ADV•CACY Kenneth H. Bacon is the president and Maureen Lynch is the research director of Refugees International, a Washington- based advocacy organization.

Lost in Purgatory The Plight of Displaced Persons in the Caucasus Kenneth H. Bacon and Maureen Lynch

All people forcibly uprooted by political of the three countries. Most were displaced violence are losers, but some are bigger los- by ethnically based independence move- ers than others. We refer to a growing cate- ments shortly after the dissolution of the So- gory of refugees known in the chill jargon viet Union—in the conflict between Arme- of humanitarian relief as “IDPs,” or inter- nia and over Nagorno-Karabakh, nally displaced persons. These are people and by Abkhazia’s attempt to break away driven from their homes and farms within from Georgia.1 Many IDPs have lived in their own homeland, unlike those forced to squalor for upward of a decade, their plight flee their country under threat of persecu- either forgotten or known only to interested tion. The difference is critical, since under parties, notwithstanding the new media at- the 1951 United Nations Refugee Conven- tention on the Caucasus as a seedbed of ter- tion and its 1967 protocol, those qualify- rorism and instability. Our purpose is to de- ing as refugees receive greater recognition, scribe the problem, and to put forward some rights, assistance, and protection than the reasonable proposals for salvaging the people internally displaced, even though both trapped in this purgatory. groups face similar hardships. Moreover, there is a political as well as Uprooted Populations a legal catch. IDPs are frequently pawns in a The dispute over Nagorno-Karabakh, the slow-moving, inconclusive diplomatic chess contested ethnic Armenian enclave within game. Not only do adversaries in civil con- Azerbaijan, is the biggest longstanding flicts tend to prefer protracted deadlock to source of displacement in the South Cauca- necessary compromise, but combatants often sus. This conflict, embroiling Azerbaijan exploit displaced populations as visual re- and Armenia, has uprooted 844,000 Azeris, minders of victimization, even at the cost more than a tenth of Azerbaijan’s popula- of prolonging their hardship. “Politics is tion. In addition, large numbers of ethnic keeping them victims to attract donors,” we Armenians have fled Azerbaijan, and today were informed by a relief worker in Azerbai- nearly 265,000 continue to live in refugee- jan, where many displaced communities rely like conditions in Armenia. The dispute on international aid. over Nagorno-Karabakh began shortly after Nowhere are the anomalies of this new the incorporated the Caucasus purgatory more evident than in the South in 1920–21. Moscow placed the Armenian Caucasus, the rugged isthmus that separates enclave under the governance of Azerbaijan. the Black and Caspian Seas. Nearly 1.4 mil- In 1988, Armenians began to demonstrate lion people have been displaced by civil con- against Azeri control. Demonstrations flict in Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, turned into riots. Russian troops supported amounting to 8.7 percent of the population Baku’s efforts to retain control of the en-

66 WORLD POLICY JOURNAL • WINTER 2002/03 Photograph by Thatcher Cook

Railway car shelter, Imishli, Azerbaijan. clave until 1991, when the population of persons, most have remained for years in Nagorno-Karabakh, which was 75 percent substandard hovels with irregular access to Armenian, approved a referendum calling water and fuel. They live in abandoned box- for independence. Some 30,000 people died cars, holes dug in the ground, half-derelict in the fighting that began after the Russians Soviet-era apartment complexes, and make- withdrew, and hundreds of thousands of shift shanties. Old railway cars shelter the Azerbaijani refugees fled the region. A 1994 displaced persons we visited near Imishli cease-fire ended the fighting but not the and Saatli in south central Azerbaijan. An dispute. Efforts by outside mediators (Rus- elderly woman explained that during the sia, France, and the ) have freezing winters she and other residents use failed to yield even the rudiments of a set- animal dung stored beneath the cars or tlement. A displaced Azeri expressed a deadwood from a nearby forest for fuel. widely held sentiment: “Our situation does They bake their bread over open fires be- not attract attention because we wait for a tween the parallel lines of boxcars; lack of peaceful solution and do not engage in vio- access to water rules out truck gardening. lent acts. It just doesn’t seem right.” It is a In the urban environs of Sumqayit, a view echoed by Brenda Shaffer of the Caspi- large former Soviet industrial center on the an Studies Program at Harvard’s Kennedy , the displaced eke out an exis- School of Government. Because Nagorno- tence in an industrial cemetery of smoke Karabakh is no longer the focus of a “hot” stacks, abandoned factories, and above- war and displaced Azeris have not turned ground gas pipes. At one dark, dank flat to terrorism to highlight their plight, she we visited, 72 families shared one shower says, the conflict has simply slipped off the and a few “kitchens” (a single gas burner, screen, its victims forgotten.2 shallow plastic wash basins, and an occa- Their plight is real, and the sore festers. sional faucet). “Ninety percent of the fami- Although the Azerbaijani government has lies here are unemployed,” a resident said. built some acceptable housing for displaced During the Soviet era, the factories made

