by Jan Fisher - New York Times
KAPUTA, Zambia - There are no oranges at the refugee camp here, no canned fish or meat, no press-packed visits from the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair.
International aid officials say all refugees are treated equally, but there is no doubt that the world's attention is on the hundreds of thousands of people displaced in the Balkans, and refugees and aid workers in Africa worry that attention to the plight of refugees here may fade even further.
Africa is the continent with the largest number of refugees, and it counts 30,000 more since March as Congolese fled fighting at home and swarmed into this corner of Zambia.
Already, the head of the U.N. refugee agency in Africa, Albert-Alain Peters, has worried publicly that it may be hard to pay for refugee programs here as the crisis in Kosovo wears on. It is a concern heard around Africa, he said, including at a recent meeting about the refugees in Zambia with the nation's president, Frederick J.T. Chiluba.
"That was the very first thing he said to me," Peters said in an interview. "I told him of course we are doing our best. But indeed we have every reason to be worried as to what our financial situation will be next month or the month after." He added: "I can understand why Europeans are so concerned about what is happening at their doorstep. Africa is so far away. They can do it out of charity. But charity has limits."
While there is some degree of institutional positioning in Peters' remarks, UN relief efforts for refugees in Africa only have between one-half and two-thirds of the money needed for this year. One concern is that the Western nations that donate most of the money to relief efforts may be tapped out as the year goes on, depending on how expensive the operation in Kosovo ultimately becomes or if a crisis develops elsewhere.
Other officials say the concern is misplaced, that the so-called "donor nations" tend to respond to emergencies regardless of how much they have spent, in part for reasons that have little to do with humanitarianism: influxes of refugees can make a region unstable and thus more expensive down the road.
"Funding is continuing to come in," said Jean-Jacques Graisse, assistant executive director for the UN World Food Program. "Be it in Africa or Asia, we are still getting good strong support for other emergencies around the world."
But Graisse and other officials of aid groups concede that there is a large degree of what has become known as "donor fatigue," caused by the sense that Africa's problems seem endless. There are now about 7.3 million people being assisted by the UN human rights agency in Africa, which includes people who have fled their countries, people displaced inside their countries or those who have recently returned home.
In 1990, that number was 4.6 million. Five years later, after some 2.2 million people were displaced following the genocide in Rwanda, the number rose to 11.8 million. Today, 6 of the 10 nations that produce the most refugees are in Africa: Angola, Burundi, Eritrea, Sierra Leone, Somalia and Sudan.
Here in the remote northeast of Zambia - it is a two-day drive from the capital of Lusaka - refugees from the continuing war in Congo began trudging across the border in early March.***
PD Sunday, May 9, 1999
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