest of my left hand and threw it away because Icould not hold it together while running,” he said.

Such atrocities became commonplace, but today, ina remarkable turnabout, Sierra Leone is enjoying afragile recovery after a 10-year-long civil war endedin 2002. A civilian government has been elected, thepolice and military are being rebuilt, some 14,000United Nations troops help to keep the peace. UN-HCR and other humanitarian agencies have assistedmore than 220,000 refugees and hundreds of thou-sands of internally displaced persons return home inthe last two years, including around 26,000 refugeesthus far in 2003.

A so-called 4Rs pilot project was launched. HighCommissioner Ruud Lubbers described the 4Rs ini-tiative as an attempt to create a ‘seamless’ flow of assis-tance from governments, humanitarian and develop-ment agencies during the four major phases of arefugee return—repatriation, reintegration, rehabili-

TWO MILLIONPEOPLE DIEDFROM HIV/AIDSIN 2001.ANOTHEREIGHT MILLIONSUCCUMBEDTO OTHEREASILYTREATABLEAILMENTS. ATTHAT RATE THEPOPULATIONOF AMODESTLYSIZEDEUROPEANCOUNTRYWOULD BEWIPED OUT INLESS THAN ADECADE.

On the move in Sudan.

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UNHCR HASAPPROVED AMINIMUMSTANDARD OFASSISTANCEEVERY REFUGEESHOULDRECEIVE BUTEVEN THOSEBASICBENCHMARKS COVERINGSUCHNECESSITIES ASFOOD, WATERAND SHELTERARE REGULARLYBREACHED INAFRICA.

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tation and reconstruction. Some earlier refugee oper-ations were blighted by breakdowns in the chain ofaid, creating an infamous ‘gap’ in assistance andthreatening to undermine the entire peace processand create new waves of refugees.

As UNHCR phases out its own participation inSierra Leone by 2005, having spent between $80 and$100 million there, development agencies such as theWorld Bank will take over, accelerating long-term re-construction of increasing numbers of schools, clinicsand other infrastructure.

Sierra Leone recently opened a Truth and Recon-ciliation Commission, similar to the panel SouthAfrica created to help that country overcome thetrauma and crimes of the apartheid era. PresidentAhmed Tejan Kabbah said this commission would of-fer “a therapeutic contribution to the peace process,the healing of trauma and the removal of the emo-tional scars of the armed conflict.”

The first witness, Tamba Finnoh, described howhe had been abducted and had his right arm severed,but then added, “I have put everything behind me andI am ready to forgive.”

ULTIMATE NIGHTMAREIn comparison, 26-year-old Abigail is continuing

to live the ultimate refugee nightmare, a symbol ofjust how quickly things can go wrong in the most un-likely of places.

Since the age of 13, she has been constantly on therun, seeking a safe place to live. That refuge, however,has eluded her and she just keeps bumping intoAfrica’s latest war.

As a teenager she fled Liberia in 1990 as that coun-try plunged into its latest round of civil war. Shetrekked on foot along the disease-ridden coastline ofthe Guinea Gulf and eventually reached the capital ofneighboring Côte d’Ivoire. A decade ago, Abidjan wasthe epitome of the post-colonial African dream, a cityof gleaming office towers, sophisticated Frenchrestaurants, dapper diplomats, thriving business andblack Africa’s only iceskating rink overlooking an-cient mangrove swamps.

Liberian refugees and hundreds of thousands ofguest workers from neighboring states fueled the eco-nomic expansion but lived in somewhat less salubri-ous circumstances, in a chain of Abidjan slums.

Abigail managed to complete her education andbecame a teacher in the town of Tabou, near the bor-der of the two countries, but late last year the Ivoriandream, which had been slowly unravelling for severalyears, imploded into civil war between the govern-ment and military rebels.

The unthinkable happened. Panic-stricken Liberi-an refugees, Ivorian citizens and guest workers fledthe country, nearly 100,000 of them to Liberia, itselfstill in the grip of that same conflict Abigail had fled 13years earlier. The Liberian teacher was again amongthe civilian flood tide on the move, undertaking whatthe New York Times called a journey from “one bankof hell to another… a darkly absurd and what mayprove to be an ultimately futile voyage for safety.”

And so it turned out for Abigail. A UNHCR pro-tection unit spot-checking the border region recentlycame across her at a checkpoint inside Côte d’Ivoire.

“I knew the horror that I was returning to in

Africa’s worst war

Abrightly colored United Nationsmap tells the story of the Congo.It is a crazy patchwork of yel-lows, greens, blues, pinks and

even soft pinks and is a vivid representationof the reality on the ground—areas con-trolled by the government and various rebelsplinter groups. A diagonal slash—a so-calleddemilitarized zone—divides the territory of-ficially known as the Democratic Republic ofCongo which has been riven by war for nearlyfive years.

