With their escape, Cabral and his family became the latest statistics in the worst–and most overlooked–humanitarian crisis in the Americas: Colombia’s swelling legions of internal refugees. The escalation of violence in the countryside has forced more than 700,000 people to abandon their homes in the past three years, raising the total number of internal exiles to an estimated 1.5 million since 1985–a figure that is much larger than the number of ethnic Albanian refugees who fled Kosovo and that ranks third in the world, behind Sudan and Angola. These rural peasants, including nearly a million women and children, are trying to escape an increasingly barbaric war waged by Marxist guerrillas, right-wing paramilitary forces, and the Colombian military–all fueled by disputes over land, ideology and the illegal drug trade. Poor, anonymous and deeply traumatized, they are flooding the “belts of misery” around major cities and deepening the nation’s worst recession in half a century. Because they remain inside Colombia’s borders, they are not technically refugees but “internally displaced people,” a bureaucratic euphemism that shouldn’t obscure the full scope of Colombia’s tragedy. Says Hiram Ruiz, the senior analyst at the U.S. Committee for Refugees: “Nothing in this hemisphere even remotely approaches this crisis in terms of human suffering.” Adds Gen. Barry McCaffrey, head of the White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy, “This is an emergency situation.”
The mass exodus has been silent and almost invisible. Small groups leave their homes deep in the countryside, far from television cameras, often in the middle of the night. There usually are no refugee camps for them, so they filter into shantytowns, too fearful to announce their arrival but too numerous to ignore. The makeshift camp in the border town of Cucuta, where the Cabral family landed, is one of the rare places where the impact of human displacement can be seen. Cabral, his wife and his daughters sleep together on a plastic mattress on the floor of a local gymnasium along with 325 other refugees. Restless and bored, Cabral spends his days pacing back and forth in the fenced-in, overcrowded camp, wondering how he will support his family. “I will never go back,” he says. “The paramilitaries could pull us out of our homes any time they wanted and massacre us.” He’s right. One week after the refugees arrived, a group of seven farmers tried to leave the camp and retake their homes. They were intercepted by paramilitaries at a bus stop and gunned down before they even left Cucuta.
And the situation is only getting worse. President Andres Pastrana has tried to hold peace talks with the 13,000-strong Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). But the violence has spun further out of control. The leftist FARC and the smaller National Liberation Army (ELN), both financed by drugs and extortion, now control nearly 40 percent of the country, including the coca-producing region where an American plane crashed two weeks ago, killing five U.S. servicemen and two Colombians (box). Over the past few weeks, FARC has blown up bridges, bombed dozens of towns and attacked Army units just 25 miles south of the capital, Bogota. Last Friday military authorities said FARC guerrillas set off a 220-pound car bomb outside an Army base in Medellin, killing at least 10 people and injuring almost 40 civilians and soldiers. The ELN, for its part, has carried out bizarre kidnappings, in one instance taking hostage a church full of worshipers. But perhaps the most menacing force is the right-wing militias, financed by rich landowners, who have used terror to expand their power. According to most experts, they are responsible for the majority of the massacres, chaos and mass expulsions over the past three years. Not surprisingly, as the atrocities have accumulated, the number of displaced people has soared from 90,000 in 1995 to 308,000 last year. And plenty of experts fear the pace is accelerating this year.
Colombia’s peasants and farmers are not simply caught in the cross-fire; they are targets in the dirty war. Rather than risk losses in battle, the guerrillas and paramilitaries use a Vietnam-era tactic known as “taking the water from the fish.” They force people from their homes, depriving their enemies of supplies and shelter, and seize the land. The armed men take farms, gold mines and coca plantations to expand their influence and build their war chests. In December 1995 the government announced the construction of a canal linking the Atlantic and the Pacific in the Uraba region near the border with Panama. The canal was never built, but land values rose 1,000 percent, attracting the right-wing paramilitaries. They took control of the area by carrying out public beheadings, dumping bodies into rivers and razing homes. Some 90,000 people fled the region over the next two years. Six hundred are still crammed into a fetid camp in the port of Turbo, suffering malnutrition, filthy conditions and suffocating heat.
