Information update . . . May 21 1999
Refugees Besides Kosovars Ignored
While the world has focused on the abuses suffered by Kosovo Albanians,
it has barely cast a glance at the millions elsewhere driven from their
homes.
Consider the global silence that has accompanied the displacement of
780,000 Angolans since the start of the year, virtually all victims of a
conflict largely fought, like Kosovo, along ethnic lines.
"I don't see anybody at the moment who is willing to do anything about
them," says James Woods, a longtime Africa watcher
and former Pentagon official.
Woods says African crises are political-military problems that have
created immense humanitarian suffering, but solving them would require
high-risk intervention that neither the United States nor Europe is
willing to undertake.
As refugees go, the Kosovo Albanians for the most part are an elite
group. The international community has rushed to their defense with
offers of food, shelter and a promise of repatriation. Beyond that, NATO
has punished Serbia for its abuses with eight weeks of air strikes.
There is no international constituency for displaced Angolans or for
many of the 50 million or so other people worldwide whom the U.N. High
Commissioner for Refugees says have been forced from their homes in
recent years. Countless people have known brutality and the pain of
losing everything, family members included.
In Angola, the number of displaced people has averaged about 6,500 a day
since Jan. 1, most of them victims of attacks on cities and towns by a
rebel group that once received U.S. backing. Others are victims of
attacks by government forces.
Among African countries, Angola is hardly alone with refugees and
so-called internally displaced persons. The continent, according to the
private U.S. Committee for Refugees, had 2.7 million refugees at the end
of 1998 and 8.7 million displaced
people. Most are from long standing conflicts.
Sudan is the world leader in this category with an estimated 4 million.
Another 350,000 have fled the country. Worldwide,
Afghanistan ranks first in producing refugees, with 2.6 million as of
1998.
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who was born in Ghana, has lamented
the lack of political will from the international community in assisting
refugees, especially in his homeland, even as he has put Africa high on
the U.N. agenda.
"I have made peace and progress in Africa a priority of my tenure as
secretary-general not only because I am an African but
because I believe that the United Nations cannot rest until all of
Africa is at peace," Annan said earlier this month in Washington in a
commencement address at Howard University.
On Thursday, Annan's attention was back on Kosovo when he visited a
refugee camp on the edge of Kukes, Albania. "We are all doing our best
to get them home before the winter," he proclaimed. "I hope we succeed."
James Bishop, a former ambassador to Liberia, laments that the Congress
has been willing to appropriate billions for humanitarian relief and
military outlays for Kosovo but has been reluctant to allocate $10
million for relief in Sierra Leone, another African country stricken by
war and human misery.
Bishop, of the umbrella group for private humanitarian
groups, InterAction, says attention to the Africa crises is more muted
because the media coverage has been far less compared with Kosovo.
Peter Takirambudde, of the New York-based Human Rights Watch,
says that since the end of the Cold War, the strategic importance of
Africa to the West has diminished sharply.
He also says the West has been encouraging African solutions
to African problems, an approach that, he contends, allows the
international community to relinquish its responsibility for addressing
in a fashion similar to Kosovo the problems of Africa.
The West knows there is no African equivalent of NATO so the
notion of made-in-Africa solutions "may sound noble but it's a copout,"
Takirambudde says.
Whereabouts of Kosovo Refugees
The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees estimates that some 800,000
people, the vast majority of them ethnic Albanians, have left Kosovo
since NATO began its air assault March 24. Many of Kosovo's 1.8 million
ethnic Albanians were already displaced before the current exodus. This
includes 100,000 Kosovars who sought asylum in European countries before
the airstrikes on Yugoslavia.
The whereabouts and numbers of the refugees, according to UNHCR:
Albania _ 433,400
Macedonia _ 226,300
Montenegro _ 64,000
Bosnia Herzegovina _ 20,000
Refugees who have been evacuated from Macedonia, according to UNHCR:
Germany _ 12,421
Turkey _ 7,475
Canada _ 4,374
Norway _ 4,361
France _ 3,506
United States _ 3,368
Austria _ 3,064
Italy _ 2,478
Netherlands _ 2,164
Sweden _ 1,831
Australia _ 1,627
Belgium _ 1,223
Denmark _ 1,182
Britain _ 1,175
Poland _ 1,049
Finland _ 958
Czech Republic _ 824
Switzerland _ 816
Spain _ 789
Portugal _ 658
Ireland _ 449
Slovenia _ 305
Croatia _ 188
Israel _ 106
Slovakia _ 90
Iceland _ 70
Romania _ 41
Countries that have offered to take in refugees on a temporary basis,
according to governments:
Turkey _ 20,000
United States _ 20,000
Germany _ 15,000
Finland _ 10,000
Italy _ 10,000
Norway _ 6,000
Sweden _ 5,000
Austria _ 5,000
Canada _ 5,000
Australia _ 4,000
Britain _ up to 1,000 per week
Switzerland _ 2,500
Netherlands _ 2,000
Denmark _ 1,500
Romania _ 1,500
Poland _ 1,000
Portugal _ 500
Israel _ additional 100
Iceland _ 100
Malta _ 100
Pray for them. For one day we, too, may have to be refugees from our
homeland.
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