The Washington based International Res-cue Committee recently put a price tag on theconflict: an estimated 3.3 million people per-ished in a war which at times sucked in sixarmies from surrounding countries in what theadvocacy group called “the deadliest docu-mented conflict in African history.”

But like many of Africa’s long-running wars,and despite being among the most deadly inrecent history, this one, too, was largely ig-

nored in the world at large as the bloodlettingcontinued unabated.

The combatants have now signed a seriesof peace pacts, most foreign troops withdrewand the United Nations dispatched a tiny4,300 garrison to reinforce the fragile peace.

THE HUMAN COSTSome two million Congolese civilians were

internally uprooted in the latest conflagrationand another 400,000 left the country entirely,seeking sanctuary in surrounding countries.

But some of those ‘host’ nations were alsoin a state of war. In a tragic cross fertilizationof misery, 330,000 civilians from Angola,Uganda, the neighboring Republic of Congo,Burundi, Rwanda and the Central African Re-public made the trek into DemocraticCongo—searching for assistance in a countryso many others were trying to leave.

On the humanitarian front, UNHCR estab-lished a network of 10 offices across Demo-

cratic Congo. Field staff there and colleaguesin surrounding states were charged with tryingto assist all the hapless civilians repeatedlycriss-crossing each others tracks and nationalfrontiers and eventually returning the major-ity to their home villages.

Clumps of refugees are spread across tensof thousands of square miles of often impene-trable rain forest and savannah grassland.There are virtually no roads, basic security isoften nonexistent and periodic massacrescontinue. Nearly nine years after they first re-treated into these forests, the remnants of anarmy of Rwandan refugees who escaped thatcountry’s genocide, are still emerging everyweek from the eerie heart of the continent.

A major operation to repatriate thousandsof Angolans is getting underway this year, butin the face of such enormous difficulties, theoverall humanitarian rescue mission for manyrefugees could turn out to be a ‘mission im-possible.’ B

Liberia,” she said quietly sitting beside an ancient buswith 26 other passengers as nervous but belligerentIvorian soldiers poked through their belongings anddebated her immediate fate. “My father and most ofmy family were killed in the last few years,” she said.“But the radio said things were quiet in Liberia, betterthan here” where all Liberians increasingly were be-ing labelled as rebels or dope smugglers.

She walked for two days in Liberia to reach the vil-lage where her mother lived, but the war there wassteadily engulfing eastern as well as western parts of

the country. “There was no food. There was no lawand order,” she said. “Men with guns took anythingthey wanted. The whole country was in a panic.”

For a second time she decided to do the unthink-able—escape from one war for the ‘safety’ of another,retracing her steps once again. Carrying one small ny-lon bag containing two sets of clothing and a few cos-metics, she again walked to the frontier, crossed andhitched the bus to her old ‘home’ in the coastal town ofTabou before the soldiers stopped her.

Having escaped possible death, she now faced theprospect of rape. One of the soldiers took away herrefugee identity card and said he might return it thenext morning—but only if she slept with him.

“I will do it,” the woman, single, attractive and to-tally vulnerable to such coercion, told UNHCR pro-tection officer Chiara Cardoletti. “What is one night ofmisery compared with a whole life of degradation?”

Negotiations, phone calls, threats and bluster. Abi-gail was eventually released unharmed. A small butimportant protection victory was achieved amidwidespread misery and suffering.

CHANGING EXPECTATIONSPanos Moumtzis, a veteran of earlier refugee emer-

It may be ‘mission impossible’ to help all the uprooted civilians in the heart of the continent

R E F U G E E S 23

Refugee conditions can be very different in Africacompared with Europe.

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ON THE MEND

It is the last and most difficult obstaclebetween fear and chaos and possible sal-vation. Every one of the more than 50million refugees UNHCR has helped since

1951 has undergone the ordeal. Untold num-bers of others have tried and failed.

The immense tide of ‘normal’ global travel-ers and tourists who cross frontiers each daywith minimal inconvenience have little senseof the immense barrier of worry fraught withunimaginable consequences the same processpresents to the would-be refugee. A negativeresponse may mean renewed persecution,starvation or even death in the country theyare trying to escape; a ‘yes’ the chance ofrefuge and a new start to life.

Today, fleeing civilians may traverse bor-ders in gleaming aircraft, sleek trains, by car orby truck. Human traffickers have turned thebusiness of transporting people on the runinto a multi-billion dollar enterprise strad-dling the globe.

Africans often take the old fashionedroute, walking or hitching rides on ramshacklebuses for days to reach a crossing—a small hutwith a single pole slung across the road, or aforbidding natural river barrier—where theycan be greeted with remarkable friendship orsubject to an official gauntlet of interminabledelay and financial and sexual harassment.

They move in small groups or, as in the caseof the exodus from Rwanda in 1994, floodinginto then eastern Zaire, hundreds of thou-sands each day for several days.

