refugee camps: Africa vs Europe

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Tue Jun 1 15:42:51 PDT 1999


Los Angeles Times - May 22, 1999

REFUGEE CAMPS IN AFRICA AND EUROPE ARE A WORLD APART

By T. Christian Miller and Ann M. Simmons

SKOPJE, Macedonia When veteran refugee worker Lynne Miller arrived here from Africa earlier this month, she stepped into a different world. After three years monitoring food supplies at a remote refugee camp in Somalia, one of her first crises in Macedonia was an urgent request from a medical team. A diabetic refugee had just crossed the border. Could she provide a special diet?

She could not believe what she was hearing, much less that she was able to fulfill the request. "In Africa, we don't have special food or diets. There are no diabetics in the camps," she said. "They just die." The outpouring of aid in recent weeks for ethnic Albanians ripped from their homes in Kosovo has stunned humanitarian groups, which continuously fight for dollars for refugees in Africa.

For many of these workers, the response to the Balkans crisis has highlighted the enormous difference between the newly sprouted camps in Europe and existing facilities in Africa. And that difference, in turn, has raised uncomfortable questions about the reasons for it a complex mix, according to humanitarian groups, of logistics, culture and race. While nothing compares to a permanent home and a stable life, refugee workers say, the camps in Africa and Europe are a world apart.

Consider:

-- The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees is spending about 11 cents per day per refugee in Africa. In the Balkans, the figure is $1.23 per refugee per day, more than 10 times greater.

-- Some refugee camps in Africa have one doctor for every 100,000 refugees. In Macedonia, camps have as many as one doctor per 700 refugees.

-- Refugees at most camps in Albania have clean, readily available water. In Eritrea, families as large as 10 are given about 3-1/2 gallons of water to last three days, according to Mary Anne Fitzgerald, a Nairobi, Kenya-based spokeswoman for Refugees International.

-- The camps in Africa hold as many as 500,000 people. Up to 6,000 a day die from cholera and other public health disease. In Macedonia, the largest camp holds 33,000 people. There have been no deaths from public health emergencies such as epidemic or starvation so far.

The immense flow of aid to Europe has alarmed some aid agencies, who worry whether the attention now focused on the Balkans will cut into the food and supplies going to places like Eritrea and Somalia. The most common explanation for the gap in resources is culture. U.N. officials and aid workers say they must give European refugees used to cappuccino and CNN a higher standard of living to maintain a sense of dignity and stability.

Others offer a blunter assessment: They say wealthy, first- world donors and the aid agencies they support feel more sympathy -- and reach deeper in their pockets -- for those with similar skin color and background.

Andrew Ross, a refugee worker who came from Africa to the Balkans last month, called the camps in Macedonia "far superior" to those in Africa. "What's the difference?" Ross asked. "There's white people here."

Nezir Gashi's life is by no means comfortable. His family of 13 lives in a 150-square-foot tent. Every day, Gashi or one of his four children stand in line four hours for food. They haven't had a hot meal in weeks. Water is a few hundred feet away at a communal spigot.

Still, the meager shelter and supplies are far better than those provided to Gashi's fellow refugees in Africa.

Typically, African refugees sleep out in the open, or under makeshift shelters made from branches, leaves, mud or plastic sheeting provided by an aid agency. They rarely have canvas tents or prefabricated housing. For example, most of the 300,000 or so Eritreans deported from Ethiopia back to Eritrea in early February make their homes under trees, in riverbeds or simply by the roadside without any kind of shelter, said Fitzgerald, who recently visited the refugees.

Stranded in a semi-desert terrain, where the afternoons are blazing hot and the nights freezing cold, there are 1,200 tents available for some 16,000 families, Fitzgerald said.

Another major difference is in the type of food supplied. World Food Program officials say both Europeans and African refugees are getting about 2,100 calories per day of food rations. But for the Kosovo Albanians, those calories come in the form of tins of chicken pate, foil-wrapped cheeses, fresh oranges and milk. In some ready-made meals, there's even coffee and fruit tarts.

Water is plentiful in most of the camps in the Balkans. At one camp in Macedonia, German officials have even installed a fully functioning sewer treatment system. That contrasts with Africa, where refugees are far less likely to receive ready-made meals and have to make most of their food from scratch -- a practice reflecting the simpler lifestyles of the area, say U.N. officials. Instead of meals, they are given basic grains such as sorghum or wheat.

"Here in Africa, we see people who have walked naked, without a thread on their back, who don't have a grain of rice," said Nina Galbe, a Nairobi-based spokeswoman for the International Committee of the Red Cross.

"With all due respect to the horrors the people of Kosovo have suffered, they are dressed in their winter clothes; the babies are kept in their blankets. They are not malnourished."

Beyond such basics as shelter and food, the differences become even more stark. The camps in the Balkans have mobile phones that refugees can use. There are soccer fields, basketball courts and Ping-Pong tables. One camp has a children's center with two theaters showing films.

At Stankovac, a camp of about 21,000, hot showers, communal kitchens and street lighting are planned. Such extras are nonexistent in Africa, according to those who have worked in both areas.

"Compared to the refugee camps in Africa, Stankovac is a five-star hotel," said Marion Droz, a Red Cross field worker who also worked on the Rwanda crisis earlier this decade.

The primary explanation for the stark contrasts, according to U.N. and aid groups, are the differences between the backgrounds of the refugees in the camps. In Africa, where many refugees eke out existence in semi-nomadic tribes, the bare provisions of shelter and health care offered by the refugee camp there are a step up in life for many. But in Europe, where many of the refugees from Kosovo had two cars, a city apartment and their own businesses, a night in a canvas tent with cold food is misery. "You've got to maintain people's dignity," said Bob Allen, a camp manager who has worked in both Africa and Europe for the relief agency CARE.

"The life in Africa is far more simple. To maintain the dignity and lifestyle of Europeans is far more difficult."

Another issue is that Yugoslavia is in Europe's backyard. Albania is a ferry trip from Italy. Two of the Macedonia camps are just off the main highway that leads north from Athens to European capitals like Vienna and Berlin. The crisis is far more immediate and tangible.

People can directly see and feel the impacts, and they respond accordingly, refugee workers said. Still, many wonder whether such distinctions are valid. While some extras are just that, shelter, food and water should be the same everywhere, they say.

"I don't know if (the help) should be different," said Lindsey Davies, spokeswoman for the World Food Program, a U.N. agency. "People are people all over the world."



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