MAYOTTE AND KHOA'S COURSE apprises students of
the present
worldwide refugee situation, which is appalling. There are more
people now in flight from warfare and civil collapse than at any
time in history. A census of the displaced is inherently
imprecise--imagine counting people on the move in a nation as
chaotic as Zaire--but Khoa estimates that 17 to 20 million people
now are refugees. Even more, 25 to 40 million, are internally
displaced persons, IDPs in relief work parlance. An IDP is
someone who has not crossed a national border and thus is not a
refugee, according to the official United Nations definition, but
who nevertheless has fled home to escape violence and turmoil.
Mayotte estimates that one out of every 115-120 people on earth
is displaced.
If you want to know where to find them, consult a current atlas
of warfare. They are in Bosnia, having escaped that country's
vicious civil war. Sudan, fleeing another civil war. Chechnya--
more war. Rwanda. Zaire. Afghanistan. Iraq. All in search of a
haven from bombing, artillery, snipers, land mines, starvation,
rape, and persecution.
They are products of the vicious nature of contemporary warfare.
Until World War II, battles usually were restricted to
battlefields, and civilian casualties, even in a conflict as
massive and widespread as the First World War, were comparatively
minimal. But in a typical war in 1997, says Mayotte, over 90
percent of all casualties will be civilian--often women,
children, and the elderly or infirm. And these civilian
casualties are no longer people mistakenly caught in crossfires
or errant shelling. They are now targets, deliberately killed,
abused, and terrorized for political and territorial gain. In
Cambodia, there is a saying, "You will know the Cambodian of the
future, for he or she has but one leg."
"I have clandestinely gone into rebel-held areas in southern
Sudan," Mayotte says. "I have held children in my arms who I knew
would die in a few hours. I have been in areas where there are no
surviving children under age 5. Where there are no cattle. Where
midwives lack razor blades for cutting umbilical cords. All
because the Sudanese government in the north has decided to
starve the population in the south. And the rebels would do the
same thing if it suited their purposes."
People displaced within a country at war are constantly
vulnerable to attack, disease, and hunger. When they flee across
borders, it is often to inhospitable regions of countries that
may be no more stable than their homelands, or that are poor and
cannot handle a sudden influx of hundreds of thousands of
desperately needy and fearful refugees. In 1985, "Site 2" became
the fourth largest city in Thailand when 180,000 Cambodian
refugees were settled there in a barbed wire enclosure. The 7.8
square miles set aside for them had few trees and no ground
water. The Thai government meant for the camp to serve as an
evacuation site for a year or less. Five years later, the camp
was still there, and had one of the highest birth rates in the
world.
The degree of disorder in some regions beggars the imagination.
Robert Kaplan, writing in The Atlantic Monthly, described the
recent situation in the West African country of Sierra Leone:
"...roughly 400,000 Sierra Leonians are internally displaced,
280,000 more have fled to neighboring Guinea, and another 100,000
have fled to Liberia, even as 400,000 Liberians have fled to
Sierra Leone. The third largest city in Sierra Leone, Gondama, is
a displaced-persons camp."
Welcome to the aftermath of colonialism and the Cold War. When
Western colonial powers granted independence to their former
possessions, they created nation-states that made no inherent
sense. Especially in Africa, but also elsewhere like Iraq and
Indonesia, borders and countries were created for political
convenience, contrary to ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and
indigenous political realities. When a country lacks some
powerful form of cohesion--be it ethnic, tribal, cultural,
linguistic--it can fall prey to the cynical manipulation of
dictators, warlords, and religious or political zealots. Slobodan
Milosevic can exploit old anxieties of Serbs regarding their
Bosnian Muslim neighbors. Hutu extremists in Rwanda can incite a
population to genocide.
