Regional Outlook : Home at Last in Africa : Mozambique, where more than 1.6 million refugees have returned, bodes well for the future of the whole continent.

Sitting in a rickety barge surrounded by pots, pans and squawking chickens, Mangetsi Demba is beaming. She is finally going home.

Demba and the dozen other Mozambican refugees in the boat have lived nearly a decade here in verdant southern Malawi after fleeing their own country’s brutal civil war and a series of catastrophic droughts.

“There is peace now, and I’m going home to live with my father,” Demba said with a shy smile. The 35-year-old widow came to Malawi after her husband was killed by Mozambican troops.

In the past two years, more than 1.6 million refugees have voluntarily gone back to Mozambique, the former Portuguese colony on the southeast coast of Africa, from camps in Malawi, South Africa, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Swaziland. Their return constitutes the largest and most successful United Nations-sponsored refugee repatriation program in the world.

“It could be a model for the rest of the continent,” claims Denis Venter, executive director of the Africa Institute of South Africa, a nonprofit research group in Pretoria.

At a time when the United Nations and the international community are struggling with immense refugee outflows from Rwanda, Burundi, Somalia and Liberia, any type of success is welcome. Nearly a third of the world’s 23 million cross-border refugees live in Africa, more by far than on any other continent.

Ethnic violence, wars and severe economic turmoil mean that three out of four nations in Africa today either produce or host refugees. Meanwhile, more and more of these countries are competing for an ever-shrinking slice of U.N. relief aid. And Africa is the continent most ill-equipped to receive and care for refugees.

Refugees fleeing the conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina, for instance, make for the prosperous economies of Germany or the United States, but those eluding ethnic pogroms in Burundi land in some of the world’s poorest nations, often creating instability.

Still, African nations such as Malawi have set a remarkable standard for caring for refugees. Unlike in many Western countries, there have been few instances of forced repatriations or closed borders. Moreover, some see the relatively smooth Mozambican repatriation and the nascent peace in long-embattled Angola as signs that southern Africa, mired for years in Cold War-fueled conflicts, has achieved some regional cooperation.

“The appreciation of refugee problems [is] bringing the nations of southern Africa closer together,” said Greg Mills of the South African Institute of International Affairs, a Johannesburg think tank.

Some of the blame for the crisis falls heavily on the continent’s former colonial powers, such as the British and the French. Like those in most far-flung outposts of colonial empires, national boundaries in Africa were indiscriminately drawn by outsiders. So today, Somalis live deep within Ethiopia and Kenya, and Dinka and Nuer clan members are found on both sides of the Ethiopia-Sudan border. In other parts of the continent too, cross-border mingling between tribes with similar cultures has led to more or less fluid boundaries.

Such cultural kinship helped give birth to a groundbreaking convention of the Organization of African Unity in 1969. The OAU established an unusually liberal definition of international obligations to protect and care for refugees. But porous national borders, when added to internal conflicts and economic stress, often produce instability. At the turn of the decade, several new conflagrations prompted hundreds of thousands to flee.

Running away from civil war, more than 150,000 Liberians landed in the Ivory Coast at the start of the 1990s; 547,000 ended up in Guinea and Sierra Leone. Around the same time, 520,000 Somalis went to northern Kenya, escaping a famine and clan wars.

“We’ve seen since the end of the Cold War an emergence of conflict within national borders,” said U.N. Deputy High Commissioner for Refugees Gerald Walzer in a recent interview. “Many of the old blueprints don’t apply anymore to the problems one has to address.”

According to the refugee agency, there are now 848,000 Liberian exiles in various West African nations. Somalis by the hundreds of thousands have crossed into neighboring countries. In Sudan, a decades-old civil war between the Christian south and the Muslim north has uprooted more than 3 million people and sent 391,000 to camps in Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda and Zaire. Sudan itself shelters more than 600,000 refugees, mostly from Eritrea and Ethiopia.

But in no region of Africa is the dire plight of refugees and of those who are caring for them more haunting than in the so-called Great Lakes area of Central Africa. Genocide in Rwanda and Burundi has elevated Zaire to the unenviable title of world’s leading asylum-giving country. More than 1.8 million refugees live in grim and massive camps.

A worsening of the continent’s refugee crisis could occur if anticipated cuts are made in U.N. funding. With the United States the largest contributor to U.N. refugee agency operations, and a Republican-controlled Congress intent on hacking away at foreign aid, relief organizations are closely monitoring developments in Washington.

“We need a very intense dialogue with donor governments to identify early where problems could occur,” said Walzer, the U.N. refugee official. “Setting of priorities will be necessary.”

For instance, difficult situations are likely to remain once refugees leave an area. Indeed, if the Mozambican repatriation can be called a paradigm of success, it also epitomizes the challenges faced by poor yet generous African nations that host refugees.

At Malawi’s Luwani Medical Center, life moves at a slow pace. Basking in the sun, a few locals chat on wooden benches surrounded by rich green foliage. Nurses amble in and out of rooms housing a dozen patients from a nearby village.

It’s hard to imagine that less than a year ago, more than 150 Mozambican refugees a day, often from opposing factions, patiently waited in long queues that snaked along the clinic’s walls. And despite tribal links to the refugees, many of Luwani’s employees were relieved to see them go home.

“They’ve been fighting for years. That mentality is still in their minds,” said Esnath Nankhuna, a nurse. “I’m concerned about them fighting here.”

No doubt the Mozambican refugees imposed an enormous burden on Malawi. The sudden influx of a large population of refugees and the accommodations they required resulted in extensive deforestation, depletion of natural resources and soil erosion.

And Malawian politicians are quick to point the finger at refugees for rising crime and murder rates. They say the country has become a dumping site for firearms once used in Mozambique’s civil war.

“To a certain extent, Malawi paid too high a price for hosting the refugees,” says Venter of the Africa Institute. “It was a tremendous strain on the Malawian economy and society.”

Returning Mozambicans can expect a few rough years at home too. Contrasted with Mozambique’s paltry gross national product of $64 per capita--the lowest in Africa--even Malawi’s average output of $160 looks appealing. In addition, 16 years of civil war and a series of droughts have devastated the Mozambican economy and infrastructure. On top of that, the country is littered with land mines.

Alex Vines, a specialist at Africa Watch in London, believes with other analysts that the peace in Mozambique will last; he argues that combatants on both sides are simply tired of fighting. But a recent Oxford University study found the average Mozambican soldier has 7.8 hungry mouths to feed.

Said Vines: “It’s going to be a rocky ride.”

And there has been a troubling new development on the continent. In the past two months, Tanzania, traditionally one of the most welcoming of nations, closed its borders with Burundi.

“More and more African nations are taking their cue from the West and becoming more restrictive,” said Jeff Drumtra of the U.S. Committee for Refugees. “If people cannot get across that border, I have no doubt they will get slaughtered.”