Stranded

is senior policy adviser at the International Rescue Committee. Ban Don Yang Camp, Thailand They had already sold or given away their mosquito nets and rice rations when the bad news arrived. It was late September 2005 in the Ban Don Yang refugee camp, located on Thailand's western border and home to thousands of ethnic Karen refugees fleeing Burma's brutal military dictatorship. Among those refugees were 25 who had been slated for resettlement in the United States. One, a chubby, white-haired farmer, was bound for Utica, New York, where he hoped to seek medical attention for his half-paralyzed 18-year-old daughter. Another, a baby-faced 28-year-old, was planning to reunite with his mother, father, brother, and sister in Amarillo, Texas; he had not seen them in six years, since taking up arms to fight with a Burmese opposition group. Then there was a rice-picker who had served time in a notorious Burmese jail. For once, his future looked bright: His five-year-old son was going to grow up an American.Or so he believed. Two days before they were scheduled to fly out, the 25 refugees, all of whom had been previously approved by U.S. immigration authorities, were suddenly and without explanation removed from the resettlement list--or, as they put in their tentative English, "ejected." They tried to figure out what had happened, but answers were hard to come by. "Then we heard on the BBC in Burmese that the U.S. would not accept anyone who has been a fighter," recalled the rice-picker. But this created more questions than it answered. For one thing, some of the 25 refugees were not fighters. Moreover, as the rice-picker pointed out, "We all know other Burmese who have been fighters and who were resettled." Why was there a problem now? The answer has little to do with them and everything to do with the United States. A series of congressional actions before and after September 11-- including the Patriot Act--have created a quandary for many refugees seeking to enter the country. The problem has two parts. First, anyone who has provided "material support" to a terrorist group can be denied entry into the United States. The concept of "material support" has neither a clear de minimis level nor an explicit exemption for those who have been coerced--so a farmer who, under duress, provides a bowl of rice to a terrorist can be barred from resettling in the United States. Compounding this situation is the irrationally broad definition of terrorism put forth by Congress. Since passage of the Patriot Act, a "terrorist organization" can be any "group of two or more individuals, whether organized or not," that uses an "explosive, firearm, or other weapon or dangerous device (other than for mere personal monetary gain), with intent to endanger, directly or indirectly, the safety of one or more individuals or to cause substantial damage to property." In other words, just about any kind of violence can qualify as terrorism--even when it is a struggle that advances democracy and even when it is being carried out in opposition to unjust regimes. What's more, anyone who gives "material support," however minimal, to such groups is ineligible for refugee status. This was exactly the situation of the 25 Karen Burmese in Ban Don Yang camp. At most, these refugees were guilty of legitimate resistance to one of the world's nastiest dictatorships. But some had only the most tangential of associations with rebel forces. When I asked the white-haired farmer if he had ever carried a gun, he seemed embarrassed to admit he never had. A tailor insisted he had taught sewing classes for the separatist Karen National Union (KNU), but it turned out that, far from fashioning military fatigues, he was merely making Karen folk clothes. When pressed, he finally conceded, "I lived in the area under control of the KNU's fourth brigade, so I said [during my resettlement interview] that I was part of the fourth brigade of the KNU." For many Karen, ethnic pride dictates that they reflexively inflate their ties to the armed opposition. Besides, many civilians living in the Karen region of Burma own some sort of connection, however tenuous, to rebel fighters. That is simply how life unfolds if you are part of a marginalized community in a totalitarian outpost. And therein lies the cruel logic of America's new approach to refugees: The very circumstance that causes someone to become a refugee in the first place--namely, persecution by an oppressive government-- will get you "ejected" from resettlement in the United States. This would be a sad state of affairs if it were happening only to a small group of people in a forgotten corner of Southeast Asia. In fact, it is happening all over the world. After September 11, the number of refugees admitted to the United States plummeted--from 70,000 in fiscal year 2001, which ended just 20 days after the attacks, to 27,000 in 2002 and 28,000 in 2003. Admissions have picked up since, rebounding to 53,000 in 2004 and 54,000 in 2005, but they have yet to return to previous levels. This year, the International Rescue Committee (IRC)--where I am senior policy adviser, and on whose behalf I traveled to Thailand--projects that the United States will take, at most, 40,000 refugees, an improvement over 2002 and 2003--but still well short of the up to 70,000 it had offered to accept. That means stranding tens of thousands of refugees in places like Ban Don Yang. Indeed, for fiscal year 2006, the United States proposed resettling thousands of Burmese refugees, the bulk of which (more than 9,000) live in one camp in Thailand called Tham Hin. Yet, to date, the monthly influx of Burmese has been mostly a trickle--five in January, 86 