The guerrillas, too, have targeted farmers in their enemies’ strongholds. Last month FARC attacked an area in southern Cordoba held by the paramilitaries and coveted for its hydroelectric plant and nickel mine. They entered the town of Juan Jose, beheaded four residents for being paramilitary supporters and killed 35 soldiers in combat. All this in the name of the poor. Now an additional 1,000 people are on the run, headed for the shantytowns of Bogota, Medellin, Bucaramanga or Monteria. The irony, of course, is that the leftist guerrillas, who have fought for 35 years to redress Colombia’s gaping inequalities, have helped engineer a reverse land reform. Not only does the exodus from the countryside impoverish the refugees, but their deserted land is snapped up by wealthy landowners, drug traffickers and friends of the different private armies, widening the gap between rich and poor.
The vast river of displaced people threatens to engulf the cities and overwhelm social services. This year refugees are flowing into the “belts of misery” at a rate of 533 per day, according to Codhes, a Colombian refugee agency. They arrive bedraggled and brutalized, with few skills for urban life and fewer friends. With the nation enduring its worst economic crisis in decades–including negative growth and 20 percent unemployment–the government has been hard pressed to help. Pastrana has budgeted just $40 million to handle the crisis, mostly for food and housing. But overwhelmed city governments have done little. “The mayors don’t have programs to deal with the refugees, and nongovernmental programs don’t have resources,” says Neider Monevar, a psychologist who works with refugees. “Refugees feel both traumatized and utterly abandoned.”
It’s been even harder to get the world’s attention. The U.S. Committee for Refugees, a nonprofit group in Washington, has launched a campaign highlighting the plight of Colombia’s displaced, and the International Committee for the Red Cross is working directly with refugees in the shantytowns. But the United Nations is barely engaged, in part because the Colombians have not crossed international borders. For its part, the United States has been fixated almost exclusively on the drug war. But this year the Clinton administration decided to budget $2 million for Colombia’s refugees. (Compare that with the $238 million the United States spends on the anti-narcotics effort in Colombia alone–or the $500 million it gave last week to Albanian refugees returning home to Kosovo.)
Sandra Orejuela could use a little of that money. The 28-year-old peasant fled paramilitary violence in the countryside two years ago and landed in the Usme slum just outside Bogota. The ghetto, once a fertile valley at the foot of a mist-shrouded national park, is now a vast warren of concrete, plywood and aluminum shacks. Orejuela now lives with her husband and four small children in a cramped apartment on an unpaved street. The floor is bare concrete, the windows are covered with cardboard and water arrives through a hose connected to a nearby river. Her husband travels four hours a day to a job washing cars, for which he makes $25 a week. And they are the lucky ones. Many of their neighbors compete with other refugees to sell pencils and trinkets on street corners or turn to begging, crime or prostitution. “Necessity can drive people to do the unthinkable,” says Ruiz of the U.S. Committee for Refugees.
Children suffer the most. Six out of 10 refugee children in Bogota do not attend school, mostly because they cannot pay tuition. Psychologists say many of those who do are tripwired to explode. They have seen relatives and friends butchered and their villages bombed by military helicopters. They cannot forget. Kindergartners spontaneously draw pictures of weapons during art class. Elementary-school students play at being guerrillas, death-squad members or soldiers during recess. As they grow older, refugee children are often so lost and angry that they are easy recruits for the warring groups that have urban militias prowling the ghettos. Jorge Rojas, director of Codhes, recalls an 11-year-old boy who had seen his father killed by paramilitaries. “Psychologists and social workers tried to help him and failed. Now he is with the guerrillas and itching to get even.” Rojas reflects: “Our great challenge at the end of the century is to prevent war orphans and sons of refugees who have witnessed cruelty from becoming protagonists of urban violence in the next one.”
