There are people on the run all across the globe and, more and more, people unable to run far enough, people who are trapped. Taken together, they are the luckless and usually innocent victims of international war and civil conflict, the human chaff of a new world order no one could have foreseen.
There always were refugees and displaced people. There always will be. But there are probably more today than ever before, and the world seems reluctant to confront that fact. It's not the first time this reluctance has revealed itself.
They huddle in camps, disoriented and displaced, existing under plastic tarpaulins and other make-do shelters. They swat flies in the heat and crouch in the mud. They don't know what to do, or where to go, so they go nowhere and sink ever deeper into their squalid circumstances.
AThey survive on the bread and soup of the international charities and the United Nations, these agencies themselves supplied by the donor countries of Europe and North America.
It wasn't too long ago that the face of an African child, frightened and hungry, could draw out the sympathies of people in the richer countries and, more importantly, stimulate a reflex toward rescue.
That face became emblematic of the 1980s. But with all symbols it soon lost its human dimension, its link to the actual flesh-and-blood child. Now that face stirs fewer people.
The child has fallen victim again, this time to a syndrome %J described as "compassion fatigue."
Refugees and displaced people, and what to do about them, pose an immediate and future threat to global stability. That is the consensus of those charged with dealing with that problem, and other observers as well.
"The traditional system for protecting refugees has come dangerously close to breaking down," said Sadako Ogata, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, in her agency's report for 1993.
How bad is it? Why isn't more being done about it?
Sylvana Foa, Ms. Ogata's spokeswoman, said in an interview from her office in Geneva that the UNHCR today counts 20.7 million refugees in the world. By definition these are people who have fled across an international border. Her figure reveals an increase of about 2.5 million since the 1993 report came out last November.
The advance in this specific index of misery has been inexorable. In 1960, the UNHCR registered only 1.4 million refugees worldwide. In 1970, it had reached 2.5 million, by 1983, 11 million. Since then it has nearly doubled.
In addition to the refugees, an additional 25 million people are internally displaced. They have been driven from their homes by armed conflict but have not been taken in by another country. They are in camps in Bosnia, Tajikistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Rwanda and elsewhere.
In Rwanda alone there are between 1 million and 2 million of these internally-displaced persons, IDPs as they are called. They are the targets of troops on both sides of that ethnic/political conflict, men with such an appetite for homicide they have filled several African rivers and lakes with corpses.
In all, there are 45.7 million souls displaced internally or externally. That means, as Ms. Foa calculates, 1 of every 122 people on the planet has been driven from his or her home.
The UNHCR will spend $1.4 billion this year to provide relief to these people. Most of it will finance UNHCR programs. About a third of it will help support the work of hundreds of other private charities, such as the American Red Cross, Save the Children, etc.
The United States has historically contributed 22 percent of this budget.
The 45.7 million refugees and IDPs are only the bystanders of human conflict and organized warfare -- not the victims of natural disasters such as earthquakes, cyclones, floods or famine. Nor does it include more than 2 million Palestinians, who are not part of the count because they are cared for by the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, set up in 1949, two years before the UNHCR was established.
Bosnia alone has 2.7 million people displaced within its own borders, and there are lesser but significant numbers in Georgia.
"It's a frightening situation," said Ms. Foa. She wonders why it is not at the top of the United Nations' agenda, where it clearly is not. "During 1992, for example, we saw 10,000 people being driven out of their country every single day. That's a lot of people," she said. "It creates instability in other countries. It creates environmental damage in other countries. The [conflict in Rwanda] has created an environmental catastrophe in Tanzania."
(In the Ngara district near the Rwandan border, refugees have already stripped some 2,000 acres of forest, according to a report last month by the British Broadcasting Corp.)
"People want to close their eyes to this," she said. "They want to close their borders, too."
Ms. Foa recalled that the office of the High Commissioner for Refugees was created by the United Nations to prevent a recurrance of what happened before and during World War II, when country after country closed its frontiers to people fleeing the Nazis, and later said they didn't know what was happening.
"They created a high commissioner to warn the world if it ever happened again," said Ms. Foa. So now it has, and the response, she noted, is not all that different from that of a half century ago. "People now are pretending it is not happening," she said.
Perhaps it is not compassion fatigue behind all this, so much as fear of being overwhelmed. Whatever the impulse, it is evident even in countries traditionally welcoming to refugees.
Germany, for instance, the country re-created after World War II and committed to the principle of asylum (a principle rooted in ancient history, evident in the Bible and Koran), has stopped accepting immigrants who claim protection from political persecution.
France has strengthened its border police. Britain is ever more reluctant to admit refugees. Even Canada, Sweden and the Netherlands, once among the more generous toward refugees, have made entry difficult.
"The single largest concern," said Hiram Ruiz, a policy analyst for the U.S. Committee for Refugees (USCR), a private agency, "is the fact that the commitment on the part of many in the international community to extend protection and assistance to refugees is greatly diminished."
Among the causes of the burgeoning world refugee and displaced persons populations, of course, are the nationalist, religious and ethnic wars that have exploded in the fade-out of the Cold War.
The reasons for the lack of response by countries traditionally willing to offer asylum are various: economic troubles, and as a consequence a weakening of their appetites for new sources of labor; and spreading anti-foreign sentiment stoked by right-wing extremists, such as those in Germany, France and other European countries.
