I The problem of refu- gees, both those who have crossed recognized international borders, and those "internally displaced" who have not, has recently achieved greater policy prominence in the developed world.' This new concern has also prompted a greater inclination to consider and apply military remedies to specific refugee problems. Policy makers, analysts, pundits, and activists now perceive vastly diminished constraints on the exercise of military power in the service of "good," compared to their views during the Cold War. The great preponder- ance of global power now enjoyed by the west due to the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the greatly increased capability of air power demonstrated in Operation Desert Storm, have both contributed to this tendency. This optimism is misplaced; I argue below that the application of military power to this set of problems will often prove politically and militarily difficult. This essay first briefly reviews the political and military causes of refugee flows. (The essay is not concerned with economic sources of migration.) These are genocide/politicide, ethnic cleansing, harsh occupation or a repressive indigenous regime, the dangerous environment created by warfare, and the deterioration of local economies that often is caused by warfare. Then, the alternative military remedies to these causes are developed, and their general strengths and weaknesses are outlined. These remedies are aerial bombing, large safe zones, circumscribed safe havens, peace enforcement, and general war against the state or group deemed to be the principal cause of trouble. Barry R. Porn is Professor of Political Science at MlT and a member of its Defense and Arms Control Studies Program. He is the author of Inadvertent Escalation (Cornell University Press, 1991) and The Sources of Military Doctrine (Cornell University Press, 1984). A version of this essay will appear in Migration and Refugees: U.S. and German Policies Toward Countries of Origin (Berghahn Books, forthcoming in 1996). The Camegie Corporation of New York provided support for this research. The MacArthur MIT/Harvard Joint Program on Transnational Security Issues sponsored a seminar presentation. William Durch, Taylor Seybolt, and Steve Van Evera offered critical comments, and Chikako Ueki was my research assistant. Thanks to all. 1. For a comprehensive introduction to the problem, see Myron Weiner, The Global Migration Crisis: Challenge to States and to Human Rights (New York: Harper Collins, 1995). See also United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR),The State of the Worlds Refugm, In Search of Solutions (Oxfont Oxford University Press, 1995); UNHCR, The State of the World's Refugees, The Challenge of Protection (New York Penguin, 1993); Gil Loescher, Refugee Movements and International Security, Adelphi Paper 268 (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies [IISS], 1992). Zntmtionul Security, Vol. 21, No. 1 (Summer 1996), pp. 72-111 Q 1996 by the President and Fellows of Harvad College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 72 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/isec.21.1.72 by guest on 27 September 2021 Milita y Responses to Refugee Disasters I 73 The analysis is conducted at both a general deductive level and a specific operational level. The distinction between deterrent and coercive strategies is employed to illuminate the general difficulties of humanitarian military inter- vention. Broadly I conclude that these operations will more often take the form of compellence than deterrence. Because compellence is the more difficult political-military enterprise, advocates of these humanitarian operations should understand that success will require the commitment of substantial resources, perhaps for quite a long time. To coerce successfully, it is generally necessary to demonstrate the capability not mereIy to hurt, but to defeat the adversary. The main discussion then assesses the practical applicability of the specific remedies to the specific causes. I discuss four of the five remedies in detail. I omit a detailed discussion of general war because plenty has been written on the subject. I examine each remedy in detail in terms of the specific political, geographical, and military factors that will affect the feasibility of its imple- mentation. I briefly discuss how certain remedies may be combined. Finally I discuss whether and how each remedy might be applied to the causes of refugee flows I have identified. The complexity of the problem resists broad conclusions but most plausible remedies are serious military operations that require substantial, diverse capabilities. If "rescuers" cannot, in fact, muster such capabilities and the will to use them, it is improbable that scattered air attacks and diffuse threats will convince the assailant-the party whose actions precipitated the refugee flight-to cease its depredations. The Causes of Mass Displacment I idenhfy five general political-military causes of mass displacement: geno- cide/politiade; ethnic cleansing; occupation; collateral damage; and primitive military logistics. Genocide is employed here in the conventional sense of the word: a human community based on ethnic, national, or religious ties is singled out for exter- mination? In modern times the Armenians and the Jews are the best-known victims. More recently the killings of the Tutsi people in Rwanda appear to be 2. Article 2 of the genocide treaty offers such a broad definition that virtually any political violence directed against a "~ti0~1,ethnical, racial or religious group" qualifies as genocide. While the ethical intent is laudable, it is unlikely that most states will act according to such an expansive definition. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/isec.21.1.72 by guest on 27 September 2021 International Security 21:1 I 74 genocide. Politicide means the attempt to destroy a political idea, usually by destroying many if not all of those who hold that idea, or at least enough of them to terrorize others into abandoning it. The Khmer Rouge murdered hundreds of thousands to wipe out any positive attitudes towards a western style economy or society. What starts a5 politicide often evolves into genocide. Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi Ba’ath party have attempted to wipe out the idea of Kurdish inde- pendence among Iraqi Kurds. In doing so they have tried to find and kill anybody who believes in this idea. Though it does not seem true that there was a policy to kill or eject all Iraqi Kurds, the task of ”politicide” has been interpreted expansively by Iraqi security forces, producing consequences for the Kurdish population indistinguishable from deliberate genocide. This seems to be a common outcome where ethnic, national, or religious groups seek political autonomy or secession from governments determined to resist. Ethnic cleansing is a term that has been propelled into political discourse by the wars of Yugoslavia’s disintegration. I employ it for deliberate actions to induce populations to leave their homes. Several methods may be employed. Organized military or para-military forces or even mobs terrorize the target population, threatening it with harm or death, to induce out-migration. Con- siderable killing will occur, though the scale required to terrify people into departure may not be great.3 Forcible deportation may be organized, in which people are escorted out of an area at gun point. Finally deliberate starvation can be a tool of deportation. Food can be expropriated from a population, and farms burned, while the import of relief supplies is blocked. People leave in search of food. This has apparently been practiced in Africa.4 Yugoslavia is not the only place ethnic cleansing has occurred. Indian officials suspected Pakistan of ethnic cleansing when millions of Hindus fled East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) in 1971: The “international community” has 3. As in the analysis of war, where one finds distinctions between light, medium, and heavy casualties, the analysis of political killing of unarmed civilians requires rough distinctions in the scale of death. Even in a world where civilian deaths have been measured in the hundreds of thousands, the killing of tens of thousands or even thousands may be sufficient to induce mass flight. 4. Loescher, Refugee Movements and International Security, pp. 52-53. 5. Richard Sisson and Leo E. Rose, War and Secession: Pakistan, India and the Creation of Bangladesh (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 147-148. The initial flow of refugees from the Pakistani crackdown consisted of Bengali Muslims, but the composition quickly shifted to 80 percent Hindu. See also Robert Jackson, South Asian Crisis: India, Pakistan and Bangla Desh: A Political and Historical Analysis of the 1971 War (New York Praeger, 1975), pp. 75-76, who concurs with the suspicions of Indian offiaals. By June nearly seven million refugees had reached India. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/isec.21.1.72 by guest on 27 September 2021 Military Responses to Refugee Disasters I 75 even cooperated in the practice from time to time. Large-scale expulsions of Greeks from Turkey and Turks from Greece in 1923-26 were precipitated by the Greek-Turkish war: Once the horrors of the initially unregulated popula- tion exchange became clear to the great powers, the League of Nations inter- vened to help manage the transfers. Similarly, there was a lot of ethnic cleansing in eastern Europe at the end of the First and Second World Wars. Many Germans were expelled from their homes; these expulsions were con- ducted in a quite inhumane fashion, until international agencies stepped in to manage them.7 Those few Jews who survived the Nazi death camps were in some cases the object of violence by local populations. Under some circumstances, warfare may involve competitive ethnic cleans- ing, which may deteriorate into competitive terrorism, murder, and even geno- cide. The parties to a war may be victims one day, and assailants the next; or victims in one place and assailants in another.