How to break the cycle of violence? The peace talks have been suspended–indeed last Friday’s bomb in Medellin went off just as government envoy Victor Ricardo was meetng with FARC to restart them. He failed. Now Colombians fear illegal armies could plunge the nation into deeper chaos–as they did 50 years ago during a reign of terror known simply as La Violencia. Marches protesting the violence periodically break out all over the country, while the government is trying to help–in a small way–by returning hundreds of refugees to their homes or to safer regions. They go back with titles to land, credits for housing and crops, and a mandate to share profits and decision making. The idea is to forge communitarian values that will resist violent intruders, who often get invited into a town to resolve local disputes. “The armed group quickly establishes itself, and its enemies then begin to view the village as a legitimate target,” explains Fernando Medellin, the government official in charge of refugees. “The trick is to break the cycle by forging cohesive, self-ruling communities that don’t need private armies or the government to resolve conflicts.” A bit idealistic, perhaps. But without a stronger civil society, Colombia seems destined to enter the next millennium as a nation of warlord armies and their terrified victims, who flee for safety in the dead of night, too terrorized ever to go home again.
title: “Casualties Of War” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-20” author: “Alicia Caskey”
Tragically, however, many of the people on the road that day were not military targets . An 80-year-old Albanian refugee, Dibran Asmani, was riding in one of the tractors. “Suddenly there was a big blast, and I started running,” he told reporters later. “All I could think was, ‘My God, NATO is bombing us.’ I ran through the field like a mouse.” Two tractors jammed with refugees were blown apart, killing at least 75 people, the Serbs said. It was the second such slaughter ; NATO hit a civilian train on April 12. Slobodan Milosevic made the most of it. In a crude propaganda effort, he staged a bus trip into the Kosovo wasteland, where reporters were shown body parts littered over a 220-yard area–some, perhaps, repositioned for effect by the Serbs. But it wasn’t clear whether that site was even hit by a NATO jet .
NATO couldn’t get its own story straight. On Wednesday, Supreme Commander Wesley Clark said the Serbs were responsible for the civilian casualties. Then a day later NATO admitted the air attack had killed some refugees , but officials insisted that the Serbs had taken reporters to the wrong site. On Saturday Joint Chiefs spokesman Steve Pietropaoli did another flip-flop, saying the F-16 pilot’s tape played by NATO described a separate incident entirely, a strike northwest of Djakovica that did not involve refugees. He indicated that NATO had, in effect, apologized for the wrong atrocity: the real culprit may have been another NATO plane to the south, apparently around where Asmani’s tractor was hit . In the end NATO hurt its credibility far more than Milosevic did.
The High Cost of WarNATO’s air campaign takes a rising toll in refugee lives, threats to neighboring countries and increasing financial costs.
Peace Plans All the plans are based on President Milosevic’s acceptance of NATO’s original conditions for ending the air war.
“The fog of war,” Clausewitz, the great Prussian military theorist, called it. Laser targeting and smart bombs haven’t changed that 19th-century reality . Last week’s refugee disaster, and the confusion over how it happened, illustrates a larger point. A month into the Kosovo campaign NATO planners have discovered just how hard and messy it is to fight a war from 15,000 feet up . Senior NATO commanders, including Clark, are admitting privately that it may be impossible to win from the air.
Particularly under such odd rules of engagement. In what seems to be a Catch-22, NATO pilots are told they must be certain of their targets before firing. And yet their commanders, under orders from Brussels and Washington to minimize pilot casualties , have forced them to fly too high to be sure. At 15,000 feet, says one U.S. flier out of Aviano, Italy, “you probably can’t tell the difference [between] a military truck and a truck full of refugees.”
Telling the difference may be crucial to victory. Knowing NATO’s tactics, the Serbs in Kosovo are now dug in–and dispersed. As the Djakovica tragedy shows, Milosevic’s forces are expertly shielding their movements with refugee convoys. Returning pilots also tell of spotting tanks and armor tucked away in villages and the countryside. “You can see the stuff in the towns,” a Harrier pilot told NEWSWEEK. “But you can’t go after it.” NATO in the skies and the Serbs on the ground seem to exist in two universes–interacting only from great, murky distances. Until late last week, despite flying some 2,000 bomb- ing sorties, NATO’s cautious fliers had severely damaged little more than 100 targets, according to Clark . And they’d struck only a relatively small number of the Yugoslav Army’s 400 tanks and 400 armored personnel carriers, which are dispersed in woods and gullies in Kosovo .
Worse, everything from aircraft to ammunition is closeted in the cold-war-era bunkers that honeycomb the country, according to CIA and military officials who have seen them. Intelligence reports read to NEWSWEEK say the Serbs are capable of reconstituting much of their command and control structure every 24 hours–mainly in bunkers, which also house the Yugoslav high command. The result, Pentagon officials say, is that NATO has “degraded” only one third of the Yugoslav military.
