They’re Trapped in Politics of War

Imagine an evening unwinding at home, blissfully oblivious to anything unfolding beyond your front door. Then a neighbor bursts in. That thunder you thought you heard? It’s actually artillery fire. Enemy soldiers aim to take over your town.

You grab the kids and head into the night. The stores are already looted, which means no food or water or fuel along the way. You stay close to your neighbors, hoping for safety in the surging crowd.

A raggedy band of armed men has set up a checkpoint in your path, however. They wade into your group and seize the men, taking them to detention camps or, just maybe, a mass grave. They select women to rape. The rest of the group, now disproportionately composed of the young and the old, are forced to move on, wheezing and sneezing in the cold night air. It starts to rain. Sickness will soon settle in.

It could be Kosovo, the latest of four Yugoslav wars that have uprooted 5 million people and scattered them around the world, burdening economies and agitating extremists. It could be Angola, where a population bigger than Boston’s has been dislodged since December. It could be Sierra Leone, where rebels lop off the limbs of wandering civilians. It could be Colombia or the Caucasus, Sri Lanka or the Sudan. Yet the primal terror of sudden rootlessness is no less taxing than if it had happened in Ohio.

Kosovo’s catastrophe is a thunderous coda to what has been the decade of the displaced, the post-Cold War period in which more people have been uprooted than ever before. Refugee numbers are confoundingly hard to quantify, yet 50 million--roughly one in every 100 people on the planet--is a reliably round estimate of the decade’s human debris.

For the most part, we hardly notice these fellow earthlings because there are just too many of them. The uprooted are like a vast, secret society within the known world, the casually overlooked casualties of transitional times. We notice this parallel universe only when there’s a particularly violent and visually accessible rip in it, when we see an especially forlorn group of people passing over to the other side, wandering the road to oblivion. The languages and the clothing and the complexions may vary, but it always seems to be the same faceless mass of unfortunates tumbling into the harsh life of endless motion.

What sometimes seems like a single organism, of course, is merely an accidental collection of individuals who just happened to be standing in the way when history got made. I once met a mechanical engineer in Liberia who had a nice home with his wife and six kids. Yet when war came to his country, the family had to toss some clothes in the car and head out. Their car was quickly seized, and survival was a daily uncertainty for years. They shrank to skin and bones covered in rags and barely existed on fitful inflows of outside aid. They hid in hovels abandoned by people just like themselves, too frightened to whisper, lest the horrors outside come in. They were stuck in a slipstream, just a few more faces in a Darwinian throng.

Few of us really noticed the nearly 500,000 people that Serb strongman Slobodan Milosevic had uprooted in Kosovo until the NATO bombing began and the numbers spiked spasmodically upward. Then three American soldiers were taken hostage, triggering the dread yellow ribbons of withering resolve.

We can’t stomach the sight of some of our own held at the mercy of an enemy du jour, which is why we do half-baked things like bomb Kosovo without sending in ground forces to protect the people we’re supposedly trying to help. Or why we let old Cold War puppets like Liberia or Rwanda spiral into regional wars that send multitudes flying around the world like human shrapnel, prompting rich nations like ours to toughen their asylum laws. Many of us can’t take the thought of risking a few of our own to save a few hundred thousand of someone else’s.

This is why American casualties sustained in Somalia will probably forever dwarf the fact that untold thousands were rescued from starvation, and why critics complain about the presence of U.S. troops in Bosnia even though those troops ended a terrible war.

Too often we’re scared off by high expectations. Halting epic death isn’t good enough. We need a perfect plan, an escape strategy. Yet allowing a massive population to stop running, to simply stand still long enough to sink a hoe in the ground, is a goal worth the price of mighty resources. The ability to rescue a multitude is a gift.

Most refugees aren’t warlords or gunmen or bandits. They’re just regular folks, people who, with a bit of luck, could be you and me, or us them. People forced to grab their kids and head out on the road, hoping only to survive the day ahead.