OFF THE BEATEN TRACKNero is a nondescript border point on the

Cavally River between Liberia and Côted’Ivoire, several hours off the main tarmacroad through a maze of oil palm plantationsand rain forest. It is a difficult place to findeven when someone is looking for it. A bam-boo flag pole, an open-sided lean-to and a re-ception area of beaten earth mark the spot.One hundred meters across the sluggish river,the Liberian flag hangs limply in the heat.

Several months ago, tens of thousands ofLiberians, Ivorians and guest workers fled thechaos enveloping Côte d’Ivoire for the equallydangerous territory of Liberia. Caught in the

middle of two wars, some are now beginningto return.

The situation is confused. One Ivorian saidthe border was sealed; another said it wasopen. ‘Officialdom’ is represented by severalunsavory Young Patriots, a government militiathrown together to man road and river barri-cades. They are armed with ancient rifles, ma-chetes and knives. One wears a woman’s blackevening gown.

Liberian representatives use a dugout ca-noe to cross the 100 meter barrier to discussthe situation. The Liberian side is also closedthough 50-60 civilians are gathered there,fleeing a war edging closer to the frontiereach day. They may have no alternative but toreturn to the conflict.

Edward Moore, the Liberian Collector ofCustoms explains in perfect English: “We havehad instructions that no one can cross.” Butthen he adds, “But we will let them go. We

must honor the 1951 Geneva Conven-tion.”

A passing UNHCR group is delightedto discover support for the RefugeeConvention in such an unlikely place,even if it may be just a calculated ges-ture to the visitors.

CUTOFFLife can be tough, not just for the

refugees, but also for the locals here.Moore has not seen or heard from hisfamily in Monrovia, the cutoff and dis-tant Liberian capital, for two years. Hehas been paid only fitfully. He is eager totalk to strangers. “Why are we Africanskilling each other all the time?” he asks.“There should be peace here. We arefrom the same tribe. But they are killingeach other in Iraq, too,” he adds.

The refugees begin to cross, eight toa single dugout canoe, their few remain-ing possessions piled high around them.A ‘dash’ (bribe) here and there, a hugefare for the dugout canoe is common tospeed the process.

One woman has delivered a baby inthe bush and her five-year-old sister cra-dles the newly born girl. Another woman

has walked for five days with her daughter toreach this spot. The four-year-old youngster isnamed Promise.

And now the ritual humiliation. The Patri-ots, enjoying their unaccustomed power, sim-ply tip the arrivals belongings onto theground. The cross-dresser in the black eveninggown is particularly vigorous. ‘Suspicious’items such as radios and torches are examinedminutely. A few things are confiscated andthrown into a pile. Civilians are interrogated.

They have virtually no money left, littlefood, few possessions and once they move in-land will again face the hostility of Ivorianswho have seen their own country pulledapart.

Despite that, the crossing has been rela-tively benign; completed in one day and ev-eryone allowed to enter.

Now, from somewhere deep in the bushthey must find a bus… or start walking again. B

Crossing the borderA wall of fear and major consequences for millions of people

24 R E F U G E E S

Shakedown at the Ivorian border.

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gencies including the aftermath of thefirst Gulf War, Somalia and Africa’s GreatLakes crisis in the mid-1990s, had beenlooking forward to his transfer to Abidjanas something different in the refugee ex-perience. “I had such a positive feeling. Foronce, amidst so much misery, this wouldbe a happy project.”

Along the coast in Tabou, the new headof that office, Anne Dolan, another oldhand at ‘normal’ refugee emergencies, hadthat same hope.

“Surprise, surprise,” Dolan said later.At one point, Côte d’Ivoire hosted some

200,000 Liberian refugees. Many had beenwelcomed “as brothers and sisters in dis-tress” by the country’s founding father,President Felix Houphouet-Boigny and had integrat-ed into local communities. There was only one smallrefugee camp called Nicla for around 3,000 people.

In such a seemingly benign atmosphere, Moumtzisand Dolan expected to concentrate on projects to pro-mote integration, education and self-help “somethingreally positive and more satisfying than seeing somuch suffering and death all the time in other crises.”

In the capital, on the night of September 18-19 lastyear, Moumtzis woke to the rattle of gunfire—the startof a conflict which sent the once stable country into atailspin and change the lives of not only the refugeessheltering there, but also many tens of thousands oflocals and guest workers from surrounding countries.

“Virtually overnight, there was a 180-degree turnin UNHCR operations,” Moumtzis said. “Buildingschools, clinics, infrastructure, helping refugees tocontinue to integrate was out. We moved into normalemergency mode—trying to provide people with asafe place to stay, getting them out of dangerous situa-tions. Xenophobia and nationalism destroyed thebrotherhood and good neighborliness.”

As Dolan helped a sad procession of people to crossinto Liberia she recalled: “Everyone was faced withthis awful dilemma. ‘Should I stay here where I mightwell be killed, or should I go to Liberia where I mightalso be killed, but maybe less quickly?’ It was so dread-ful to watch.”

