Agency Still Racing to Help Refugees

In the turmoil of post-World War II Europe, millions of people were on the move--uprooted refugees herded along roads, pouring into squalid camps, sheltering in bombed-out buildings.

National borders were being redrawn. Multitudes were expelled from ancestral homelands. Of those who stayed home, many suddenly found themselves in a new country. And all over Eastern Europe, countries only just liberated from the Nazis were falling under communist rule. The Iron Curtain had descended.

In a camp near Pisa, Italy, 10 families were crowded into a dormitory with hanging blankets for walls and an outdoor trench for a latrine. Among them were the Andrettis, and they had an 8-year-old boy named Mario who would grow up to be crowned the world’s greatest race car driver.

Something had to be done fast to cope with the human torrent engulfing Europe. The task fell to a United Nations agency that arose in humble circumstances on Dec. 14, 1950, anticipating that it would be in business for three years at most. Instead, it grew into a globe-girdling giant.

When the office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees opened in Geneva at mid-century, it had a budget of $300,000, a staff of 33 and a mission to resettle 1 million European refugees.

“The idea, clearly rather naive, was that we would get them all resettled and everyone would live happily ever after,” says UNHCR spokesman Ron Redmond.

But long after those displaced Europeans were dealt with, the haunting images of refugees are still with us, even more vividly now in the television age. They are scattered around two dozen countries--Balkan peoples, East Timorese islanders, Rwandans, Burundians, Tibetans, Palestinians, Afghans, Chinese, Somalis, Sudanese, Armenians, Azerbaijanis . . .

The UNHCR that was supposed to be gone by the mid-1950s now has an annual budget of about $1 billion--30% given by the United States--and 5,000 employees in 120 countries. And the number of refugees in its charge has exploded from a million at its beginning to 22.3 million at last count.

“My office remains necessary because persecution and conflict continue to force ever greater numbers of people to flee their homes,” says Sadako Ogata, the UNHCR chief.

But refugees can and do escape their dire circumstances. The refugee is an icon of human failure, but also one of hope. Just ask Mario Andretti.

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In the abandoned college dormitory in Lucca, Italy, the boy found himself a world away from his home village of Montona, where his father, Alvise, had owned an 1,800-acre farm.

The redrawn border had placed Montona, east of the Mediterranean port of Trieste, in Yugoslavia. The Andrettis had no desire to live under communist ruler Josip Broz Tito. But neither did they expect to spend months, then years, as refugees--or “displaced persons,” to use the jargon of the times.

The elder Andretti picked up odd jobs, but steady work was scarce. Mario, his twin brother, Aldo, and older sister, Anna Maria, felt the strain. “It was just a big cloud of uncertainty,” he recalls.

The townspeople of Lucca scorned the refugees. Andretti remembers overhearing a woman tell her misbehaving son she would send him to the camp to be eaten. “They thought we were freaks.”

But camp conditions gradually improved; the Andretti kids made friends and went to school. Churches and local governments attended to the refugees’ everyday needs, while the UNHCR looked for long-term solutions--helping the refugees obtain passports and other documents, advising them on how to obtain asylum, and protecting them from being thrown out of their country of refuge.

For the Andrettis, the camp would be home for seven years.

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UNHCR records do not tell what role, if any, the agency played in resettling the family, but the route the Andrettis took is typical for refugees who passed through the UNHCR machinery--a long, laborious process of applying for visas, supported by relatives including an uncle who had moved to America in 1909.

Teenagers by now, Mario and his brother fell in love with racing--then the most popular sport in Italy. They went to the movies just to watch the newsreels of auto races. Andretti’s hero was Alberto Ascari, an Italian world champion.

In 1955, U.S. visas finally came through. Alvise, the father, had always viewed America as a last resort, and promised that the family would return to Italy after five years. The Andrettis set sail aboard the liner Conte Biancamano and got to New York nine days later, on June 16. It was Anna Maria’s 21st birthday.

“It was the most beautiful morning, clear, and we sailed right past the Statue of Liberty,” Andretti says. “We just sailed quietly in. And I said to my sister, ‘Happy birthday.’ ”

They came with $125 and spoke little English, anonymous specks among hundreds of thousands of postwar refugees flooding into America. They settled in Nazareth, Pa., near their relatives. Alvise quickly found work with Bethlehem Steel, and two years later built a home.

