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WORLD POLICY JOURNAL
Lost in
Purgatory The Plight of Displaced Persons in the Caucasus All people forcibly uprooted by political violence are losers, but some are bigger losers than others. We refer to a growing category of refugees known in the chill jargon of humanitarian relief as "IDPs," or internally displaced persons. These are people driven from their homes and farms within their own homeland, unlike those forced to flee their country under threat of persecution. The difference is critical, since under the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention and its 1967 protocol, those qualifying as refugees receive greater recognition, rights, assistance, and protection than the internally displaced, even though both groups face similar hardships. Moreover, there is a political as well as a legal catch. IDPs are frequently pawns in a slow-moving, inconclusive diplomatic chess game. Not only do adversaries in civil conflicts tend to prefer protracted deadlock to necessary compromise, but combatants often exploit displaced populations as visual reminders of victimization, even at the cost of prolonging their hardship. "Politics is keeping them victims to attract donors," we were informed by a relief worker in Azerbaijan, where many displaced communities rely on international aid. Nowhere are the anomalies of this new purgatory more evident than in the South Caucasus, the rugged isthmus that separates the Black and Caspian Seas. Nearly 1.4 million people have been displaced by civil conflict in Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, amounting to 8.7 percent of the population of the three countries. Most were displaced by ethnically based independence movements shortly after the dissolution of the Soviet Union—in the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh, and by Abkhazia’s attempt to break away from Georgia. 1 Many IDPs have lived in squalor for upward of a decade, their plight either forgotten or known only to interested parties, notwithstanding the new media attention on the Caucasus as a seedbed of terrorism and instability. Our purpose is to describe the problem, and to put forward some reasonable proposals for salvaging the people trapped in this purgatory.
Uprooted Populations Their plight is real, and the sore festers. Although the Azerbaijani government has built some acceptable housing for displaced persons, most have remained for years in substandard hovels with irregular access to water and fuel. They live in abandoned box-cars, holes dug in the ground, half-derelict Soviet-era apartment complexes, and make-shift shanties. Old railway cars shelter the displaced persons we visited near Imishli and Saatli in south central Azerbaijan. An elderly woman explained that during the freezing winters she and other residents use animal dung stored beneath the cars or deadwood from a nearby forest for fuel. They bake their bread over open fires between the parallel lines of boxcars; lack of access to water rules out truck gardening. In the urban environs of Sumqayit, a large former Soviet industrial center on the Caspian Sea, the displaced eke out an existence in an industrial cemetery of smoke stacks, abandoned factories, and above-ground gas pipes. At one dark, dank flat we visited, 72 families shared one shower and a few "kitchens" (a single gas burner, shallow plastic wash basins, and an occasional faucet). "Ninety percent of the families here are unemployed," a resident said. During the Soviet era, the factories made Railway car shelter, Imishli, Azerbaijan. Photograph by Thatcher Cook.steel, synthetic rubber, fertilizer, and petro-chemicals, "but the factories are all closed down now." A widow with five children to support said: "We first lived on the street, and then we found this room. The state gives us 2,500 manats (about fifty cents) a month to support ourselves, so we live on borrowed money and food until we can get our land back." Cruelly, though their hardship has waxed, international support for these displaced people has waned. Since 1993, the number of nongovernmental organizations assisting refugees in Azerbaijan dropped to 62 from 180, illustrating the sad reality that the longer a humanitarian crisis persists, the harder it is to sustain interest and support. A further reason for the decline in relief agencies working in Azerbaijan is the sharp drop in funding there by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees; the UNHCR budget plunged from $12 million in 1999 to $3.9 million in 2001. In Georgia, though the numbers are smaller, the IDP crisis is as acute and even more complex since no less than three conflicts have convulsed this poor country of 5 million inhabitants. To the north lie Chechnya and Dagestan, both within the Russian Federation; the former has suffered two catastrophic wars within the past decade. Several thousand Chechen refugees live within Georgia, in the Pankisi Gorge, where fighting and lawlessness impede the delivery of most basic humanitarian aid. Russian attacks on real or alleged Chechen terrorists have resulted in repeated suspensions of relief programs. In addition, Georgia has experienced two secessionist conflicts of its own, which have displaced about 5 percent of its population. South Ossetia began a campaign in 1990 to form a political alliance with North Ossetia, leading to an unsuccessful plebiscite in 1992 on the question of seceding from Georgia and uniting with Russia. The conflict displaced more than 60,000 people, most of whom fled to Russia; some 12,000 remain displaced within Georgia. Georgia’s northwest province of Abkhazia also rebelled in 1991, displacing an estimated 250,000 Georgians, who had been the dominant ethnic group in the province, making the ethnic Abkhazi a minority in their own region. In 1994, Georgian and Abkhazi negotiators agreed to a separation of forces, which is monitored by peacekeepers from former Soviet states and a U.N. military observer mission. Several years ago, displaced Georgians began to return home, but renewed fighting drove most of them out again. Georgian officials claim that Russia sometimes sends troops into Abkhazia to protect Abkhazi fighters. Episodic fighting isolates those locked within Abkhazia. Everybody has lost. In a May 2001 report, Georgia: Paradise Lost, the International Committee of the Red Cross warned that "the specter of a major public health catastrophe looms, as water and sewage systems are nearing breakdown, especially in urban areas." A recent visit to an abandoned hotel in Georgia’s central city of Kutaisi illustrates the problems. We found Zuhra, an 18-year-old boy with lifeless eyes, sitting listlessly in the dilapidated and windowless room he shares with his 12-year-old brother. When Zuhra was eight, and his brother two, they were forced to flee as orphans from wartorn Abkhazia. At the ramshackle hotel, all they possess is a small bed, a space heater, and each other’s support. They cook on a neighbor’s stove, and use a bathroom shared by half the building’s 500 residents. Zuhra finds occasional work as a day laborer but other-wise is a casualty of a shattered country.