When the violence breaks out, it does so among people who are
heavily armed. The Cold War was a violent affair in places like
Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, and Cambodia, where
contending superpowers supported warring factions with massive
shipments of armaments. The Cold War is over, but the guns
remain, as does the global arms business. If a Somalian warlord
wants to make mischief, he has little trouble equipping his
troops with not only AK-47s, but rockets, artillery, and armored
vehicles. When the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan, the
mujahadeen did not surrender their weapons. They turned them on
each other in a civil war that has been as brutal for Afghan
civilians as the Soviet invasion.
The result has been an epic disaster for much of the world's
population, and an unrelenting international problem. How do you
help these people? Where do they go? Who feeds, clothes, and
nurses them? What do you do about, say, the Palestinians, who
have been refugees for so long that some young adults have lived
their whole lives in camps? Finally--and to Khoa and Mayotte this
is the central question--how do you prevent the strife that
creates new massive dislocations?
KHOA ADDRESSES THESE ISSUES from SEARAC's modest
offices near
DuPont Circle in D.C. As executive director, he oversees
fact-finding, the creation of programs to aid refugees from
Southeast Asia, and promotion of public policies that prevent the
creation of new refugee situations. In 1995, two decades after
the end of the Vietnam war, 40,000 Vietnamese and Laotian
refugees still lived in camps, mostly in Hong Kong, Thailand,
Malaysia, the Philippines, and Indonesia. By this June, most or
all should be resettled or repatriated. The camps have been a
long coda to the Vietnam war.
Born and raised in Hanoi, Khoa was educated there and at the
Sorbonne in Paris, where he studied Oriental philosophy. He had
moved in 1953 to what became South Vietnam when the country
divided, and in 1965 he joined the faculty of the University of
Saigon. Four years later, he became deputy minister of education
in the South Vietnamese government. He campaigned for programs to
enable Vietnamese students to study abroad, and for draft
exemptions for teachers, who were being killed in the war at an
alarming rate. The military government rejected his ideas for
sending students out of the country. So, in his words, he decided
"to bring the brains in," and initiated a visiting-professor
program at the university. He also decided Vietnamese schools
needed good translations of American textbooks.
To that end, he approached the Vietnamese-American Association
(VAA) and persuaded it in 1970 to start a press, with him as
director. He couldn't know at the time that the friendships he
developed would save him five years later. In April 1975, when
the military situation in the south deteriorated, he told his
American friends, "Everywhere you go, I will be with you. You
cannot leave me here."
He recalls, "I was really scared." He told his wife to pack what
she could in suitcases. He forbade his children from leaving the
house or talking on the telephone. He knew that if an evacuation
order came, they would have little time to gather themselves and
get out.
They had an hour. On April 28, Khoa called his wife and said,
"I'll be home in 10 minutes. Then we go." He raced home from the
VAA offices, loaded his family and suitcases in the car, and sped
to the evacuation point. He had been told that each person would
be allowed so many kilos of luggage, and his wife had packed as
many bags as she could within that limit. But when it came time
to board the plane, they were told that each could bring only one
bag. Khoa grabbed the biggest one, assuming his wife would have
put their most valuable possessions in it.
"We stayed in Guam a few days," he recalls. "When I opened the
suitcase, I found just toilet paper, whatever, things people need
when they travel." His rare books, his research notes, his
dissertation--all were in a smaller suitcase left behind. Khoa
never recovered them. "Just thinking of that, I am still sad," he
says, 22 years later.
By June 1975, Khoa and his family had made it to Kensington,
Maryland, where they lived with a family that sponsored them. He
says, "I told my family, 'Forget everything you had. Forget your
house, forget your air-conditioning, forget your car. And don't
be disappointed if I must begin with manual jobs.' I wanted to
give a lesson to my children: This is how we start in the U.S."
Concerned that all his education could close him out of a job he
might need, he composed three rŽsumŽs, each portraying different
levels of schooling and experience. His first employment was in a
7-Eleven.
He didn't spend long ringing up corn chips and sodas. In a week,
he received an offer to be a research associate at a consulting
firm. Ever since, he's spent his professional life working on
refugee issues. "Two things I learned in this country," he says.
"True democracy and volunteerism."