Lost in Purgatory 67 R USSIAN Abk Chechnya ha F EDERATION zia D Grozny North a Osseti a g e Caspian Sea South s Black Oss t etia a Pankisi n Sea G EORGIA Gorge A j a r i a T BLISI Java kheti

A ZERBAIJAN A RMENIA B AKU Nagorno- Y EREVAN T URKEY Karabakh

Na kh ic (A he ze. va ) n I RAN steel, synthetic rubber, fertilizer, and petro- more complex since no less than three con- chemicals, “but the factories are all closed flicts have convulsed this poor country of 5 down now.” A widow with five children to million inhabitants. To the north lie Chech- support said: “We first lived on the street, nya and Dagestan, both within the Russian and then we found this room. The state Federation; the former has suffered two cat- gives us 2,500 manats (about fifty cents) a astrophic wars within the past decade. Sev- month to support ourselves, so we live on eral thousand Chechen refugees live within borrowed money and food until we can get Georgia, in the Pankisi Gorge, where fight- our land back.” ing and lawlessness impede the delivery Cruelly, though their hardship has of most basic humanitarian aid. Russian waxed, international support for these attacks on real or alleged Chechen terrorists displaced people has waned. Since 1993, have resulted in repeated suspensions of the number of nongovernmental organiza- relief programs. tions assisting refugees in Azerbaijan In addition, Georgia has experienced dropped to 62 from 180, illustrating the two secessionist conflicts of its own, which sad reality that the longer a humanitarian have displaced about 5 percent of its popu- crisis persists, the harder it is to sustain lation. South Ossetia began a campaign interest and support. A further reason for in 1990 to form a political alliance with the decline in relief agencies working in North Ossetia, leading to an unsuccessful Azerbaijan is the sharp drop in funding plebiscite in 1992 on the question of seced- there by the United Nations High Com- ing from Georgia and uniting with Russia. missioner for Refugees; the UNHCR budget The conflict displaced more than 60,000 plunged from $12 million in 1999 to $3.9 people, most of whom fled to Russia; some million in 2001. 12,000 remain displaced within Georgia. In Georgia, though the numbers are Georgia’s northwest province of Abkhazia smaller, the IDP crisis is as acute and even also rebelled in 1991, displacing an esti-

68 WORLD POLICY JOURNAL • WINTER 2002/03 mated 250,000 Georgians, who had been Zuhra was eight, and his brother two, they the dominant ethnic group in the province, were forced to flee as orphans from war-torn making the ethnic Abkhazi a minority in Abkhazia. At the ramshackle hotel, all they their own region. In 1994, Georgian and possess is a small bed, a space heater, and Abkhazi negotiators agreed to a separation each other’s support. They cook on a neigh- of forces, which is monitored by peacekeep- bor’s stove, and use a bathroom shared by ers from former Soviet states and a U.N. half the building’s 500 residents. Zuhra finds occasional work as a day la- borer but other- wise is a casualty of a shattered country.

A Way to Bring Peace The problems in Armenia, Az- erbaijan, and Georgia are depressingly similar. Cease- fires have for the most part stopped the

Photograph by Thatcher Cook fighting, but Sumqayit, Azerbaijan. have failed to bring peace. military observer mission. Several years ago, Yet the governments in Baku and Tblisi, displaced Georgians began to return home, hoping for settlements that will make their but renewed fighting drove most of them territories whole again and allow their citi- out again. Georgian officials claim that zens to return home, are reluctant to resettle Russia sometimes sends troops into Abkha- IDPs in permanent homes. Thus, the dis- zia to protect Abkhazi fighters. Episodic placed remain in limbo. Lack of security fighting isolates those locked within Ab- prevents them from going home; indecision khazia. Everybody has lost. In a May 2001 prevents them from resettling. report, Georgia: Paradise Lost, the Interna- More than anything, peace is the fun- tional Committee of the Red Cross warned damental precondition for ending the ago- that “the specter of a major public health nies of displacement in Georgia, Armenia, catastrophe looms, as water and sewage and Azerbaijan. The current efforts to re- systems are nearing breakdown, especially solve the disputes surrounding Nagorno- in urban areas.” Karabakh, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia A recent visit to an abandoned hotel in focus on settling ethnic claims and trying Georgia’s central city of Kutaisi illustrates to find structures of governance that bal- the problems. We found Zuhra, an 18-year- ance demands for independence with com- old boy with lifeless eyes, sitting listlessly mitments to territorial integrity. It might in the dilapidated and windowless room he help to place the negotiations in a broader shares with his 12-year-old brother. When regional context in order to spur investment