In April, some of the civilians who fled to Liberiabegan to return. With virtually no aid officials presentin eastern Liberia, UNHCR monitored the commonborder, providing assistance where it could, trying tohelp several thousand refugees move into severalhastily established transit centers for their own safety,asking neighboring countries to take some of thethreatened Liberians. There were few offers.

“It is a sad reality that what might take decades tobuild up can be destroyed almost overnight,”Moumtzis said.

ROGUE ELEPHANTLong suffering Liberian refugees have become

pariahs in neighboring states, branded as troublemakers or worse—rebels, gun runners, drug dealers.Conditions inside the country, sandwiched betweenthe hope of Sierra Leone and despair of Côted’Ivoire, have continued to deteriorate.

On a recent visit High Commissioner Lubberssaid flatly: “The picture is pretty clear: it’s a disaster”and he went on to accuse the Liberian governmentof “killing your own people.” One senior aid officialdescribed Liberia as the ‘rogue elephant’ of WestAfrica, a country at war with itself since 1989, butalso exporting chaos and anarchy to its neighborslike a ‘cancer.’

Much of the country is now off limits. Aid work-ers withdrew from eastern Liberia following thebrutal murder of three officials from the AmericanAdventist group ADRA earlier this year. In a gener-al state of anarchy several weeks later, just acrossthe border in Côte d’Ivoire, four local Red Crossworkers were also deliberately killed.

The World Food Program reduced food rationsto recipients for April and May. By spring, warydonors had provided just two percent of the $42.6million funding requested in a U.N. humanitarianappeal for this year.

At a high-level strategy meeting in Geneva, hu-manitarian officials debated the possible optionsavailable to help Liberia’s stricken civilian popula-tion: establish safe corridors for aid convoys; air-drops; physical safe havens; an international peaceforce; cross-border operations. Each was examinedand put aside as unworkable without a political so-lution also being implemented.

THE FIRST CONTACTUNHCR began operations in 1951, principally to

help refugees in Europe in the aftermath of WorldWar II, but several years later, the agency began itslong association with Africa. On 31 May 1957, thethen Tunisian Prime Minister Habib Bourguibaasked UNHCR to “examine the way in which theHigh Commissioner will be able to help my govern-

WEST AFRICA ISA MICROCOSMOF BOTH THEHOPE ANDDESPAIRGRIPPING THECONTINENT. ITOFFERS AWARNING THATTHINGS IN EVENTHE MOSTSTABLE OFSOCIETIES CANQUICKLY SPINOUT OFCONTROL OR,CONVERSELY,COUNTRIES CANBE PATCHEDTOGETHERAGAIN.

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UNHCR protection officers interview fleeing Liberian refugees.

R E F U G E E S26

ment resolve the problem of Alge-rian refugees” who were fleeing toneighboring states from thatcountry’s war of independenceagainst France.

The agency responded andduring the same crisis it becameinvolved for the first time in so-called post-conflict situations—helping former refugees once theyhad returned home. “The fate ofrepatriated ex-refugees can nolonger be disassociated from thatof the Algerian population as awhole without seriously endan-gering the country’s social stabili-

ty,” High Commissioner Felix Schnyder wrote at thetime, establishing an important benchmark for UN-HCR’s future protection work.

In 1969, Africa made another important contribu-tion towards overall refugee protection when the Or-ganization of African Unity (OAU) adopted its ownconvention which, for the first time extended refugeerecognition to people fleeing in large groups and es-caping such things as external aggression, occupationor foreign domination. It included the now universal-ly accepted principle of ‘voluntary’ repatriation.

During those early, post-colonial days, many civil-ians seeking safety in African countries simply movedinto established communities—in official parlancethey became locally integrated.

In succeeding decades, however, this patternchanged and more and more refugees were housed insprawling camps—sparking lively and often acrimo-nious debate among governments and humanitariansabout who was responsible for spreading this ‘campculture’ and the advantages or disadvantages of thesystem.

Jeff Crisp of UNHCR’s evaluation unit traced thebeginning of a ‘deteriorating climate’ towardsrefugees and their increasing incarceration in campsto the mid-1980s. Western countries had, he said, be-gun to toughen their legislation towards asylum seek-ers, encouraging African countries to follow suit;refugee numbers increased dramatically at the sametime as African economies deteriorated; and per-versely the spread of democracy allowed an increas-ing number of politicians to use refugee issues as po-litical footballs.

Today, an estimated 2.4 million people live in 267camps worldwide, 170 of these sites being in Africa.

Images of tents and huts sprawling seemingly for-ever across the African landscape have become syn-onymous with the plight of refugees and video footagehas dramatically captured the often squalid condi-tions of tens or hundreds of thousands of peoplepacked tightly together, spawning disease and crime,damaging the local environment and becoming natu-ral recruiting centers or hiding places for bands ofarmed militias.