In 1991, the U.N. sent a delegation to Vietnam to assess the
status of Vietnamese who had fled the country as refugees, only
to be forcibly repatriated, not resettled in a third country.
Khoa was part of the delegation.
"When the plane landed in Hanoi and I followed people out,
suddenly I saw a few soldiers with the flat North Vietnamese Army
helmets and red stars, and I stepped back [in momentary fright],
accidentally hitting one of my colleagues," he recalls. "It was
very emotional." Frightened that he might be detained, he would
not venture out alone, instead staying with the delegation
wherever it went. In Hanoi, he did manage to see his older
brother for the first time in 38 years. "When I saw him he was
dying. Only four weeks after returning to the U.S., I got a cable
that he had died."
Khoa has since been back to Vietnam seven more times. He no
longer worries about problems with the authorities. The
Vietnamese government is too busy trying to modernize its economy
and normalize relations with the West to worry about old scores.
"I can come back to Vietnam to visit," he says, "but I think not
to live." He has nine grandchildren now, all of them in the U.S.
His life and his work are in the States. He looks at his hands on
the tabletop before him and says, "I know I am fortunate."
JUDY MAYOTTE IS FORTUNATE, TOO--fortunate to be
alive. When she
answers the door of her Washington apartment, her slacks are
pinned neatly just below her right knee, where her leg ends. She
came very close to giving literally life and limb for the refugee
cause.
Mayotte has not led an everyday sort of life. She is a recovered
polio victim. For 10 years, she was a nun, one of the Sisters of
Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary. It is a teaching order, and
she worked in the inner cities of Los Angeles, Phoenix,
Milwaukee, Kansas City, and other communities. "That was my
introduction to people on the margins of society," she says.
Vatican II led her to reassess her religious life, and she left
the order. She taught juvenile delinquents for a while, and
earned a doctorate at Marquette University. She married Jack
Mayotte; they were together only three years before he died of
cancer. She spent time as a television producer, first for WTTW,
a PBS station in Chicago, and then for Turner Broadcasting. But
she found herself drawn, inexplicably, she says, to refugee work.
She simply realized one day that she wanted to venture overseas
and work with the displaced: "It's something I can't really
explain. It was just in my heart and my gut. I just didn't
question it."
She applied for and received a grant from the MacArthur
Foundation to write a book about refugees. In 1989, at age 51,
she embarked on two years of living alone in Eritrea, Sudan,
Pakistan, Thailand, and Cambodia. Her book, Disposable People?
The Plight of Refugees (Orbis Books), was published in 1992. She
began working with groups like the Women's Commission for Refugee
Women and Children, and the International Rescue Committee. She
testified before Congress, appeared on public radio and
television.
In September 1993, she traveled to southern Sudan on behalf of
Refugees International. She was gathering information on
Operation Lifeline Sudan, whose 27 organizations, including
UNICEF, were trying to feed 1.5 million people a day, all of them
refugees created by Sudan's three-decade civil war. In tow was a
film crew from a public television series, Visionaries. While in
a village named Ayod, the crew decided to film an aerial supply
drop.
On the videotape of the program, you see aide workers laying out
a large white X in an open field, marking the target for the
drop. As the cargo plane comes into view, a worker explains that
the Russian pilots will come in low, north-to-south, and drop
mostly bags of grain. There is footage of a worker instructing
the pilots by radio, followed by another shot of the plane, this
time flying in low to the ground.
Suddenly, you hear someone exclaim fucking hell! and the
cameraman begins to run. For reasons that have never been
explained, the plane came in not north-to-south, but
east-to-west, and dropped its cargo on top of the workers. In the
video, it's clear from the wildly gyrating image that the
cameraman, Paul Van Ness, is running for his life. Then he stops,
and on the soundtrack you hear a holler. Someone has been hit.
The next image is of a woman lying on the ground in agony. It's
Judith Mayotte.