Lost in Purgatory 69 and economic growth, which could become tailing the protections internally displaced a stabilizing force. people should receive. The Guiding Princi- The European Union has helped create ples on Internal Displacement were the re- the Transportation Corridor Europe Cauca- sult of several years’ work by a team of in- sus Asia (TRACECA), which is working to im- ternational legal experts.3 They seek to con- prove transportation between Europe and fer on internally displaced people the same Central Asia by harmonizing trade and tariff protections afforded under the 1951 Ref- regulations. At the Baku Conference, held ugee Convention. These include the right in 1998, 12 countries, including Armenia, to be protected against forcible return to Azerbaijan, and Georgia, signed an agree- unsafe areas, the right to food, shelter, and ment that committed them to cooperate on clothing, the right to seek employment, traffic security, cargo safety, and environ- and the right to seek the protection of the mental protection. Like the European courts. “The Principles clarify the rights of Union, which started out by focusing on the internally displaced and the obligation economic and trade issues, TRACECA, could of other actors toward these populations, eventually provide a foundation for improv- and they bring together into one document ing cooperation in security, governance, and the disparate provisions of international human rights. humanitarian law, human rights law and The planned expansion of NATO along refugee law that by analogy apply to dis- the Black Sea through the addition of Bul- placed populations,” explains Roberta garia and Romania, the increasing impor- Cohen of the Brookings Institution. tance of the Caspian Basin’s oil wealth, the Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia have growing U.S. commitment to fighting ter- embraced the goals of the Guiding Princi- rorism in the Caucasus, and Russia’s new ples, but their efforts in this direction have concern about terrorists argue for a cooper- been hampered by lack of funds and by their ative effort to bring peace, stability, and unwillingness to provide attractive resettle- prosperity to the Caucasus. ment opportunities. In 1999, for example, the Azeri government passed a law guaran- The Rights of the Forgotten teeing “social protection of forcibly dis- It is also time to eliminate the discrepancy placed persons” by granting them free access in the way countries and international or- to health care, schooling, and social services, ganizations treat refugees and internally but the promised services have not yet been displaced persons in the Caucasus and else- provided. Armenia passed a law in 2000 de- where. The number of IDPs worldwide signed to help Armenians who fled Azerbai- greatly exceeds the global refugee popula- jan secure housing, social services, and com- tion: there are 22 million internally dis- pensation for property they left behind; placed people, compared to 15 million however, Yerevan and Baku must first reach refugees. Many of the IDPs are in war-torn an agreement on compensation for aban- or repressively governed areas that are diffi- doned property. With international help, cult for the international community to Tbilisi has established the Georgia Self- reach—approximately 4 million in Sudan, Reliance Fund to help integrate displaced 2.5 million in Colombia, 2 million in the persons into other parts of the country, Democratic Republic of Congo, up to 1 but, according to the U.S. Committee for million in Burma, and perhaps as many Refugees, the program lacks adequate in Iraq. funding. In 1998, Francis M. Deng, the represen- Ending displacement and its human tative of the U.N. secretary general on inter- costs goes hand in hand with achieving nally displaced persons, released a report de- peace and restoring economic growth. The

70 WORLD POLICY JOURNAL • WINTER 2002/03 problems in the Caucasus, as in most ethnic Notes conflicts, are longstanding and complex, 1. All estimates of the size of displaced popula- which is all the more reason to approach tions in this article are from the U.S. Committee for them in a regional context with the goal of Refugees, World Refugee Survey 2002, available at improving economic growth, governance, www.refugees.org. and human rights. 2. Brenda Shaffer, “East of the Oder: One Con- It is a sobering thought that the prob- flict That Can Be Solved,” Wall Street Journal Europe, lems in the Caucasus would pale in compar- July 26, 2002. ison to the displacement issues that could 3. Although the United Nations has embraced arise in Iraq after the departure of Saddam and issued copies of this document, it has not adopt- Hussein, whether by peaceful or other ed it, and the principles are not binding. The full means. In Iraq, a Sunni minority has bru- text is available at www.unicef.org/emerg/Guiding- tally suppressed a Shiite majority and a Principles.htm. Kurdish minority, displacing as many as a million people. War would displace many more. Addressing the needs of Iraq’s dis- placed would be a huge challenge.•

Lost in Purgatory 71