Rescuing the Refugees

Arthur C. Helton

From Foreign Affairs, March/April 2002

Summary:  The world's focus in Afghanistan is shifting from waging war to picking up the pieces and helping the long-suffering Afghan people. But can action follow words? Modern refugee crises require solutions that pair crisis response with nation building, and private agencies with national and international actors. But the organizations devoted to such tasks remain outdated, uncoordinated, and shackled by politicians and bureaucrats. The system is broken, and it cannot be fixed from within.

Arthur C. Helton is Senior Fellow for Refugee Studies and Preventive Action and Director of Peace and Conflict Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is the author of the forthcoming The Price of Indifference.

A BROKEN SYSTEM

The reconstruction of Afghanistan presents a variety of unique problems, but it also illustrates the larger dilemmas that characterize most modern humanitarian emergencies. Around the globe, more people are displaced today than ever before, and the costs of assisting them are rising. The source of the problem, increasingly, is internal conflicts, in which Western powers often intervene. Indeed, both the concept of sovereignty and the nature of war are evolving, altering the landscape for humanitarian action in the process. Unfortunately, the institutions that deal with refugees have not yet adapted effectively to these new realities. The time has come for innovation.

Refugee crises now require new kinds of responses: feeding civilians while dodging bullets and bombs, using military force to organize safe havens, and even nation building alongside refugee repatriation. But the exclusively reactive international system for handling refugees is not designed to predict such changes and prepare for them. And the narrow focus on providing relief to the uprooted who have crossed national borders fails to acknowledge the fact that tens of millions of people around the world today are displaced within their home countries. The result is unnecessary expense, instability, humiliation, and suffering.

The old distinction, derived from U.N. treaties, between externally and internally displaced people is simply no longer viable. Nor is it any longer possible to ignore the link between crisis response and long-term development, or the need to coordinate policies among a bewildering array of national and international bodies and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). The U.N. has introduced a new mechanism for Afghanistan to deal with this latter problem, but it only scratches the surface of what is really required. How coordinated can the effort be when donors will give money through both multilateral and bilateral channels, international organizations and NGOs will jockey for roles and money, and relief work will run up against recovery and development plans? Making matters worse, all of this commotion will play out in a country without an effective national government, where programs and recipients will be highly localized. The system for dealing with refugees and humanitarian crises is broken, and it cannot be fixed from within.

FROM BAD TO WORSE

Many Americans look back to the pre-September 11 era with nostalgia, but in Afghanistan a dire humanitarian crisis has existed for decades. Long before the U.S. troops arrived and the Taliban departed, the country had already been devastated by more than twenty years of war, widespread human rights violations, and the longest drought in modern times. Out of a total population of 26 million, hundreds of thousands were internally displaced, 7 million were made vulnerable to food shortages, and 4 million had sought shelter abroad.

Refugees, in fact, have been central to recent Afghan history. The 1979 Soviet invasion created a prolonged and highly politicized refugee emergency. Vast numbers fled to Pakistan and Iran, from where mujahideen refugee warriors launched cross-border forays against Soviet forces until they withdrew in 1989. In December 1990, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCHR) estimated that more than 6.3 million Afghan refugees were living in neighboring countries, 3.3 million in Pakistan and 3 million in Iran. Overburdened by this influx, both countries grew progressively weary of shouldering the responsibility. Islamabad and Tehran pressured the exiles to leave and even deported some who refused to comply. The pressure worked: there are now 1.5 million Afghan refugees in Pakistan and 2 million in Iran. The plight of those in Pakistan grew worse in late 1995, when the UNHCHR and the World Food Programme terminated food aid to most camp residents, prompting many to migrate to Pakistan's cities. It is thus unsurprising that both countries had closed their borders to new Afghan entrants long before September 11 and have resisted calls to reopen them.

The international humanitarian response to Afghanistan, meanwhile, was as well established as the crisis. The largest bilateral aid donors were the United States and the European Union. International assistance, totaling approximately $200 million annually in recent years, flooded in for humanitarian relief, mostly in the form of food aid. But all these laudable efforts were crucially limited: relatively little assistance went to providing basic social infrastructure. Funding was given for the removal of land mines, which kill and maim many hundreds each year, but fewer than half of the areas identified for clearing had been demined as of September 11.

The gap between relief and social development efforts was partly filled by the substantial private humanitarian network that also existed in the country, with approximately 40 sizeable NGOs each spending at least $1 million annually, along with hundreds of smaller organizations. These groups employed several thousand locals, carrying out a wide range of activities in Afghanistan and across the borders with Iran and Pakistan. Even at the height of its repressive power the Taliban never really provided a functioning national government, so for years the NGOs have been the main actors in several sectors, such as primary education, health care, demining, and supplying water to rural communities.

Before September 11, therefore, the donor community confronted what looked to be a perpetual assistance effort -- and after the Taliban came to power in 1996, one increasingly complicated by official obstructionism. The Taliban restricted access to the needy, arrested aid workers, and severely limited communications with the outside world. These impediments made it more and more difficult to reach populations in need, particularly women and children. The result was diminished relief and a slow erosion of funding.