Mario and Aldo went to work in an uncle’s garage and built a 1948 Hudson Hornet Sportsman stock car. They both began racing in 1959. In his first two seasons, Mario won 20 times in the modified stock class.

Italy and Yugoslavia began to fade into memory.

“Out of a huge negative at the beginning, here we experienced a beautiful positive,” Andretti says. “As much rancor, as much hatred as there really was for Tito, all of a sudden I used to say to Dad, ‘We should start sending him some thank-you cards.’ ‘

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Far from folding, the UNHCR was facing new challenges.

In 1956, the Hungarian uprising against communist rule drove out 200,000 people. During the 1960s the focus turned to Africa and Southeast Asia, in 1971 to Bangladesh. The agency was having to set up refugee camps and provide food, shelter, medical care and sanitation on short notice.

The agency provides aid directly, and also coordinates the work of charities to make sure their efforts don’t duplicate one another.

Sixty percent of UNHCR staff work in “bad places” where it is too dangerous for their families to join them, said Redmond, the UNHCR spokesman.

Other organizations credit the agency in general for tackling an immense job, but they say it’s weak in some critical areas, such as protecting refugees or heading off impending problems.

Rachael Reilly of New York-based Human Rights Watch says the UNHCR “is a victim to a certain extent of what it is”--an international agency dependent on governments for funds and muscle.

She thinks it could do more to protect the rights of refugees under international law, such as respecting the ban against forcing them back into the countries they are fleeing. “It needs to be stronger and tougher with governments,” says Reilly.

Joel Charny, vice president of Washington-based Refugees International, says many of the problems stem from governments’ failure to donate money before, rather than after, a refugee crisis hits.

But “it’s more than money,” says Charny. “We need UNHCR leadership.”

High Commissioner Ogata says governments as a rule are generous, but also thinks they are less responsive when things are quiet.

“The irony,” she says, “is that unless you’re well prepared during these years, when suddenly an emergency starts, our capacity will not be strong enough.”

In 1998 Kosovo generated Europe’s biggest refugee crisis since World War II, severely taxing the agency and leading to criticism that it was unprepared.

Ogata says her agency was helping some 400,000 people inside Kosovo, “in a way, buying time for the political negotiations,” but couldn’t keep up with events.

The UNHCR marked its 50th birthday by floating thousands of lighted candles down the River Rhone in Geneva, and produced a TV ad featuring the likes of U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and sex therapist Dr. Ruth Westheimer, both refugees from the Nazis.

Ogata, a 73-year-old Japanese educated at UC Berkeley, is stepping down Dec. 31 after a decade in office.

“In our anniversary year,” she says, “we are not celebrating UNHCR, but rather refugees--their courage, their determination and their capacity for survival against all odds.”

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Over a racing career that spanned four decades, Andretti won nearly everything worth winning: the Indianapolis 500, the Daytona 500, the Formula One world championship, the Champ Car national championship--four times. Last year the Associated Press picked him and A.J. Foyt to share the title of driver of the century.

He and Dee Ann, his wife of 39 years, have a daughter and two sons who both race cars. His father died last year.

Mario Andretti, refugee, is ancient history now. But he still thinks occasionally about the long, twisting path that led him from a sleepy medieval village through a refugee camp to fame and fortune in America.

Last year, like the rest of the world, he watched on television as hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians were driven from their homes during the Serb crackdown in Kosovo--right in the geographical neighborhood where he himself was once uprooted.

Today the UNHCR grapples with an ugly new turn of phrase, “compassion fatigue”--the indifference of a world growing used to the endless spectacle of refugees crisscrossing the continents.

“It’s convenient to ignore refugees. It’s a ‘Why should I get involved?’ type of thing,” Andretti says. “You see so many innocent people being dispersed out of their home, and with really no hope. You sympathize with them, but then you go about your business.

“I think we’re all guilty of that, to be honest.”

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UNHCR: https://www.unhcr.ch

Alexander G. Higgins is based in Geneva and Michael Rubinkam in Philadelphia.