Although the television pictures of human suffering may be familiar, Kosovo, in some ways, is a novel kind of crisis. The sheer speed with which vast numbers were moved from their homes has been seen before (in, for example, Rwanda), but the way in which the refugees were helped was new. In Kosovo, humanitarianism has been militarized. Last week it was NATO that built refugee camps in Macedonia, relocated those who had left their homes and sent 8,000 troops to Albania, apparently to assist the Kosovars who had fled there. It is, to say the least, unexpected for one of the parties to a combat to undertake vast humanitarian aid of this sort.
NATO’s help was unusual but not unwelcome. Governments and international agencies were taken by surprise at the extent of the outflow. UNHCR expected about 100,000 refugees, but so far more than 600,000 have left for neighboring countries. In Macedonia, NATO’s camps helped relieve the terrible squalor in which refugees had been dumped. The soldiers have since been turning care over to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and to nongovernmental organizations. By last weekend supplies–like food, cooking utensils and blankets–were flowing into the area. But we should have done better, earlier: the Balkans are only an hour from Italy. The world was not confronted, for example, with a crisis in the Sudan.
Is there anything we can learn from refugee crises of the past? One lesson, perhaps, is that the longer refugees remain stateless and homeless, the more dangerous their situation will become. Relief–food and shelter–can never be a substitute for a political settlement. Consider Rwanda. In April 1994 about 250,000 Rwandans crossed into Tanzania in the space of 24 hours; within five months, 2 million Rwandans had left their own country. Most of those who fled were Hutus, forced out by their village leaders, many of whom were implicated in the genocide of Rwanda’s Tutsis. In the absence of a political settlement, genuine refugees were terrorized for three years by murderous militias. Despite repeated pleas from the United Nations for help in separating the killers from the innocents, no government would send troops to do so. The impasse ended only in late 1996 when Rwanda broke up the camps and drove the refugees–innocents and killers alike–back home or deep into Congo, where about 200,000 people disappeared forever.
In Cambodia, too, the failure of politicians made a refugee crisis worse. Half a million fled the country after the Vietnamese overthrew the brutal Khmer Rouge regime in late 1978. Many of them arrived at the Thai border in ghastly conditions–they had been dragged by the Khmer Rouge into the jungle and mountains, and died by the hundreds from starvation and disease as they stumbled into the camps. It suited governments–from Washington to Beijing–to keep them there. For the next decade the Khmer Rouge and other groups controlled the camps and their people. Only an international peace agreement ended this stalemate in 1991 and allowed the refugees to return home.
The Kosovars do not have to suffer military thugs in their camps, though undoubtedly many will now be persuaded to join the Kosovo Liberation Army. But they do suffer from one new and ominous menace. Serb forces have stripped many Kosovars of their identities, stealing anything–from tractor license plates to identity papers–that might prove they were residents of Kosovo. The Serbs, in short, are trying to create mass statelessness.
To combat this cruelty, the modern world should follow an earlier example. The first international official who devoted himself solely to refugees was Fridtjof Nansen, the Norwegian polar explorer. After World War I, under the auspices of the League of Nations, he became the first high commissioner for refugees. Nansen was superb. He saw that the first task of any relief effort should be to provide refugees with an accepted means of identification, and got the League to agree to recognize travel papers. At least 1,500,000 white Russians benefited from these “Nansen passports,” as did thousands of Armenians and Greeks expelled from Turkey.
In 1922, Nansen won the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts. The world could now do nothing better than to revive his idea, and give the Kosovar refugees internationally accepted documents that establish who they are, where they came from and which allow them to travel. By definition, refugees have lost almost all they have; they should not have to lose their identities, too.
title: “Wandering In The Wilderness” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-22” author: “Tammy Balas”
No one will ever mistake Ted Kennedy for Bob Bullock. In the mid-1990s, the crusty old Democratic lieutenant governor of Texas and Bush, the state’s novice Republican chief executive, struck up an unlikely friendship. Bush always cites their collaboration as an example of what’s possible when politicians lay party affiliation aside. But Kennedy’s travels up and down Pennsylvania Avenue are a measure of the Democrats’ dilemma these days.
Polls are warning that the public expects cooperation and conciliation in their dealings with the new president. Yet the same surveys also show that voters want the party to stand and fight when core principles are at stake, as many believe there were with Ashcroft. The next galvanizing battle could begin this week when Bush’s proposed $1.6 trillion tax cut arrives on the Hill. Democrats want a smaller reduction that frees up additional money for debt retirement and spending. But overall, the party seems at loose ends with a president who has reinvented a tradition lost in the turbulent Clinton years: the political honeymoon. Even as House and Senate Democrats held weekend retreats to debate strategy, Bush seemed to steal their oxygen, staging unprecedented drop-ins to preach the bipartisan gospel.
Bush has not only seized the momentum; he’s done it with the Democrats’ ideas. His education proposals, calling for increased investment and stricter accountability, are lifted from the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, chaired for the last six years by Sen. Joe Lieberman. The DLC has also been a proponent of another Bush favorite, faith-based education programs. “Except for the Ashcroft pick, Bush has done a good job of playing to the center,” says Sen. Evan Bayh, the Indiana Democrat taking over as DLC chair. This week the group will unveil a series of proposals designed to reclaim the middle for the Democrats, including a new path to universal health care. Labor and liberals have their own blueprint for increased spending on cities and new protections for unorganized employees.
The party is also looking for new leaders, and those eying 2004 are already jockeying for advantage. Bayh is said to be interested. So is Lieberman, who is setting up a fund-raising committee for political travel. After a 2000 campaign where he tacked to the left, he’s working to re-establish his moderate bona fides by leading the alternative to the Bush education package and joining forces with the administration on the faith-based initiative. He says he won’t run if Al Gore goes again. But supporters hope–probably in vain–that Gore, working from a suburban Virginia office and hitting the lecture circuit this week, will pack it in. Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, while focused on winning back the Senate in 2002, has consulted allies about a presidential bid if the Democrats fall short. House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt, who turned 60 last week, may also take one last shot if the party doesn’t regain the majority.
While the Democrats struggle to figure out the future, they can’t quite let go of the past. The Clintons, who announced late last week that they will pay for about half of the $190,000 in gifts they kept when they left the White House, show no signs of going quietly. Their buddy and mega-fund-raiser Terry McAuliffe was installed as the new Democratic National Committee chairman. (The ex-president called several undecided DNC members to lobby on McAuliffe’s behalf.) The new chairman will tend to the main mission of a party today: raising cash. “We’ll show George Bush the door in 2004!” he vowed at an opulent party he threw for himself at Washington’s Union Station. But as McAuliffe sounded his battle cry, Bush was already loose behind enemy lines.
