Regional Outlook : Out of Africa: Refugee Crisis Is Still Growing : But the continent has set world standards in caring for its fleeing people.

Lual Teng Atia demonstrated his learning by writing his name in the dirt with a stick. He shyly admitted to being 14 years old--although he was not quite sure.

Why did he come to this place, he was asked. With an expression of implacable gravity heartbreaking in one so young, he uttered a single word: “Riak.”

An interpreter spoke up. “That means ‘disaster,’ ” he said.

It had been an evening three years ago. Lual was with his father and mother near their village in Bahr el Ghazal, a region in southern Sudan where the government had armed Islamic militias and given them carte blanche to wreak havoc among the Christian and traditional believers of the area.

Lual saw them come in a cloud of dust, on camel and horseback, guns ready. He saw some of his six brothers and sisters cut down. “They were shooting at us all,” he said. “So we all ran in different directions.”

For weeks he wandered the Sudanese bush, taking up with a growing group of boys just like himself. It was the dry season and food was scarce, so they ate leaves. Finally, after at least four months afoot, they came to safety in Fugnido, over the Ethiopian border.

Fugnido is the place the Sudanese war has turned into the “boys’ republic,” a vast display of Sudan’s disfranchised future.

To call the 17,000 children now here “unaccompanied minors,” in the bloodless terminology of international relief agencies, is to obscure the tragedy of a community of boys without mothers and fathers, boys who have seen their sisters and brothers cut down and burned alive, their very childhoods extinguished and their tomorrows blighted by the charge of mounted Arab militiamen brandishing machetes and guns.

Every refugee story is unique and every one tragic. The boys’ republic in Fugnido is only one on a continent of refugees.

With the exception of Afghanistan, whose war has millions of people fleeing, no place on Earth has sent more of its people across borders in search of food, political asylum and physical safety. The number of Africans living in refugee camps is now 5 million.

Africa is the only region in the world where the refugee population continues to grow. Most of the reason for this can be found in the benighted eastern corner of the continent known as the Horn, where Somalia, Ethiopia and Sudan are all entangled in long civil wars with no current prospect of settlement.

But no region of the continent is refugee-free: Of sub-Saharan Africa’s 44 countries, at least 33 harbor some refugees, according to figures compiled by the U.S. Committee for Refugees, a Washington-based nonprofit group.

Pope John Paul II, now near the end of his seventh trip to the continent, has made the refugee problem a principal focus of his visit.

Kenya, Rwanda and Zaire still shelter refugees from Uganda’s 20-year civil war, which ended in 1986. Southern African countries like Zimbabwe and Zambia shoulder the burden of hundreds of thousands of refugees from wars in Mozambique and Angola. An outbreak of tribal pogroms in Burundi sent nearly 200,000 people to havens in Rwanda, Zaire and Tanzania. And the matchless brutality of Liberia’s tribally inspired civil war has sent as many as 400,000 of that tiny country’s 2.3 million people fleeing to Ivory Coast, Guinea and Sierra Leone.

Tragically, no region of the world is as ill-equipped to receive and care for refugees as Africa. In Asia, people eluding the ruins of Vietnam and Cambodia make for the thriving economies of Hong Kong and Thailand; but Somalis and Sudanese escaping their murderous civil wars can land only in Ethiopia, the poorest country on earth.

In Ethiopia, as elsewhere, these large populations seeking shelter create problems and raise difficulties for relief organizations that often appear insoluble. Refugees can destabilize local economies, destroy regional ecologies, harbor political dissidents and breed violence. Separatist armies do their recruiting inside the camps, sometimes provoking government troops to attack them.

But despite all this, Africans have long set a model for the world in caring for their fleeing brothers and sisters. There have been relatively few instances of forced repatriation or rejection by African countries.

The world standard of humanitarian behavior must be that set by Malawi, one of the very poorest countries of Africa, a landlocked and deprived sliver nestled within the “V” formed by Mozambique’s border and governed by the dictatorial 90-year-old President H. Kamuzu Banda.

Malawi has signed none of the international compacts governing the treatment of refugees, not even a groundbreaking 1969 convention of the Organization of African Unity. But with graciousness and proficiency it shelters the largest population of asylum-seekers anywhere on the continent and the largest anywhere in the world except Pakistan and Iran: 850,000 Mozambican refugees.