Maybe, because of polio, she couldn't run as fast as her
colleagues. More likely, she was simply the victim of horrible
luck. A 200-pound bag of grain, dropping at an estimated 120
miles per hour, had struck her, pulverizing her leg. That she is
still alive she credits to some good luck: in Ayod that day was a
relief doctor, Bernadette Kumar, who saved her life. On the
airlift out, Mayotte nearly bled to death; at one point, Kumar
could no longer find a pulse. In Nairobi, a doctor working with
25-year-old technology rebuilt Mayotte's femur. Physicians at the
Mayo Clinic, where Mayotte ended up after being evacuated from
Africa, were amazed by the Kenyan's work. He had saved her upper
leg, but the lower leg was a wreck. Mayo physicians presented her
with what she calls a non-choice: one, possibly two years of
reconstructive surgery that might not work, or amputation of her
leg below the knee.
She sighs in her Washington apartment. "The accident stopped me
from doing what I absolutely loved doing. I miss being overseas
in the camps more than I can say. But I can't run from artillery
shells anymore."
AT SAIS, GRACE GOODELL, director of the social
change and
development program, says that the refugee course was, in part, a
response to student demand. "The refugee field is being reduced
to number-crunching and issues of international law," she says.
"Our students are convinced, as I am, that you have to put people
back in the picture."
Mayotte and Khoa embody that mission. Their syllabus reads,
"...the most important consideration to keep constantly before us
is that refugees are people one by one: capable, caring, ordinary
people like you and me--mothers, fathers, daughters, sons,
engineers, doctors, farmers, teachers, homemakers--except their
lives have been turned upside down and their roots torn asunder."
During 13 weeks, the course discusses the current situation, the
specific needs of women and children, the mechanics of
assistance, the role of NGOs, U.S. admissions policy, and
prevention. "The purpose of the course," Khoa says, "is to see
how to rethink refugee problems."
Which is what the international community must do, say Mayotte
and Khoa. The basic U.N. definition of a refugee was written 46
years ago. Though amended in 1967, it's still out of date.
Written for the situation in post-war Europe, it defines a
refugee as someone who has fled to another country to escape
violence or persecution and who cannot, for the moment, return
out of fear for his or her safety. By that definition, the 25 to
40 million internally displaced persons are not refugees, since
they remain in their home countries. And definitions matter.
Governments make foreign policy decisions based on how they
define a situation. If you qualify as a refugee, you may get
assistance. If you don't qualify, you may get ignored. Says Khoa,
"We need to reshape our concept of assistance programs to reflect
the new nature of the problem. If you stick to the classical
definitions, you leave millions stranded in subhuman
conditions."
No era has ever had to grapple with such incredible numbers of
refugees. Hundreds of thousands of people can move with stunning
swiftness. One day, a remote corner of your country is empty; the
next day, 300,000 ragged, hungry people have camped there,
desperately trying to survive. When rebellious Kurds fled the
wrath of Iraq's Saddam Hussein in the aftermath of the 1991
Persian Gulf war, the line of people escaping to the north was 60
miles long.
Khoa explains that host countries are often unwilling hosts. Near
the end of last year, for example, thousands of Hutu refugees
fled Rwanda for Zaire. Not only did Zaire not have the resources
to provide assistance, it had a rebellious Hutu minority of its
own that seized upon the situation to begin fighting Zairian
troops. In 1979, Hong Kong and other Southeast Asia nations
agreed to automatically accept boat people from Vietnam, under
the assumption that the influx would taper off after a few years
and the refugees would be resettled elsewhere. Ten years later,
boat people were still arriving and joining those who had come in
1979 and had yet to be placed in a third country. So the host
nations began screening refugees, instituting what they
euphemistically called "orderly repatriation programs"--forced
return to Vietnam.
