Report Points Up Woes of Internally Displaced Persons

They are victims of the post-Cold War era--more than 20 million people driven from their homes by ethnic war, famine or oppression but unable to reach the relative safety of a neighboring country. Their suffering is a silent atrocity that the world seems incapable of stopping.

Known by the numbingly bureaucratic label “internally displaced persons,” they are “among the most at-risk, vulnerable populations in the world,” the investigative arm of Congress said in a report being issued today.

Yet there is no U.N. or U.S. government agency responsible for helping them, the General Accounting Office noted in the report. Nongovernmental relief organizations try to take up the slack but lack the money and authority to cope with the problem. Sometimes the groups can’t even win access to those in need when a country is suffering civil strife.

Advocates of the internally displaced are enthusiastic about the GAO report, which they hope will focus the attention of Congress and the Bush administration on a problem the U.S. government has largely ignored.

“What we need to do is get the issue of [the internally displaced] on the agenda,” said Anthony Kozlowski, president of the American Refugee Committee. “Probably this starts with Congress and the Committee on Foreign Relations. The GAO report is the first step.”

For more than half a century, the United States and United Nations have tried to meet the needs of refugees, defined under international law as people who fled their countries to escape religious, ethnic or political persecution. Most refugees land, at least temporarily, in camps in neighboring nations, where local governments usually welcome international aid in meeting the costs of caring for the migrants.

But the internally displaced--who now outnumber refugees by almost 2 to 1--remain in their own countries, often because they are unable to get out. Under international law, national governments are responsible for aiding their own displaced citizens. But frequently, those seeking help left home in the first place to avoid government persecution, leaving them with a cruel dilemma: Go into hiding, which often means facing disease and starvation, or return home and risk sometimes deadly oppression.

In 1999, hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo took to the Serbian province’s forests and hills when driven from their homes by Yugoslav security forces and found relief only when an 11-week air campaign by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization drove out the troops.

The GAO survey of aid workers in 48 countries shows how difficult and dangerous the life of a displaced person can be. In 90% of the countries, the displaced were subject to direct physical attack or the threat of attack; in 58%, they were forced to move against their will; in 46%, women and girls were victims of sexual assault; in 46%, employment was taken away; in 35%, the displaced were pressed into military service or forced labor; and in 25%, they had no legal access to health care, education or other services.

For the international community to help, it must either obtain permission from a nation’s government, often difficult to do, or infringe on its sovereignty, which the U.S. and U.N. have been reluctant to attempt.

Internally displaced persons are spread throughout more than 50 countries on five continents, the GAO report says, although more than half of them are in Africa. Their numbers overtook the ranks of refugees sometime in the 1990s, in the midst of post-Cold War civil conflict.

Personal accounts of life as a displaced person fill a harrowing book published this year by the Jesuit Refugee Service, “War Has Changed Our Life, Not Our Spirit.”

Denisa Baransata, a woman fleeing the long-running ethnic war in Burundi, recalls: “It was 15 August 1998 when I saw a group of soldiers coming toward our home. I knew this would not be the only visit. I left immediately, carrying my 2-year-old baby on my back. I took nothing else with me, no clothes, no shoes, nothing. After walking for some time, I arrived at the outskirts of a town called Gasamanzuki, where I met so many people in distress.

“We stayed there without aid of any sort. We could not sleep, our children were crying because of hunger, cold and rain. People died, especially children and pregnant women during delivery, as there was no one to assist them. Getting food was too difficult for us women, the only option being to climb a mango tree to get fruit. Only the men were able to do that; if they felt sorry, they would share some pieces of fruit with us women.”

In a report from the war-torn island of Sri Lanka, the book tells of a widow named Meenakshiammal, who fled into the jungle in 1995 to escape ethnic conflict that pitted the minority Tamils against the Sinhalese-dominated government.

“Hunger followed them like a shadow. One day, her sons, who used to protect and look after her, went out and did not return. In 1997, other displaced people brought her to the ‘cleared’ areas, where she had to undergo the ordeal of army interrogation before being sent to the [relocation] center.”

