• U.S.

REFUGEES: Out of Luck

9 minute read
TIME

Whether sleeping on the sidewalks of Hong Kong, in a mud hut in Jordan, or in the clean, curtained rooms of converted Luftwaffe barracks, the refugee is the man who cannot go home again. Behind him lie the major conflagrations of the past 20 years—World War II, the Palestinian war in 1948, Dienbienphu in 1954, the Algerian strife, the Hungary of 1956, Tibet in 1959—or the drab, day-in-day-out drudgery of life in Communist Europe or Red China. Sometimes beckoned by hope, usually driven by despair, he has forsaken his homeland to the number of nearly 40 million since the end of World War II.

For the most part he has found sanctuary. Yet. when the U.N. launched its World Refugee Year last July, it estimated some 2,500,000 displaced around the world still unsettled, stateless and subsisting on U.N. doles. Clotted chiefly in three points on the globe, they are the refugee problem: the hard core left in the camps of Western Europe; the political pawns in the Arab-Israeli dispute, languishing in Gaza, in Jordan and in Lebanon; the unwanted Chinese in Hong Kong. How do these stubborn people survive, and what are their prospects at the midpoint of the U.N.’s campaign to dramatize their plight to the world?

The Reluctant. In three cluttered rooms of a West German refugee camp near Hamburg live Tadeusz Bojarski, 52, his wife and their three children. Tadeusz went there ten years ago as a bachelor, today boasts his own garden plot, raises pigs and chickens for profit, and never intends to leave the camp if he can help it. Reason: his U.N.-subsidized rent is under $6 a month. “Where,” he says, shaking off the efforts of resettlement officials, “could I find another place to live in Germany for that?” His attitude is by no means unique among the 22,000 stateless refugees who remain in West European camps. Many have lived there for more than a decade, have not even learned the language of their host country. Their dormitory barracks abound in radios, newly bought furniture; more than 50% of the refugees in Germany own TV sets. At times they seem to have the best of both worlds: convenient housing in the midst or on the outskirts of large cities, where they earn the standard German worker’s wage of $105 a month, while paying almost no rent and receiving social welfare in the bargain.

Bypassed. As frustrating as such attitudes are to U.N. officials—who would like to close down the European camps—the fact is that “permanent” camp dwellers like the Bojarskis have learned cynicism in a hard school. Largely the aged, the infirm or diseased, or those classified as “asocial” —such as unwed mothers or the “politically unreliable”—they have watched one of the great migratory thrusts of modern history refuse them passage. Since 1947, about 1,500,000 European refugees have been resettled around the world, chiefly in the U.S. (470,000) and Australia (240,000), Canada (186,000), Israel (181,000) and Brazil (101,000). Another 196,000 have been integrated into booming postwar Europe, mostly in West Germany. The camp dweller who remains is weary and worn from the dreary treadmill of interviews, medical examinations and repeated turndowns. He is also well aware that a refugee’s problems are by no means ended when he disembarks in a land strange in language and customs, and is reluctant to pull up roots again.

Town Without Trees. In the past decade, a million Arabs have huddled in camps in the Arab lands encircling Israel. They are, hostages to Arab governments’ bitter reluctance to admit the existence of Israel or to prejudice the refugees’ claim to what was once their homeland by the slightest gesture toward resettlement. And they are hostages also to the hard line of the Israeli government, which ingathers hundreds of thousands of Jews from all over the world but has no space to take back the Palestinian Arabs who once lived there (Israel at one time agreed to resettle 100,000 Arabs, but has since withdrawn the offer). The Palestinian Arabs are now wards of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. Typical are the 32,235 refugees in UNRWA’s Akbet Jaber Camp. a ragged sprawl of mud-brick huts roofed with reeds that is said to be Jordan’s fourth largest city.

At first glance, Akbet Jaber looks like any provincial Arab town. Snack bars display turnips pickled in pink marinade. Butchers hawk fatty, flyspecked mutton hanging from great hooks in the ceilings of their stalls. On closer inspection, Akbet Jaber is a town noticeable for the absence of two things: trees and tradesmen’s signs. The refugees have refused to plant trees because it might indicate a willingness to settle permanently. And the potter, the shoemaker, the shopkeeper are reluctant to advertise for fear of losing their U.N. doles and, in the process, appearing better off than Arab propagandists are at pains to make them out.

The Resettled. In Akbet Jaber’s modern, whitewashed UNRWA food dispensary, refugees with ration cards line up once a month for issues of flour, sugar and rice equal to 1,600 calories daily. So desirable are the ration cards that a brisk black-market trade has their current market value at $430 apiece. Because of this, no one ever dies in Akbet Jaber or in any Arab refugee camp, or at least deaths are not reported, and the deceased’s card is not surrendered. As a result, an estimated 300,000 card carriers are not refugees at all, and in desperation, the UNRWA officials now refuse to issue ration cards to infants born in the camps.