Even wealthy nations hesitate to take on large numbers of
refugees for resettlement. "Refugees are always viewed
sympathetically by people," Khoa says. "Especially by American
people, who have a tradition of refugees and immigrants. But the
problem is, people question that tradition when refugee
populations grow to such numbers. No one wants to accept these
people anymore." Resettlement programs engender resentment, he
points out; people insecure about their own futures see refugees
as a threat to jobs. Says Khoa, "You are generous when you are
comfortable. When people have their own problems, they are less
sympathetic." As an example, Khoa notes that when Germany
reunited, it found that the former East Germany included 40,000
Vietnamese "guest workers." Germany, feeling economic strain as
it tried to incorporate the ramshackle East German economy, soon
wanted the Viets to go home.
Internally displaced persons present a unique challenge. They
have not crossed the border out of their country. How do other
nations and NGOs go in and help them without violating
sovereignty? This has been a constant problem in Bosnia, where
Bosnian Serbs have held up--and in some cases shot at--aid
convoys trying to help displaced Bosnian Muslims. Some countries
have multiple refugee problems, making life even more difficult
for relief agencies. Mayotte cites Sudan as an example. Aid
workers were assisting Ethiopian refugees in north Sudan. They
also wanted to help IDPs in south Sudan who had fled the civil
war. The government in the north was fighting rebels in the south
and did not want IDPs there to receive assistance. If the relief
agencies went in to help in the south anyway, would the
government consider that a violation of its sovereignty and halt
relief operations in the north? Mayotte says the relief agencies
went into the south anyway, sometimes clandestinely, exposing
themselves to considerable risk.
The international community has had several years now to observe
how bad refugee situations can be. Khoa and Mayotte believe that
the only durable solution is to prevent the conflicts that
displace populations. Says Khoa, "We need to deal more actively
with the root causes, rather than ad hoc solutions." Adds
Mayotte, "Conflict is part of life. How do you prevent conflict
from tipping over into violence?"
One thing the international community must do, she believes, is
be more attentive to what aide workers in NGOs tell them is
happening in the world's trouble spots. "They're out there in the
villages," she says. "They know what's going on. You've got to
get your ear to the ground." She also says that foreign service
personnel need better training in recognizing the warning signs
that a country may be veering toward collapse.
When nations like the U.S. spot a developing crisis, she says,
they must be more aggressive about intervention. Diplomatic
intervention comes first, she says, followed by sanctions. NGOs
can play an important role, because they can act as disinterested
mediators and messengers, helping to resolve simmering disputes
before they turn into warfare. But, Mayotte adds, the U.S. must
back its diplomatic positions with the threat of armed
intervention, and if necessary follow through with force. She
finds it incomprehensible that international peacekeeping troops
in Bosnia will not arrest Bosnian Serbs indicted for war crimes.
She's critical of U.S. hesitance to commit troops for
peacekeeping missions. She attributes that reluctance to the
"Somalia Syndrome." After U.S. Army Rangers were killed in a
firefight in Somalia, the U.S. government became ever more
reluctant to send troops to places like Bosnia or Rwanda.
"There's the idea that we don't want one American soldier to get
hurt," she says. "To me, that's ludicrous. People sign up for the
Army knowing that they will be exposed to risks. Humanitarian
workers put themselves on the line every day. They run from
artillery shelling, they trip land mines, but somehow their lives
don't count as much as that of a soldier."
She continues, "We've got to deal with preventive action, and to
make prevention a cornerstone of our foreign policy. If we don't,
we're going to have one refugee crisis after another."
She and Khoa hope that their SAIS course will train people who
someday can influence refugee policy. She says, "The people who
come to a course like this are the future." SAIS is a
professional school, and it's obvious from discussions in class
that some of the students are eyeing jobs with refugee relief
agencies.
Khoa continues to work for Southeast Asian refugees as director
of SEARAC. Mayotte has been special advisor to the State
Department's Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration. Both
epitomize a statement by Carel Sternberg, who twice fled
persecution by the Gestapo: "The refugee condition, once
experienced, does not wash off."
Says Mayotte, "I have walked in so many war zones and so many
refugee situations. I hope never again to see someone freshly
blown up by a land mine. What I have seen...there has to be a way
for that not to happen."
Dale Keiger is the magazine's
senior writer.
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APRIL 1997 TABLE OF CONTENTS.