Its ratio of refugees to indigenous population, more than 1-to-9, is the highest in the world. Malawi’s gross national product is $160 per capita, but the refugee camps clustered around Nsanje, at the country’s southern tip, are models of efficiency.

Africans have long recognized that the unique features of their political landscape and nature of their conflicts required a different standard of care and definition of refugees. The 1969 OAU convention went far beyond any other international compact, including those of the United Nations, in the breadth of its definition of “refugee” and the understanding of international obligations to protect these people.

Why is Africa such a prolific producer of refugees? It has become something of a cliche to point a finger at the continent’s former colonial powers for every one of today’s failures. But in this case some blame may be due, especially for the maelstrom of the Horn of Africa.

More than in any other part of the continent, the national boundaries of the Horn’s countries were set by outsiders--particularly British and Italians.

By contrast, in West Africa, where indigenous leaders had a voice in designing their fledgling countries, they tended to rely on natural boundaries like rivers and mountain ranges that had historically separated unfriendly tribes with incompatible social and cultural habits. Nature may have given these countries the bizarre shapes of gerrymandered political districts, but with few exceptions it also granted them lasting political stability.

Not so on the far side of the continent. The national boundaries of the countries of the Horn were drawn by straightedge at international conferences in Europe. Dinka and Nuer tribesmen landed on both sides of the Ethiopia-Sudan border, Somalis were found not only in the Somalilands of Britain and Italy but deep in Kenya and Ethiopia.

This situation aggravates the natural difficulties of making stable states out of the destitute lands and mobile populations of Africa.

“African states have rather fluid borders,” observes Kingsley Amaning, a Ghanaian official of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). “Locals question whether they should be in some other state, and central governments can’t pay for services to pacify them. In the Horn, also, people are mostly nomads, so the idea of settling in any state is an alien one.”

In a region of great want, it is almost inevitable that refugees tend to settle in places of meager resources that challenge the capacity of the outside world to reach and care for them. Nowhere is this more true than a forsaken stretch of desert in eastern Ethiopia that has become a battleground between the UNHCR and its multiplying army of critics, who include diplomatic observers and many international assistance agencies.

This area, surrounding a tiny village called Hartisheik, was a graceless wasteland vacant of vegetation and water in 1988 when hundreds of thousands of Somalis emerged into it, fleeing the government’s bombing of the northern cities of Hargeisa and Berbera.

Unlike most other African refugees, these people were mostly urbanites, civil servants and businessmen, some of whom arrived briefcases in hand, with their wives and children trailing behind them. Only 5% of Hartisheik’s refugees were farmers in their old country.

They had held onto their homes until the last moment, as the government of Mohammed Siad Barre, a member of the Marehan clan, made war on the Issak people of northern Somalia.

“Siad Barre’s people would come at night and put Issak in jails indefinitely,” recalled Mohammed Esa Mahamoud, a member of Hartisheik’s refugee committee. “There would be no court.”

A visit to Hartisheik is a trip through the land God gave to Cain. One reaches the camp by a 55-mile dirt road from the nearest Ethiopian town, Jijiga, through an unpopulated landscape blasted dry by the sun, where the only motion visible comes from an occasional camel and the clouds of rusty dust raised by water tankers and the off-road vehicles of international aid agencies.

At length you arrive at Hartisheik town, an agglomeration of sorry mud and wattle structures situated midway between the vast camps of Hartisheik “A” and “B.” There is an astonishing flurry of activity here in the middle of the inhospitable desert. Vendors hawk fruits and vegetables unavailable in the rationed diet provided by UNHCR.

In its first year Hartisheik became a model of what can go wrong in a refugee camp. Its relatively affluent and urbanized refugees had arrived well-fed and in good health; under the UNHCR’s care, malnutrition among the children skyrocketed to levels nearly matching those of the worst of the infamous Ethiopian famine of 1984-85. The agency’s food-delivery system was so inadequate that as many as a third of the refugees were placed on half-rations, and there were riots over the meager water supply. An outbreak of scurvy, a debilitating vitamin deficiency disease seen almost nowhere else in the world, occurred.

“Rarely can a population with such considerable initial human and material resources have been reduced to so pitiful a state while technically under international protection,” a team from Save the Children wrote in a blistering assessment last year. The team acknowledged that “exceptional political and logistical difficulties” existed for UNHCR, but concluded that “this tragic outcome was, in our view, largely avoidable.”

