Fwd: Azerbaijan's refugees: caught between politics and dwindlingaid

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Subject: Fwd: Azerbaijan's refugees: caught between politics and dwindlingaid

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Fwd: Azerbaijan's refugees: caught between politics and
dwindlingaid


Agence France Presse
August 14, 1999 12:11 GMT

Azerbaijan's refugees: caught between politics and dwindling aid

BY: David Stern

DATELINE: BILESUVAR, Azerbaijan, Aug 14

After living six years on Azerbaijan's sunbaked border with Iran
protected only by plastic sheets over their heads, a welcome respite
is finally comming to 17,000 fugitives from the Karabakh war.

Soon the inhabitants of the four refugee camps will receive materials
to build real metal roofs to cover their simple mudbrick homes.

These improvements, however, have sparked a sharp debate. Azeri
officials fear that refugees might decide to settle here permanently
after winning the little luxury of shelter.

The new roofs also fail to hide the reality that there have been no
food shipments for the last three months.

Welcome to world of Azerbaijan's roughly 800,000 refugees, whose lives
are a lethal combination of local politics and meager foreign
attention and aid.

The majority of the refugees are labeled as "internally displaced
persons" (IDPs) who fled their homes in Nagorno Karabakh and the
surrounding territories as the war with Armenian separatists
intensified.

Armenia and Azerbaijan fought a six year undeclared war over Karabakh
that ended with a ceasefire in May 1994. More than 30,000 people died
and close to one million were displaced by the conflict.

Now, seven years since the world's major aid organizations arrived
here to deal with the growing humanitarian crisis, donors are looking
to reduce their commitment and hand the reins over to the Azeris.

"People cannot think that we are going to be here forever," said
Roselyne Mattauer, head of the International Federation of the Red
Cross (IFRC) in Azerbaijan. "It could be one or it could be 10 years."

Donor fatigue is always an issue," she added, referring to the
tendency among contributors to tire of a particular project after it
has continued for a number of years.

Mattauer says that the IFRC is slowly shifting its finances to income
generation and local development projects, hoping the refugee
populations will eventually begin to provide for themselves.

Other non-government organizations (NGOs) say that millions of dollars
have already been slashed from their budgets, as international
assistance moves to more pressing areas like the emergency in Kosovo.

Azeri officials, however, say that the country's meager economy is
incapable of supporting or providing jobs for the 700,000 individuals
who by their estimates require assistance.

"I need at least 150-160 million dollars, in addition to the money in
the state budget," says deputy prime minister and state refugee
committee head Ali Hassanov. "The situation with the refugees is
catastrophic."

Hassanov was recently appointed to clean house in the refugee
committee, which had aquired a reputation for ignoring the diplaced
people's plight and selling humanitarian aid on the side.

Western aid workers give the new refugee boss early high marks in
trying to coordinate the government's work with the NGOs and in moving
from short-term relief work to longer-term development programs.

But the change to more long-term solutions also requires a shift in
attitude among the locals, since any plans to make refugees more
settled could be seen as an admission that they are never going back
to their original homes.

In the case of the Bilesuvar roofs, Hassanov says the government took
great pains not to give refugees the impression that this would be a
lasting arrangement.

"If we give them roofs, then people will think that we are taking care
of them permanently," said Hassanov. "We are not forcing the people to
take the roofs. We let them decide for themselves whether they want
one or not."

However, humanitarian assistance workers here say that the government
is in fact doing just this - conceding that the refugee problem is
unsolvable without stating so publicly.

"This is as close as they are going to come to admitting that the IDPs
are not going back," said a western aid programme director who wished
to remain anonymous.

dls/bm

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