in February, seven in March, 30 in April, and so on. Even members of the administration acknowledge the problem. Assistant Secretary of State Ellen Sauerbrey recently told the Heritage Foundation that "many [refugees] are now being disqualified because of their resistance activities to oppressive governments or because they have been coerced to provide `material support' to their persecutors." This isn't only a problem for Burmese refugees. Among those who have been blocked from entering the country are Cubans who supported anti-Castro forces in the 1960s and a group of Vietnamese Montagnards--staunch allies of the United States during the Vietnam war--who are now living in Cambodia. Then there is Colombia. The IRC first observed a drop in the number of refugees admitted from the war-torn country in 2004: That year, the United States accepted just 577 Colombians for resettlement, less than half the number it had planned to take (and only a fraction of the 258,000 Colombian refugees awaiting resettlement). Why? Because, according to the State Department, "Many Colombian refugee applicants have made payments or provided other forms of assistance to armed guerilla or paramilitary groups as a form of protection tax or `vacuna,' often made under the threat of harm to themselves or their families." Some individual stories border on the absurd. For example, after guerrillas took livestock as war tax from a family, raped two sisters, and killed the husband of one, the office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (unhcr) referred the two women, who were temporarily in Ecuador, to Canada for resettlement-- because unhcr said "items (e.g. farm animals) provided under duress are still deemed to be material support under U.S. law." Episodes like these make a mockery of America's tradition of serving as a refuge for the persecuted. But the problems go beyond that. At the most basic level, victims of persecution are left stranded in squalid camps, unable to move on with their lives. And, should other Western governments ever decide to emulate Washington's paranoid approach, it could become more and more difficult to find homes for targets of political, ethnic, or religious repression. Moreover, the message to victims of genocide and ethnic cleansing is that, if they choose to defend themselves, they are damaging their future resettlement opportunities. In addition, lumping opponents of dictatorships with terrorists provides a valuable propaganda victory to oppressive regimes. Finally, one imagines that, in the future, foreign groups like the Montagnards in Vietnam will think twice before taking up arms on behalf of the United States. That has unfortunate strategic implications, since we often need these groups as much as they need us--think of the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. When President Bush, speaking directly to the citizens of undemocratic countries, said during his second inauguration that, "when you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you," this bizarre situation could not have been what he had in mind. And it isn't likely to get better anytime soon. In May, a bipartisan group of senators, led by Patrick Leahy and Norm Coleman, proposed requiring the secretary of state to determine which groups are actually terrorist in nature and to create exceptions for those individuals who pose no threat to national security. The idea was to ensure that freedom fighters, American allies, and innocent victims would no longer be punished by the system. Leahy cut to the heart of the matter: "A 13-year-old girl is kidnapped, she is forced to become a member of the Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda, become a soldier, basically a sex slave of one of the commanders. She is ineligible for admission as a refugee under current law. That is wrong. In fact, this is immoral." But 79 senators were unmoved by Leahy's logic, and the proposal was overwhelmingly voted down. Meanwhile, the Bush administration, under a barrage of criticism from editorial pages of major U.S. newspapers, most notably The Washington Post, agreed in May to a waiver that lifted the material support bar for the more than 9,000 Karen Burmese living in Tham Hin. Interviews are currently underway in the camp, and, if a decent percentage of refugees are approved, America's overall resettlement numbers for 2006 will look better as a result. (It remains to be seen how many will actually get in.) Still, issuing case-by-case waivers is no way to fix a fundamentally broken system. Nor does it provide much solace to the residents of Ban Don Yang. Their camp was not granted a waiver, and so they are still in limbo--expelled from their homeland, squatting in a country that does not want them, waiting for word from across the Pacific. Several months after their departure for the United States was abruptly canceled, another refugee, a teacher who was scheduled to resettle soon in Norway, offered to help. He sat down at a beat-up typewriter and assisted the families in composing a letter to the American ambassador in Bangkok. Referring to themselves in wobbly English as "People of Concerns" or "POCs," they wrote: "We would like to know you the matter and all of the ejected POCs are in physical debility as a result of mental stress and strain living in limited compound. It will be the most appropriate for us if your honourable could contribute a move to solve our problem as soon as possible. We all ejected POCs sincerely hope, you will kindly consider on the matter and generous enough to accept our humble request and seriously consider in time." That was six months ago. They are still waiting for a reply.

By anna husarska