Another cause is the abuse of asylum claims by people fleeing economic deprivation, not political persecution -- people just seeking a better life.
Ms. Foa identified another cause: "During the Cold War the guiding principle was, 'My enemy's enemy is my friend.' People who --ed across the Berlin Wall, the Cubans, they all represented political capital [to the West]. Now that there is no more political capital, why take them?"
Though the U.S. has always been a traditional country of refuge, Mr. Ruiz faults it today for not doing enough. The Haitian interdiction program, he said, "sends a message that we accept or tolerate the concept that people can be prevented from fleeing and applying for asylum."
"As we and the European countries send this message through example, then the poorer countries of the world, where the vast majority of the refugees are located, begin to follow suit."
Kathleen Newland, a senior associate on refugee affairs at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, also cited the U.S. interdiction of Haitians as a policy that has encouraged other countries to close their doors.
She mentioned Pakistan and Thailand, which, she said, both referred to the U.S. policy toward the Haitians as justification for closing their borders to refugees, from Afghanistan and Cambodia, respectively.
"It [the U.S. policy] is the only case I know of a state going outside its borders to stop refugees from reaching it," she said.
At the same time, Ms. Newland noted that, even as doors once open to refugees are closing all over the world, "there has been a great deal of generosity, particularly in some of the poorer countries, like Tanzania taking in tens of thousands of Rwandans."
The U.S. is playing host to about 400,000 refugees. Since 1975, ** some 1.8 million have been admitted. That included more than a million Vietnamese. But this figure greatly understates the numbers actually absorbed, since it doesn't include the family members of refugees, who are admitted later but not counted as refugees.
Most refugees to this country eventually become citizens.
The rate at which refugees are absorbed into the country where they are granted asylum depends on a variety of factors. Absorption is often easier in Africa, where people of the same tribe or ethnic group may live in neighboring states whose borders have been drawn with out regard to those groupings.
Some states are receptive to the resettlement of refugees owing to a similarity of religion with their own population. Iran, the country in the world with the largest concentration of refugees, has allowed hundreds of thousands of Afghans to integrate into Iranian society.
Other countries are less receptive -- such as Thailand toward Cambodian refugees and Hong Kong toward Vietnamese boat people -- and discourage integration.
When deciding on who is a true refugee, the United States usually adheres to the United Nations' criteria on the matter: people with a well-founded expectation that should they return home they would face persecution on the basis of race, religion, nationality, political opinions or because of membership in a social group.
Last year, 150,386 people applied for asylum in the United States, and 119,482 were admitted. Up to March 1, 1994, 36,808 applications were made; 1,668 were granted; 7,083 were denied, and the rest are still being processed.
As bad as the situation is, both Mr. Ruiz and Ms. Foa point out that it could be worse and that progress is being made. People are going home.
Millions of refugees from wars that have burned themselves out have been resettled in their own countries -- in Mozambique, Cambodia, Ethiopia.
Even 1.6 million Afghans were repatriated from Iran and Pakistan after the withdrawal of the Soviet Union, but many had to flee again when the civil war there re-ignited.
Thousands of refugees from the late wars in Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua have gone home.
All in all, the advances are small and the reverses great, and that has bred a deep pessimism. This was evident in the grisly picture rendered by journalist Robert D. Kaplan in an article earlier this year in the Atlantic Monthly. It offered the conflicts of Africa and the misery of displacement they have generated as a picture of the world as it will be in a few decades.
"West Africa," he wrote, "is becoming the symbol of worldwide demographic, environmental, and societal stress, in which criminal anarchy emerges as the real 'strategic' danger."
His view of a "tidal flow of refugees" crumbling borders all across the globe is probably overdrawn. (It had better be.) But one thing is clear: The challenge presented by the mounting legions of refugees and displaced persons must be met with more vigor than it has been to date.
C7 Richard O'Mara is a reporter for The Baltimore Sun.
WHERE THEY ARE
Major refugee concentrations by region at end of 1992. Source: 1993 report by UNHCR and report by U.S. Committee for Refugees.
AFRICA -- TOTAL 5.3 MILLION
Countries of major concentrations:
Ethiopia 431,800
Guinea 478,500
Kenya 401,900
Malawi 1,058,000
Sudan 725,000
! Tanzania 250,000*
ASIA -- TOTAL 7.2 MILLION
Countries of major concentrations:
Iran 4,150,700
' Pakistan 1,629,200
EUROPE -- TOTAL 4.3 MILLION
Countries of major concentrations:
Armenia 300,000
Azerbaijan 246,000
Bosnia 810,000
Croatia 48,000
Germany 827,000
THE AMERICAS -- TOTAL 1.9 MILLION
Countries of major concentrations:
Guatemala 222,900
Mexico 361,000
Canada 568,200
% United States 473,000
LARGEST REFUGEE GROUPS
(As of the end of 1993.
Source: U.S. Committee for Refugees)
Afghans 3,430,000
Palestinians 2,800,000
Mozambicans 1,330,000
Former Yugoslavs 1,330,000
Burundians 780,000
Rwandans 300,000 *
* Estimates updated since fighting began in Rwanda.