Increasingly, however, African governments whoare ultimately responsible for deciding whererefugees should be located, decided that for securityreasons, to protect the interest of local communitiesthreatened by a large influx and to more easily ‘showcase’ large concentrations of refugees to visiting jour-nalists and politicians in a search for internationalfunding, camps were the preferred option despitetheir obvious drawbacks.

According to Jeff Crisp these camps can have otheruseful purposes. Some refugees may prefer to inte-grate locally if their new neighbors are from the sameethnic background. But they may cling to camps forsafety reasons if they find themselves in a differentethnic environment. Too, the compounds may serveas the safety net component of a larger survival strate-

A massive refugee camp for Rwandansin Tanzania.

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AFRICA ON THE EDGE

Hope replaces ‘misery and desperation’

This is the nightmare. The deadalready number in the hun-dreds of thousands, the muti-lated more than 100,000 and

the displaced well into the millions. Becauseof the killings, kidnaps, land mines and dis-ease it is the worst place in the world forchildren to grow up in, and should they sur-vive, they will inherit a vast plain of scorchedearth.”

That was the assessment four years ago ofCatherine Bertini, then head of the WorldFood Program, talking of Angola.

Earlier this year, U.N. Secretary-GeneralKofi Annan, in a report on the same country,concluded that “Angolans can live withoutfear of a recurrent and devastating war.”

Three decades of murderous civil conflicteffectively ended in April last year followingthe death of Jonas Savimbi, the head of the

country’s rebel movement, UNITA, and An-gola has undergone a remarkable transfor-mation.

The shooting stopped, fighters were de-mobilized, as many as 1.5 million of the coun-try’s four million persons displaced withinthe country returned home ‘spontaneously’,as did around 100,000 of some 470,600refugees who were living in surroundingcountries.

Angola contemplates a brighter future, but will need help for a long time.

“IT IS A SADREALITY THATWHAT MIGHTTAKE DECADESTO BUILD UPCAN BEDESTROYEDALMOSTOVERNIGHT.”

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gy—younger and stronger refugees venture furtherafield to seek work while women and children remainin a camp where they are assured a degree of safetyand at least minimum humanitarian supplies.

To try to balance conflicting interests, humanitar-ian groups such as UNHCR developed a range ofmore flexible programs. Increasing attention hasbeen paid to assisting both refugee and local commu-nities in the construction of schools, clinics or roads.

While camps will always be necessary in some cir-cumstances, the refugee agency has encouraged ex-panded local integration whenever possible. In Zam-bia, for instance, one recently launched project willassist some of the 247,000 refugees in that country to

establish themselves in nearby villages and towns,find jobs and, hopefully, become productive membersof Zambian society.

Iraq, and Afghanistan before it, suggested that theinternational community focuses on one major crisisat a time. Africa, however, remains in permanent cri-sis and UNHCR’s David Lambo worried that “We arefighting for space on the world stage. But we cannotgive up on Africa.”

For his part, High Commissioner Ruud Lubbersinsisted he would continue to “raise the issue with de-veloped countries that they must focus more onAfrican refugees” whatever the situation in otherparts of the world. B

Education is thekey to successfulrefugeereintegration.

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An organized repatriation of otherrefugees gets underway this summer by UN-HCR, which has opened several offices inborder regions as partner agencies busily re-habilitated schools, clinics and water pointsin anticipation of an ongoing return.

DIFFICULT FUTUREEncouraging though those developments

have been, Angola faces a very difficult future. Much of the country was off limits to the

outside world during the conflict and whenaid officials began investigating they found“a world of misery and desperation,” accord-ing to UNHCR’s Lucia Teoli. “A large part ofthe population was close to starvation,” she

said. They often survived on berries androots. “Many were found in the bush wherethey were born and where they grew up andmany didn’t even know the war had finished.”

The country’s entire infrastructure—roads,bridges, schools, hospitals, the environ-ment—was destroyed, making it difficult andoften impossible for people to return to theirold villages and begin life again, and for hu-manitarian agencies to reach and help them.It remains one of the most booby-trappedcountries in the world with unimaginablenumbers of mines buried in the fertile earth.

Civilians face a jolting return home. Manyhave been dependent for years on foodhandouts, and it will be a difficult transition

to begin farming or work again, even if giventhe opportunity. Food supplies may beginappearing in marketplaces, but most peopleare too poor to buy anything. Schools mayreopen but many children don’t even speakPortuguese, the official language. Familieshave been split up and out of touch, oftenfor decades. Malnutrition and early deathfrom easily treatable diseases are huge.

Potentially rich though it may be in min-erals and oil, faced with such overwhelmingdifficulties Angola will need internationalsupport for many years to complete thetransition from war to stability, but it re-mains unclear whether such assistance willbe forthcoming. B

28 R E F U G E E S

IRAQ: What happened?