In the face of the intransigence of Arab and Jew, every effort at a solution of the refugee problem has thus far foundered. But, almost unnoticed over the trying years, the refugees have increasingly infiltrated the economies of their host countries—in effect, have resettled themselves.

Palestinian Arabs tend to be better off and better educated than other Arabs, and many have readily found new lives. Today tens of thousands of them earn their livings in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Iraq, where there are no refugee camps. And their numbers grow, thanks to the vocational-training schools, such as the Y.M.C.A.’s at Akbet Jaber, where 480 boys are enrolled. A recent graduate of the Y.M.C.A. school now runs his own carpentry shop in Amman, has six men working for him. And as the refugees bestir themselves, there are the first faint stirrings of a change in the Arab position —though at any moment Nasser or Kassem may again feel the need to show himself more anti-Israeli than the other. Many specialists argue that if Israel would offer to take back a number of Arabs, or pay compensation for their lost lands, pride would be satisfied, and most Arabs would choose compensation rather than life in an unsympathetic Israel.

The Hopeless. If in Europe the elimination of the permanent refugee is all but in sight, and in Palestine there are at least faint whispers of hope, it is in Hong Kong that the refugee is most miserable, most likely to remain so.

Arriving legally by ferry from Canton (the old, infirm and undesirable that Peking readily supplies with one-way visas to Hong Kong), more often illegally swimming the Sham Chun River or entering as vat se (“smuggled snakes”) packed in the false hulls of cargo junks, the refugees from Chinese Communism stream into Hong Kong at the rate of 200 a week. In the past ten years, 3,000,000 have moved in (they came at the rate of 10,000 a week when the communes were set up).

Most of them were farmers in China; in Hong Kong they become dog butchers, bakers, sausage makers, typists, prostitutes, dope peddlers, seamstresses. And they live where they can—in the streets, squatting on rooftops or in tar-paper shacks that multiply overnight to inch up the precipitous Hong Kong hillsides like some black fungus. The British have worked hard to build better quarters for thousands of them. Refugees struggle to save enough to buy a $25 hawker’s license, or work ten hours a day in tiny textile mills, or start businesses of their own. Many starve; some, such as Refugee Garmentmaker Chen Che Lee (TIME, Dec. 14), become millionaires.

Together, out of teeming squalor and an excess labor supply that has cut some of the city’s piecework wages in half over the last year, they have turned Hong Kong into a frenetic, corrupt boom town.

Point of No Return. The price of entry into Hong Kong on the “snake express” is $25-$30, which usually means being packed like a snake for the voyage. After twelve hours searching one junk, a 21-man British customs team finally found a secret compartment ordinarily suitable for concealing ten men. In it were 100 refugees. Deluxe smuggling with no crowding costs the refugee $105. Once in Hong Kong, the refugee is safe from expulsion: Hong Kong, without welcoming the newcomers, receives them. But, almost always, Hong Kong is the end of the line.

Few countries want Chinese refugees for resettlement (since 1950 Canada has accepted 20,000, the U.S. less than 7,000).

Canada, one of the most liberal, will admit only close relatives of Chinese already in residence, and the black market gets $10,000 a head for false family certificates to get Chinese into Canada. For all practical purposes, Hong Kong is a vast refugee station without exit, and the U.N. and private agencies labor to provide a measure of food and medical care for a slum city where uncounted thousands live close to starvation and every seven hours someone dies of tuberculosis. Projects to be financed by World Refugee Year funds: a therapy center for cripples, a children’s home, several primary schools and a technical high school.

The Permanent Refugee. Refugee resettlement can claim some remarkable successes: 12.4 million ethnic Germans integrated into West Germany’s economy and life; the more than 900,000 North Vietnamese who smoothly moved to South Viet Nam by whole villages; 15,000 Tibetans well cared for by private U.S. aid and Indian funds; above all, the rapid assimilation around the world of 200,000 Hungarians, who fled in a few short months in 1956. But these successes had in common either the willingness of nations to take in their own kin, or spectacular circumstances arousing deep international sympathies. Neither of these conditions applies to the 2,500,000 still under U.N. care. Recently, to take care of them, the U.N. announced that the 34 governments participating in World Refugee Year (predictably, none of them Communist) had pledged more than $34 million—$23 million from the U.S. alone. The 2,500,000 seem destined for some time to come to remain luckless permanent refugees.

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