Today is World Refugee Day and for the first time in years the number of refugees is going up: "the dramatic increase is largely due to the war in Iraq, where an estimated 1.5 million people have been forced to find refuge in neighboring Jordan and Syria."
The general decline in refugee population is a side-benefit of the underappreciated fact that the world became a much less war-torn place after the end of the Cold War. Media reporting tended to obscure this, but the absence of USA-USSR competition led to a sharp reduction in the funding stream available for the would-be prosecutors of proxy wars in the third world. There turn out, in short, to have been major humanitarian benefits to reduction in tensions between the major powers. More recently, by contrast, US-Iranian tensions are contributing to civil strife in Iraq, Lebanon, and the Palestinian Territories (obviously, these conflicts have their own local roots and dynamics, but the US-Iranian conflict helps pour gasoline on the fire). And, of course, it's at least possible that future decades will see US-China competition on a grand scale in a manner that would have very dire consequences for this sort of thing.
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Heads in the Sand
The largest recipient of U.S. military and other aid in the Western hemisphere is Colombia.
Colombia also has the world's 2nd greatest number of refugees, internally displaced and fled to neighboring countries.
Also, it is a nationwide scandal inside Colombia (with only occasional eruption into news here, including the Washington Post editorial board's command to shut up about it) that the right wing governments at the federal, state, and local level have been directly working with and penetrated by the right wing drug trafficking paramilitary death squads for decades.
The 'leftist' guerrillas are murderers who cannot be directly swayed by the government, but the one time in recent history where a Colombian guerrilla movement surrendered from war and integrated into lawful politics, the army- and government-linked right wing paramilitary death squads murdered up to 3,000 of the former guerrillas as peaceful candidates.
So yes, idiotic policies favoring death squads have prolonged a civil war and provoked millions of refugees. That the US has been supporting paramilitary activity since 1963 in Colombia ought to provide some sort of a lesson.
Posted by El Cid | June 20, 2007 1:11 PM