They were among the most anticipatedcrises in modern humanitarian histo-ry. Millions of refugees, were expect-ed to flood across porous borders to es-

cape the impending military onslaught.Appeals for funds were launched. Emer-

gency supplies were stockpiled amid pre-dictions of catastrophe. Teams were dis-patched to mountain and desert outposts.

The global media, which has become anintegral part of all major crises, dispatchedits own formidable legion of hundreds ofreporters, photographers and cameramento cover the unfolding dramas.

But first, on the borders of Afghanistantwo years ago, and early this year with Iraq,the horizon remained largely empty andthe anticipated flood tides of fleeing civil-ians were little more than a trickle. Aid of-ficials waited. Journalists became frustrat-ed that the action was passing them by.

So what happened?Predicting refugee outflows is an inex-

act science at best. Planners review a situa-tion, especially if war is likely, the history ofthe region, earlier civilian exoduses, re-ports from their own regional field officesand any government and military intelli-gence they can glean in reaching an assess-ment of how events may unfold and the as-sistance that will be needed.

SURPRISE, SURPRISEIt is a historical truism that the best laid

military plans rarely survive the first fewdays of any war. The same is true in tryingto plan humanitarian crises. Surprise is theonly non-surprise in any emergency.

At the beginning of the Kosovo conflictin 1999, not even the most sophisticatedgovernment intelligence agencies predict-ed that Serbian forces would deliberatelyempty the region of hundreds of thousandsof ethnic Albanians at the point of a gun. Inthose circumstances, even if humanitarianorganizations had anticipated the ethniccleansing—which they did not—they wouldhave been powerless to mobilize major re-sources in the face of big power scepticism.

This time, there were conflicting con-clusions. There were many solid reasons toplan for a major civilian exodus from Iraqonce American-led forces began their as-sault. Several million Iraqis had abandonedthe country in previous decades. Followingthe first Gulf War in 1991, an estimated twomillion people fled from their homes. In an-ticipation of this ‘medium case’ scenario,UNHCR drew up plans to assist as many as600,000 refugees. At the same time, how-ever, senior spokesman Ron Redmond pub-licly cautioned that, depending on develop-ments in the war itself, few if any refugeesmight try to leave.

In the event, of course, few did. The In-ternational Institute for Strategic Studiesin London said the nonappearance ofrefugees was tied directly to the tactics used

by the coalition forces: “It seems that theearly allied military strategy of bypassingmajor cities, selective bombing of militarytargets and warnings to civilians to stay athome and off the main roads limited thenumber of civilians on the move.”

Sten Bronee, UNHCR’s Representativein Jordan said: “People had property andthey didn’t want to leave. Fatigue set in. Theconflict was déjà vu for the Iraqis.” AndBritish journalist Jonathan Steele added:“People developed a nonchalance about thebombing. By the time water and powershortages began to hit, the fact that Saddamwas already gone cancelled things out.”

THE FUTURENow what?In reviewing events, Ron Redmond said:

“It was imperative that we prepared thenecessary programs based on unfoldingevents. We did that and were satisfied withour planning. We were not unhappy thathundreds of thousands of new refugeeswere not created, adding to the nearly 22million people we are already trying to helparound the world.”

In the aftermath of the short, Ameri-can-led war in Afghanistan, UNHCRswitched plans from dealing with a poten-tial exodus, to helping long exiled refugeesgo the other way, back into the country.More than two million people returned thefirst year and that repatriation is ongoing.

The recent war did not produce a flood of refugees,

29R E F U G E E S

What next?

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but many longtime exiles may now go homeThough the international spotlight has

been turned down somewhat on Iraq, therefugee agency is now putting some of themanpower, financial and stockpile re-sources already in place to similar uses inthat country.

The situation inside Iraq remains un-certain. Fragile religious and ethnic ten-sions could yet spark a future civilian out-flow, especially since the roads have becomecomparatively safe for civilian travel.

Stockpiled emergency items such astents, stoves, cooking pots, blankets andplastic sheeting will remain in place for thetime being and eventually will be used in-side Iraq or elsewhere.

And there is now an ambitious new pro-gram to help not the anticipated newrefugees created by the latest war, but asmany as 500,000 of an untold number ofIraqis who had fled their country in earlieryears, but who may now wish to go homeand restart their lives there.

The budget for preliminary repatria-tion and reintegration is $118 million overeight months, which would mean the agen-cy working within the levels of the previ-ous Iraq emergency budget of $154 million.

Several million Iraqis probably left dur-ing Saddam Hussein’s rule. Of those, theU.N. refugee agency estimated some900,000 were asylum seekers, refugees orother civilians living in refugee-like situa-tions. Preliminary estimates suggested

around one half of this group may needhelp in going home.