The GAO report says some countries, such as Algeria, Myanmar and Turkey, routinely bar international contact with internally displaced citizens. Others, such as Sudan, place so many restrictions on the distribution of relief supplies that aid agencies, if they hope to operate in the country at all, are forced to cooperate with government programs that severely limit efforts in rebel-controlled areas.

“Since the end of the Cold War, the number of internally displaced persons has grown steadily. . . . Internally displaced persons suffer extreme deprivation, are subject to threats to their physical security . . . and are unlikely to have adequate shelter, health care and the ability to earn a livelihood,” the report says.

Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), joined by Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), requested the GAO report as the first step toward focusing U.S. government attention on the festering problem.

“This report details the lack of coordination within various agencies of the United Nations,” Helms said Thursday. “As we have seen in the Balkans, these problems hinder assistance from getting to the [internally displaced] of repressive governments.”

In comments to the GAO, the State Department and the U.N. “emphasized that lack of resources seriously undermines international efforts to address the protection and assistance needs of the internally displaced,” the report says.

Although the U.S. and U.N. have sometimes attempted to aid the internally displaced, their efforts have been diluted by their failure to designate a single agency to take charge. The result has been bureaucratic disputes over jurisdiction.

Into that vacuum, a number of nongovernmental organizations--the International Committee of the Red Cross, the American Refugee Committee, Refugees International, the International Rescue Committee and a long list of others--have sought to assist the internally displaced. It is a difficult and dangerous job, carried out by workers who have no diplomatic immunity and lack the clout that government agencies can bring to bear.

Such groups try to avoid risking the lives of their representatives and have pulled out of a number of countries, such as Afghanistan and Congo, at least temporarily. But the work is hazardous almost everywhere.

“We probably have the second-highest casualty rate in the world, behind only journalists working in combat situations,” said Kozlowski, the American Refugee Committee president.

Roberta Cohen, co-director of a project on displacement at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, noted, “The United States has a goal of zero casualties for military operations but not for humanitarian programs.”

The U.N. lists 185 aid workers killed in the line of duty between 1992 and 1999. No one has kept an official count, but Larry Thompson, advocacy director of Refugees International, believes that the number “is far higher.”

The GAO report, however, says the presence of international aid workers often causes oppressive governments to think twice about persecuting the displaced.

“Protection experts acknowledge that a simple visible field presence is sometimes the most effective means to prevent harm to internally displaced persons,” the report says.

Although the failure of the U.S. and U.N. to establish an organization devoted to the protection of the internally displaced seems like a bloodless and bureaucratic problem, it has caused real pain.

For instance, of the 2.7 million deaths reported in the eastern Congo in the last two years, only about 300,000 resulted from combat while the rest were from disease and neglect, said Mark Bartolini, vice president for government relations of the International Rescue Committee.

“Some of these deaths are the result of a lack of coordination,” he said.

The Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees has resisted pressure to launch programs for the internally displaced because recent budget cuts make it difficult for the organization to expand. The closest thing to an official U.N. response was the appointment in 1992 of Francis M. Deng, a Sudanese diplomat, as special representative of Secretary-General Kofi Annan on the internally displaced.

Deng’s office is so strapped for cash that he retained his day job as a professor at City University of New York. Much of his work with the displaced is underwritten by the Brookings Institution.

Deng has produced a 30-article code outlining the rights that the displaced should have, such as food, shelter, medical treatment and freedom of movement. The code also says the displaced should not be subjected to genocide, murder, rape, mutilation, torture, slavery or terror.

Although the principles have won praise from humanitarian aid groups, they are unenforceable and not considered international law. The U.N. Security Council and General Assembly have declined to endorse the principles, at least in part because of opposition from Third World countries that fear international infringement on their sovereignty.

“The United Nations is an organization of governments,” Deng said in an interview this year with InterAction, an advocacy group. “It is only as good as its members.”