Winter 02-03 Final.Qxd
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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 Azerbaijan 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 Soviet Union 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 United States) 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 Caspian Sea, 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.