From the above group, Iran hosts half ofthe 400,000 Iraqi refugees living in placesas far flung as Sri Lanka, South Africa andArgentina, and around 165,000 people fromthis group may eventually return.

A further 183,000 refugees are solidlyintegrated in industrialized nations and asmall number, perhaps 35,000, may opt togo back to their ancestral homeland.

Of the 84,000 Iraqis currently seekingasylum, primarily in developed nations,some 60,000, are expected to repatriate.

Of the 450,000 Iraqis living in ‘refugee-like’ situations, primarily in Jordan andSyria where they work illegally, as many as240,000 may return.

EXPANSIONTo oversee this mass return, UNHCR

plans to expand its current Middle East net-work, mobilizing 250 mostly Iraqi staff toopen 15 offices around the country and mansix mobile monitoring teams.

All returns will be screened to ensurethat they are ‘voluntary’ and that the Iraqisare not harried or ousted from their hostcountries. A series of benchmarks are be-ing established “to provide for the physical,material and legal safety and well-being ofthe returnees,” Redmond said.

“This includes an end to violence andinsecurity and the establishment of opera-

tional law enforcement institutions,” thespokesman added. “Material safety includesaccess to basic services, things like potablewater, food and health services.

“Over the longer term, we need to seemeasures to ensure sustainable reintegra-tion. Legal safety includes the redress ofhuman rights violations, non-discrimina-tion and unhindered access to justice.”

The returnees, like the population atlarge, will face a series of other dauntingpractical difficulties, ranging from an esti-mated eight million land mines strewnacross the northern part of the country, to abarely functioning infrastructure and thelarge-scale destruction of public propertyrecords, citizenship papers and other im-portant documentation.

Two-thirds of returning refugees are ex-pected to go back to urban areas in centraland southern Iraq and the others to ruralareas, primarily ethnic Kurds to Iraq’s threenorthern provinces.

Other unfinished humanitarian busi-ness includes the future of some thousandsof civilians displaced within Iraq itself, so-called internally displaced persons.

UNHCR’s mandate does not directlycover IDPs, but since their experience andsituations are often similar to refugees,UNHCR has often helped both groups as itdid in the Balkans.

It may do the same again in Iraq if calledupon to do so by the United Nations. B

30 R E F U G E E S

A NEW MOTHER TERESAAn Italian doctor is honored for decades of lonely work to combatdisease and prejudice in a forgotten corner of the world

Afive-year-old boy, his hunchback spine testify-ing to his battle with tuberculosis, picks up hisaluminum walking frame and determinedlyweaves between the hospital beds just to show

that he can. A 39-year-old woman whose arms andlegs contracted into a fetal position a year ago, takes afew steps from her own metal bed to show that she hasregained her health. The face of Marian HassanDuale, a 60-year-old woman who was brought to hos-pital in a coma, lights up as she described the “miracle”of her own recovery.

Their ‘savior’ is a 60-year-old Italian doctor namedAnnalena Tonelli, who has braved beatings, kidnap-ping, banditry and death threats to wage a 33-year-long, one-woman battle against tuberculosis, AIDS,illiteracy, blindness, malnutrition and female genitalmutilation in the middle of nowhere in the Horn ofAfrica.

In recognition of her lifelong and lonely crusade,Dr. Tonelli was recently awarded the 2003 NansenRefugee Award, a prize created in 1954 to honor indi-viduals or organizations that have distinguishedthemselves in work on behalf of refugees. The Awardwas named after Fridtjof Nansen, Norwegian polarexplorer and the world’s first High Commissioner forrefugees and includes $100,000 to be donated to arefugee project of the recipient’s choice.

Dr. Tonelli, Annalena to her patients and a newMother Teresa to some visitors, works alone, person-ally raising the $20,000 cash needed every month tofund medical projects and pay a staff of 75 at her hos-pital. She broke her vow to ‘stay hidden’ and avoid pub-licity to accept the Nansen Award in the hope it wouldrefocus the international spotlight on the chronicproblems of Somalia, long since overshadowed byother world hotspots.

GRUELING DAYSA slim woman with grey hair pulled into a bun and

covered modestly with a shawl in the manner of thelocal women, Dr. Tonelli has trained herself to sleeponly four hours a night.

She begins her workday at 7 a.m. consulting withher foreign-trained Somali physicians. As she thenmakes her daily rounds, Dr. Tonelli chats with her pa-

tients in fluent Somali. Children call her ‘grandmoth-er’ and snuggle close as she explains that these nowthriving toddlers were brought in as severely mal-nourished babies, weighing—at six months old—lessthan a newborn should. She ends her rigorous routinein the early hours of the next day, writing letters ofthanks to private benefactors.

Almost seven years ago she made her home in Bo-rama, an arid town where a fierce wind funnels desertsand into tornado-like formations, a place with farmore goats and camels than cars. Her hospital treatssome 200 inpatients and another 200 outpatients.Eight of the wards were built for her by UNHCR, in-cluding the only two-storey building in town, still un-der construction.

