The staggering plight of 100 Million refugees

Author: By Dusko Doder

Date: SUNDAY, February 28, 1999

Page: F2

Section: Books

This is an unpretentious book, but it brings out lucidly the moral and political problems caused by one of mankind's greatest migratory upheavals. Millions of people, forced to flee their homelands in recent decades, now make up a vast nation of stateless nomads whose world overlaps uncomfortably with our own.

On its surface, this is a familiar story. Many Americans reached these shores -- or their parents or grandparents did -- after violent upheavals or political oppression in their native lands. All traveled the same treacherous road: Jews escaping Hitler's Germany, East Europeans sneaking across the Iron Curtain, all besieging foreign embassies and enduring bureaucratic torture to obtain documents that would permit them to start a new life in one of the wealthy countries of the West. We have also seen televised ``ethnic cleansings'' in spasmodic and tiresomely repetitive upheavals in the Balkans, Africa, the Middle East, and the former Soviet Union.

But Mark Fritz's main argument in ``Lost on Earth: Nomads of the World'' is that, after the Cold War, forced migrations have become a phenomenon so large and so complex that they require concerted action by the international community in general and the United States in particular. The number of refugees is estimated at about 100 million. Some of them pass through refugee camps, becoming faceless numbers on various lists of displaced persons awaiting resettlement to a country that would have them. Others roam from country to country. Some desperate wanderers never find asylum and are forced to return home. All have to endure the same degradations and privations.

``Lost on Earth'' is a series of vivid dispatches from this shadowland of outlanders, and at their best they are the premier reports about the contemporary refugee. The book's structure is formal in its disorder, as it follows the author's assignments as an Associated Press correspondent in East Germany, Russia, the Persian Gulf, Somalia, Liberia, Rwanda, and Bosnia between 1989 and 1994. The common thread is the story of disaster-struck people sharing the same human impulses in seeking asylum: a desire to escape danger and a hope for a better life.

The sections dealing with Africa are by far the most illuminating, in particular Fritz's descriptions of the mindlessly brutal conflict among Liberia's warlords. Civilians are killed, tortured, mutilated. Soldiers strut around with ``enemy testicles'' strung on their belts ``like prized pelts.'' Roughly 80 percent of Liberians were uprooted and 150,000 killed during the years Fritz covers. A Nigerian-led West African force intervened to restore peace; but the Nigerian troops looted villages they helped liberate, and they bombed schools, hospitals, relief convoys, and refugee camps.

The abortive US mission into Somalia is recounted through the eyes of an American relief worker who sheds light on the misguided effort as well as its impact on the population. The Rwanda genocide is recounted in its gruesome detail -- 3 million people were displaced in less than eight weeks -- and Fritz's descriptions of their flight to neighboring Zaire (now Democratic Republic of Congo), ``in a great wave that was too big even for the horizon to hold'' are gripping.

The emphasis on the episodic and the anecdotal is coupled with a searing indictment of the wealthy West, and of the United States in particular. The Americans, Fritz says, had ``invented'' Liberia and ``manipulated'' it for generations only to ``let it die'' when it no longer served a useful purpose. They left Somalia as it ``tumbled to hell'' because they encountered difficulties. And they insisted the crisis in Rwanda was waning even as it was bursting ``breathtakingly into unbridled genocide.''

Now, it's true that the Western governments' head-in-the-sand approach to these upheavals was deplorable. Vigorous action by the United States and its allies could have prevented, or at a minimum severely reduced the scope of, the tragedies in Liberia, Rwanda, and Bosnia.

But however compelling his moral argument, Fritz fails to offer a cogent and intellectually rigorous analysis to buttress his assertion that the United States must ``accept its responsibility to manage and minimize'' such upheavals -- indeed that it has ``the duty'' to do so.

As someone whose family was uprooted in our violent century, I am on Fritz's side of this moral discussion. But I have learned that climates of opinion which at one time seem eternal can disappear overnight; witness how quickly the recent outrage over Bosnia and Rwanda has given way to public apathy and a wave of restrictive immigration laws throughout the world. Witness the American reluctance to fully endorse a proposed new international court of justice on war crimes. The notion that the United States should serve as the world's policeman, and that US troops should be used to depose rogue governments and unscrupulous warlords, would be hard to sell to the American electorate. Countries do not send their soldiers into action except in self-interest.

Still, Fritz's account suggests there are more large-scale population movements to come in the next century. This, apart from creating general instability, would undoubtedly impinge on the interests of the wealthy countries and should provide sufficient incentive for the United States to take a leading role in an international effort to adopt -- then help enforce -- certain basic standards of behavior on all members of the international community. ``Lost on Earth'' may prove a valuable contribution to a public debate on this issue.