NATO’s overall strategy seems, increasingly, as foggy as the war itself. For all the confidence exuded at news briefings, no NATO official has laid out a scenario for how or why Milosevic might surrender. On Thursday, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Hugh Shelton, in a striking confession on Capitol Hill, said he had warned President Clinton that NATO’s air campaign might not force Milosevic to negotiate at all. In the surest sign that the air campaign hasn’t been working, Clark asked for 300 more aircraft and 30,000-plus reservists, and planned soon to send in Apache attack helicopters. More and more last week, U.S. and NATO officials also pointed to the ragtag Kosovo Liberation Army, scattered in the hills, as a renewed threat to Milosevic, with “thousands” of new recruits. The only question was whether the KLA’s new profile is a sign of Serb retreat–or NATO’s desperation. Military experts dismiss the guerrillas as ineffectual (the KLA proudly announced the capture of its first, lone Serb POW on Friday) , and U.S. officials refuse to arm them (story on KLA).
Diplomacy, by most accounts, is also making little headway . A German proposal last week for a 24-hour bombing pause elicited a contemptuous rejection by Belgrade . A vague initiative to have the European Union run a Kosovo “protectorate” did no better. The American public, in the new NEWSWEEK Poll, continued to back Clinton strongly. So did Congress, but it was growing uneasy. “What we don’t want is the tragedy of Vietnam,” says Democratic Sen. Max Cleland, a Vietnam vet who lost both legs and one arm in that war, “where there was no win and no exit.”
In the absence of a clear way out, Clinton and his still-loyal NATO allies are settling in for a siege. “Milosevic can’t win this” in the long run, insisted a senior administration official–again. “People keep looking for [Lyndon] Johnson-like angst” in Clinton, added a top White House aide. But “he’s very resolute.”
Yet Clinton and NATO may not have the luxury of a war of attrition. “Every civilian death makes it harder to sustain the air campaign,” says a senior German official. And with each passing week, “collateral” damage to NATO’s larger strategic interests grows. U.S.-Russia relations are at a new low, and the targeting of ammo depots only increases the domestic pressure for Moscow to aid its natural allies , the Serbs. NATO’s destruction of supply lines is Milosevic’s greatest vulnerability. But it may also be NATO’s. As stores run out of food and schools and hospitals out of supplies and power, the Serb population will suffer and European pressure to let up will grow.
Meanwhile, the poisonous ethnic atmosphere of Kosovo is spreading regionally. Next door in Bosnia, where NATO has been tenuously trying to integrate Serbs and Muslims with 20,000 peacekeepers, Muslims rejoiced over the bombing of Belgrade. Western monitors there are in near-despair over renewed ethnic tensions. The “Dayton [agreement] is dead,” said one.
What to do? For weeks, military planners have said privately that only ground forces can end the conflict in Kosovo. NATO sources say Clark, too, has come to believe they will probably be needed. Senior White House officials still insist that troops will enter Kosovo only as peacekeepers after a ceasefire. But by late last week there were signs the administration was at least planning for a ground war, if only to pre-empt a move by another NATO ally at next week’s 50th-anniversary summit in Washington. Sources tell NEWSWEEK that French President Jacques Chirac is considering calling for a NATO debate on ground troops.
But it may be too late. Milosevic has all but won the war he is fighting . As of late last week, as many as 600,000 of the 2 million Kosovars had left the province on forced marches or in flight from war. An additional half million were displaced within Kosovo, and Milosevic, after shutting down the borders a week ago , threw them open again in an apparent final attempt to make Kosovo a Serb province. Milosevic, perhaps realizing how his image has suffered from reports of mass executions and rape, seems to be organizing the exodus more humanely (even so, the State Department announced yet another aerial sighting of mass graves late last week). “At any given moment he’s a guy making more calculations than a supercomputer,” Christopher Hill, the U.S. ambassador to Macedonia, told NEWSWEEK. “I’m sure he is considering how to get out of this.” The question is, how does NATO?
title: “Casualties Of War” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-04” author: “Loretta Stallings”
The day after McCain’s speech, Rumsfeld asked him to breakfast, where the mood matched a suddenly chilly November. “I read your speech,” harrumphed Rumsfeld (that “must have been an enjoyable experience for him,” McCain joked later). Then Rummy patiently explained to his fellow Republican why he’d continue to do things mostly the same way. McCain, who says the military is badly undermanned in Iraq, insisted that “the facts on the ground did not coincide with a successful ongoing effort to bring democracy to Iraq.” The response of Rumsfeld and his top brass? They “believed there was no need for additional troops,” McCain later related. The real question now, the senator suggests, may be whether George W. Bush himself will insist on a change of plan. “I’d like to see the president fully engaged,” McCain told NEWSWEEK. Bush needs to be on top of “more details of what’s going on.”