She spurns the comfortable life and repeatedly em-phasizes her lifelong passion to a visitor. “ I am desper-ately in love with TB patients” she says at one pointand adds later “I want to be poor up to the last day ofmy life.”

She lives simply, eating the same food—meat onlytwice a week, more often maize meal or rice andbeans—that she feeds her patients. Her home has atelevision so that deaf children can watch videos insign language, but she never watches it herself. Shelearned about the war in Iraq only from the Somalidoctors on her staff.

The doctor owns just two modest caftans. Her san-dals were given to her by a patient, and her headscarfwas a gift from her staff. She feels her poverty is essen-tial to breaking down walls between herself and thepeople she serves. “I would never be able to render ser-vice if I had clothes and furniture and all the thingswhich are normal for our society,” she says.

INEVITABLE CLASHBut don’t talk to her about sacrifice—it’s a word that

makes her laugh. A devout Roman Catholic, she says:“The word ‘sacrifice’ has no meaning in my life. I don’thide it has been a very hard life in many senses, but ithas been a life of joy, a life of happiness, gratification, aprivilege.”

It’s the life she wanted from the age of five: “Mylonging, my yearning, my pining from the time I wasso small was to serve people who are suffering.”

SHE HASBRAVEDBEATINGS,KIDNAPPING,BANDITRY ANDDEATHTHREATS TOWAGE A 33-YEAR-LONGONE-WOMANBATTLEAGAINSTTUBERCULOSIS,AIDS,ILLITERACY,BLINDNESSAND FEMALEGENITALMUTILATION IN THE MIDDLEOF NOWHERE.

by Kitty McKinsey

31R E F U G E E S

She has found plenty of them in her long years inAfrica. Fresh out of law school at 26, she moved tonortheastern Kenya to teach Somali nomads and itwas there in 1970 that she became aware of the plightof people stricken with tuberculosis. She was touchednot only by their physical suffering, but also by theemotional pain they underwent at being outcasts be-cause of their disease, one that flourishes in conditionsof poverty, overcrowding and malnutrition.

In addition to her law degree, she went on to earndiplomas in tropical medicine, community medicine,and control of tuberculosis and leprosy though she is

not a fully qualified physician. In the 1970s, a new drug reduced

TB treatment to six months, ratherthan 12 to 18, which had been standardbefore. Dr. Tonelli pioneered the“short-course” TB treatment inAfrica, an approach that since hasbeen adopted as a model by the WorldHealth Organization (WHO). Whatmakes her treatment so effective—sheclaims a cure rate of 96 percent—isthat she forces many of the Somali no-mads to live in her compound untilthey are truly cured. Outpatients aretracked diligently.

Since 1986, she has made her homein Somalia, first in the capital, Mo-gadishu, where she supplied food tothousands of starving residents, andlater Merca, in southern Somalia,again treating tuberculosis patients.After being repeatedly beaten up, andkidnapped once, she fled; the womandoctor she trained to replace her waskilled a year later. She then respondedto a request by WHO to continue herfight against tuberculosis, this timein relatively peaceful Somaliland.

She expanded her activities, help-ing to treat and prevent HIV/AIDS, anopportunistic disease which preys on

weakened TB sufferers. She set up a school for deafand disabled children and sponsors the visit twice ayear of surgeons from a German charity who have re-stored the vision to 3,700 people suffering fromcataracts. She is also passionate about the fight againstfemale genital mutilation and says she has persuadednearly all the traditional circumcision practitioners inBorama to give up the practice and join her campaign.

Even at 60, Dr. Tonelli shows no signs of slowingdown. If she’s ever forced to leave Somalia, “I will helppeople who suffer somewhere else,” she says quietly.“The world is full of people who suffer.” B

“Mother Teresa” and patient.

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Former High Commissioner PrinceSadruddin Aga Khan died in Boston in

early May after a long illness. Prince Sadruddin,the uncle of Karim Aga Khan, spiritual leader of12 million Ismaili Muslims, devoted his entireadult life to humanitarian work before his deathat the age of 70. He became the youngest personever to lead UNHCR when he became HighCommissioner in 1966 at the age of 33, havingserved the previous three years as Deputy HighCommissioner. He guided the refugee agency

for 12 years through one of its most turbulentperiods. This included the 1971 Bangladesh cri-sis in which 10 million people were uprooted,the 1972 exodus of hundreds of thousands ofHutus from Burundi and the exodus of theIndochinese boat people in the mid-1970s.

After leaving UNHCR in 1977, he continued hishumanitarian work on behalf of the U.N. in var-ious parts of the world including Afghanistanand Iraq. He published several books and

received international recognition includingthe French Légion d’honneur and the UnitedNations Human Rights Award.

Sadruddin Aga Khan

Sadruddin Aga Khan, in 1974.

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