Just off Central
Park West
&72nd Street, steps away from The Dakota and John
Lennon’s Imagine Memorial,
a cluster of tents, emergency water supply, toilet facilities and
food rations have been set up by the Medecins sans Frontieres (Doctors
Without Borders), the French-inspired Nobel Prize winning group of
doctors, humanitarian aid experts and volunteers. Today is the last day
of the exhibit and people form groups of fifteen – twenty to take the
tour to learn first hand what it might mean to be forced to go to a
refugee camp because of ethnic strife or a political coup or an
earthquake or other disaster.
A
young man Luke Thomas, a former refugee from Liberia is our tour leader.
He states that lived in a tent for six months in Baso, separated
from his family,
after fleeing
his strife-torn village in the south of the country.
He is a water and sanitation worker with
MSF.
There are at least three groups taking tours simultaneously. We
are shown the refugee tents, equipment and utensils that are currently
being used by the UNHCR (United Nations High Commission on Regugees) in
both tropical and temperate areas --
Kossovo, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Chechnya, Congo, East Timor, Sri
Lanka and more than 30 other hotspots around the world.
At the start of our tour we are
each given a ‘Refugee Passport’ that gives us entry into the
camp. I am assigned to ‘tent 95.’
If I lost my passport I would not be given food or shelter, if
this were
a real refugee camp in Eritrea or Afghanistan.
We get a chance to handle tin water cups
fashioned from
discarded food cans
and note the sacks of food rations distributed by the World Food
Program, gifts from USAID and the UK.
We are offered samples of a delicious high protein biscuit, made
in Denmark, that is supplied in many camps to refugees when they arrive.
I
ask MSF worker
Nicolas Beaudovin whether the UN has been helpful in arranging
the refugee touring exhibit, which is scheduled to visit several US and
Canadian cities.
He replied “We are doing their work.
The only thing that the UN lady”
-- who shall remain anonymous, but I will be calling her later
this week --
“was interested in was could she make a speech.”
My
own last
three weeks at the UN would confirm Beaudovin’s pessimism.
Clearly, the world body has to do more and do better in every
arena of its operations. Speeches, press conferences, reports, shopping
trips and glittering dinners will neither stop refugees and internally
displaced persons (IDPs) from fleeing their homes nor help them speedily
to return. Not to mention the reasons underlying the refugees’
dislocation – poverty, political corruption, denial of human
rights among other factors. The representatives to the UN Millennium
Summit, now concluded, must address these challenges. Better yet let
them support, or
get out of the way of people-to-people peace and progress
initiatives. The people’s business
cannot wait for another millennium.
www.doctorswithoutborders.org
www.refugeecamp.org
Chithra
Karunakaran
September 15, 2000