It was a poke at what could be Bush’s most tender spot in election year 2004, especially as the economy picks up. With the headlines full of grieving families and impatient reservists whose spouses, jobs and businesses are awaiting their return, the politics of Iraq could be the elephant in every voting booth. The latest NEWSWEEK Poll shows that although Bush continues to eke out a 52 percent approval rating, for the first time a majority of Americans, 51 percent, disapprove of his handling of Iraq. And the proportion who think that invading Iraq was right has dropped to 55 percent, down from 68 percent in July, as new questions are raised about prewar intel. As McCain suggested, the issue is not whether Bush has the resources to transform Iraq–the president’s aides point out he took big risks to push through his $87 billion package–but whether he can rally his nation behind him long enough to do it.
White House officials wasted no time in firing back. Bush constantly asks his commanders if they need more help, the officials said. And he’s authorizing more punitive strikes in Iraq even now, beginning with last week’s bombing of Tikrit. Bush officials note that Maj. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the ground commander in Iraq, hasn’t asked for more troops (he believes quality, not quantity, is the problem). And while they were careful not to dis a popular war hero, they said McCain was wrong to suggest that Bush was retreating by turning over some security to the Iraqis. In fact, he’s doing what McCain and other critics want: changing the mix of forces so Americans can go after insurgents.
Administration officials also testily deny that, as McCain suggested in his speech, the president is molding his Iraq policy to his 2004 election strategy. Still, the administration seems intent on advertising a reduction in forces in Iraq. The Pentagon said last week it plans to reduce troop levels from 130,000 now to 105,000 by next spring, though Rumsfeld warned that was “only if the security situation permits.” And some 85,000 new combat troops are now being notified that they’re heading to Iraq.
Bush’s biggest headache may be that America is fielding an all-volunteer Army in a must-win war, even as critics ask if he has diverted resources from a more vital war against Al Qaeda. (Over the weekend, terrorists struck again in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, killing at least two and wounding dozens in a massive bomb attack on a housing complex.) Today many reservists are unhappily serving longer and for less pay than regular soldiers in Iraq. Their numbers will climb from less than a quarter of the occupation force now to more than one third, or 39,000, by next spring. The “weekend warriors” have become full timers and have already put in more “duty days per year” than ever before–62.8 million days through the end of September, more than the entire first gulf war (44.2 million), NEWSWEEK has learned. “This is our Valley Forge,” says Lt. Gen. Roger Schultz, director of the Army National Guard, referring to the winter of the Continental Army’s near desertion. Schultz doesn’t see a “mass exodus” but thinks re-enlistments will drop. “To be straight up, we did a lousy job communicating the expectations to these folks on the time they’d spend in the field.”
Even Rumsfeld worries that the system is “broken,” and that re-enlistments or recruitment numbers might drop (they haven’t yet). The result is that, as Pentagon personnel chief David Chu puts it, “We need to rethink what is a military career.” At any time the Army has perhaps 870,000 active troops and Reserves ready to be mobilized. But to maintain training, only one fifth can be sent overseas at a time–about 174,000. Right now the Army is over that, even as junior commanders in Iraq complain they don’t have the manpower. While Rumsfeld is revamping active-duty forces so they can deploy without Reserves, he’s also mulling new enticements to make duty in the Reserves more appealing.
Ironically, a resurgent job market could hurt the president on Iraq by reducing the attractions of the military. “If the economy picks up, it could be disaster,” says a senior Army officer evaluating retention. And while Rumsfeld is routinely restaffing community draft boards, no one is seriously considering that idea–yet. But the Pentagon chief conceded that McCain was right to warn him against signaling U.S. retreat through “Iraqification.” The question now is whether Americans will signal retreat–at the recruiting offices and polls.