UNHCR officials consider themselves trapped with a no-win task; indeed, it is sometimes hard to see how anyone could have managed in the Ethiopian wilderness without problems. Agency officials complain that they get little credit for erecting a camp for 340,000 refugees out of solid dust.

“I don’t know what these critics expected to find in a refugee camp in the middle of the desert,” says Kalenga Lutato, the Zambian who is UNHCR camp coordinator at Hartisheik. “Water in this place is like gold.”

Still, in some ways Hartisheik has the slim advantage of being a place where there is little local competition for resources, however scarce they are. On the other side of the country, Fugnido’s 76,000 refugees and another estimated 240,000 in the giant camp of Itang have fairly overwhelmed the local population of 137,000 living around the provincial center of Gambela.

Some refugee experts consider a place like Gambela to be a perfect breeding ground for conflicts between the indigenous population and the refugees--always a problem in destitute areas. For one thing, the area has been literally overrun by refugees, who have quadrupled the local population.

“The refugees get some support, but resources for the nationals are slim,” says Kingsley Amaning of UNHCR. “The refugees have better clinics and a better water supply.” Fugnido camp, for instance, has 23 holes (drilled by UNICEF) to supply clean drinking water; the local population outside the camp must make do with five.

Aggravating the crisis is the increasing penury of UNHCR. In past years, when its $400-million budget applied to a worldwide caseload of 5 million refugees, the agency put a lot of money into projects that would benefit refugees and their hosts alike. These included improving the local infrastructure of roads and services. There were also development programs to move people into “revenue-raising activities,” UNHCR-speak for small gardens, weaving, pottery, and so on, which would make them more self-sufficient and ease the strain on local resources. To some extent this approach provided a positive incentive to locals for welcoming refugees, even if their large numbers tended to disturb a way of life.

But with the same UNHCR budget now spread thinly over a clientele of 15 million refugees, all of those programs have ceased. “Now we just have enough money for basic assistance and life-saving programs--but just for refugees,” says Amaning.

The conflict is intensified by the despoliation of the local ecology.

“Just five years ago, this entire area was so thickly forested you couldn’t see from here to there,” remarks Mathias Temesgen, an official of the Ethiopian Administration for Refugee Affairs, as he waves his hand over an empty, lightly grassed landscape dotted with dying bushes. The region was so rich in wildlife, especially elephants, that it attracted affluent foreign hunters as one of Ethiopia’s few tourist attractions.

Hundreds of thousands of refugees have ranged over the land, cutting down trees for fuel, denuding the dales and hillocks so thoroughly that Itang has suffered something no one can remember ever happening before--extensive flooding during the rainy season. No one has seen an elephant in several years.

For now, relief agencies and the Ethiopian government do what they can to mold the refugees, especially the children, into a community. As many children as can fit through the low doors of the classroom huts are given lessons in English, Arabic and mathematics, although books and paper are as highly prized here as water is in Hartisheik. Even with two shifts a day, 3,000 children still must go without any schooling at all.

In the empty days they wash their clothes in a nearby river, or kick a makeshift soccer ball around the dry fields between the huts. The adults around the camp watch them with concern, for these children who escaped the murderous militias of Sudan are the flimsy repositories of the country’s hopes. Many more were left behind.

“It was escape or die,” remembers Elijah Alier, a former telecommunications engineer from Bahr el Ghazal who recalls his own family’s escape to Fugnido with the dryness of detail that submerges grief. People were being shot on the street and rounded up by night, he remembers. On the day he left, he collected his wife and two of his children, ages 2 and 4. His third child was off playing with friends, and there was no time to find him. He was 6 then, three years ago. There has been no word of his fate from a land where children were being captured and killed or enslaved by the thousands.

“He was picked up by another family,” Alier says quietly, “if he was lucky.”

Refugees: Still A Growth Industry in Africa

Number of refugees

Zaire: 50,400

Liberia: 68,000

Western Sahara: 165,000*

Burundi: 186,500*

Rwanda: 233,000*

Somalia: 388,600*

Sudan: 435,100

Angola: 438,000*

Ethiopia: 1,035,900

Mozambique: 1,354,000*

Source: U.S. Committee for Refugees

* Indicates that numbers vary significantly in number reported. Counts may understate the total number of refugees from a given country as asylum nations do not always specify countries of refugees’ origin.