A Way to Bring
Peace More than anything, peace is the fundamental precondition for ending the agonies of displacement in Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. The current efforts to resolve the disputes surrounding Nagorno-Karabakh, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia focus on settling ethnic claims and trying to find structures of governance that balance demands for independence with commitments to territorial integrity. It might help to place the negotiations in a broader regional context in order to spur investment and economic growth, which could become a stabilizing force. The European Union has helped create the Transportation Corridor Europe Caucasus Asia (TRACECA), which is working to improve transportation between Europe and Central Asia by harmonizing trade and tariff regulations. At the Baku Conference, held in 1998, 12 countries, including Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, signed an agreement that committed them to cooperate on traffic security, cargo safety, and environmental protection. Like the European Union, which started out by focusing on economic and trade issues, TRACECA, could eventually provide a foundation for improving cooperation in security, governance, and human rights. The planned expansion of NATO along the Black Sea through the addition of Bulgaria and Romania, the increasing importance of the Caspian Basin’s oil wealth, the growing U.S. commitment to fighting terrorism in the Caucasus, and Russia’s new concern about terrorists argue for a cooperative effort to bring peace, stability, and prosperity to the Caucasus.
The Rights
of the Forgotten In 1998, Francis M. Deng, the representative of the U.N. secretary general on internally displaced persons, released a report detailing the protections internally displaced people should receive. The Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement were the result of several years’ work by a team of international legal experts. 3 They seek to confer on internally displaced people the same protections afforded under the 1951 Refugee Convention. These include the right to be protected against forcible return to unsafe areas, the right to food, shelter, and clothing, the right to seek employment, and the right to seek the protection of the courts. "The Principles clarify the rights of the internally displaced and the obligation of other actors toward these populations, and they bring together into one document the disparate provisions of international humanitarian law, human rights law and refugee law that by analogy apply to displaced populations," explains Roberta Cohen of the Brookings Institution. Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia have embraced the goals of the Guiding Principles, but their efforts in this direction have been hampered by lack of funds and by their unwillingness to provide attractive resettlement opportunities. In 1999, for example, the Azeri government passed a law guaranteeing "social protection of forcibly displaced persons" by granting them free access to health care, schooling, and social services, but the promised services have not yet been provided. Armenia passed a law in 2000 designed to help Armenians who fled Azerbaijan secure housing, social services, and compensation for property they left behind; however, Yerevan and Baku must first reach an agreement on compensation for abandoned property. With international help, Tbilisi has established the Georgia Self-Reliance Fund to help integrate displaced persons into other parts of the country, but, according to the U.S. Committee for Refugees, the program lacks adequate funding. Ending displacement and its human costs goes hand in hand with achieving peace and restoring economic growth. The problems in the Caucasus, as in most ethnic conflicts, are longstanding and complex, which is all the more reason to approach them in a regional context with the goal of improving economic growth, governance, and human rights. It is a sobering thought that the problems in the Caucasus would pale in comparison to the displacement issues that could arise in Iraq after the departure of Saddam Hussein, whether by peaceful or other means. In Iraq, a Sunni minority has brutally suppressed a Shiite majority and a Kurdish minority, displacing as many as a million people. War would displace many more. Addressing the needs of Iraq’s displaced would be a huge challenge. • *Kenneth H. Bacon is the president and Maureen Lynch is the research director of Refugees International, a Washington-based advocacy organization. Notes 1. All estimates of the size of displaced populations in this article are from the U.S. Committee for Refugees, World Refugee Survey 2002, available at www.refugees.org. 2. Brenda Shaffer, "East of the Oder: One Conflict That Can Be Solved," Wall Street Journal Europe, July 26, 2002. 3. Although the United Nations has embraced and issued copies of this document, it has not adopted it, and the principles are not binding. The full text is available at www.unicef.org/emerg/Guiding-Principles.htm. [Go to interactive discussion forum]
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