MINELRES: Wall Street Journal on Meskhetians

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Original sender: Steve Swerdlow <sms2008@uclink.berkeley.edu>


In a Riskier World,
U.S. Recommits
To Aiding Refugees

A Host of Worries Make It Harder
To Find and Help Neediest Groups
By BARRY NEWMAN 
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL


Fifteen of Feruza Mamedova's relatives have just received an invitation
to America from President Bush.

Ms. Mamedova, who lives in New Jersey, belongs to a small ethnic group
known as Meskhetian Turks. The Meskhetians are two-time exiles: Deported
by Stalin from their Black Sea homeland, then expelled from Central
Asia, many now live without citizenship in southern Russia, where
Cossack vigilantes regularly beat them.

In 1992, Ms. Mamedova was able to leave. She married a Meskhetian whose
father had managed to slip out of the Soviet Union. The three of them,
she believes, are the only Meskhetians to make it here. But in late
October, President Bush announced that the U.S. would be glad to welcome
5,000 more - as refugees.

"Do Meshketians have to wait for another pogrom?" Ms. Mamedova asks,
sitting in the kitchen of her new suburban home. "If there is an
opportunity to save them now, bring them in and let them be happy.
Wouldn't that be nice?"

The White House thinks so. As it combs the earth for foreigners who
menace America, the administration is also setting out on a search for
nonmenacing ones: people who can let the U.S. reopen its humanitarian
gateway without letting down its guard.

The world's uprooted now total an epochal 35 million: refugees trapped
where they aren't wanted, both outside and inside their own countries.
But U.S. refugee admissions have been shrinking since the end of the
Cold War. In 1992, 142,000 came here. By 2001, the tally had faded to
68,000. And after the attacks of Sept. 11, the sanctuary nearly closed.
Admissions collapsed, to 27,000, in 2002; in the fiscal year just ended,
they bumped up to just 28,000.

When he came into office, Mr. Bush was intending to reverse the decline.
His backers, in particular those who craved a larger presence for
religious groups in public affairs, described it as a moral obligation.
Now Mr. Bush has reiterated his original promise. "The administration
acknowledges that the program is at a crossroads," the White House said
in an October report to Congress. "We will do everything we can to
sustain our rich tradition of offering refuge to those who need it
most."

But saving the desperate has become a lot tougher over the past decade.
Refugees have scattered among dozens of failed states instead of a few
fairly stable ones. The terror scare has forced them through a finer
security screen and sometimes scared away the American screeners who
interview them in camps overseas. For those and other reasons, a strong
faction inside the State Department has been arguing that the U.S.
should let admissions remain at low ebb.

In its public statements, the administration isn't flinching. "The plan
still holds," says Arthur Dewey, the State Department assistant
secretary and Bush appointee who oversees the refugee bureau. "There are
refugees out there. They're just more difficult to get to. They require
a lot more work."

So Mr. Dewey's office is setting its sights on groups it can certify as
the least sinister among the world's least wanted. The administration
has assured Congress that new arrivals won't "pose a threat to the
people of this country." Mr. Dewey hopes this year's intake will reach
at least 50,000.

There is no shortage of refugees caught in camps for long periods,
sometimes for decades: 540,000 Burundians in Tanzania; 100,000 Bhutanese
in Nepal; 130,000 Burmese in Thailand. But the groups currently favored
for admission to the U.S. fall mostly into familiar pools: ex-Soviet
Jews and Evangelical Christians, Cubans, Vietnamese and some Iranians
caught in Vienna.

The Meskhetian Turks can claim a place on a new "nonmenacing" list for
three reasons: They have no link to terror; they are close enough to
civilization for Americans to meet them in safety; and they have been
living in misery for 60 years.

They come from a region of Georgia near the Turkish frontier. No one
knows exactly why, but in November of 1944, Stalin had 110,000
Meskhetians put into cattle cars and sent to Uzbekistan in Central Asia.
Feruza Mamedova has recorded some of her mother's memories of that trip
and set them down in English:

"It was a long journey - about 20 days," her mother recalled. "On every
train stop soldiers were throwing hundreds of dead bodies onto the snow.
When we finally arrived in Uzbekistan, my little sister died from
starvation, then my grandmother died; right after, my 20-year-old aunt
died from the cold... "

Never allowed to go home, the Meskhetians lived as outsiders in
Uzbekistan. Ms. Mamedova, now 33 years old, was born in the city of
Ferghana. In 1989, as Uzbek nationalism bloomed, a fight between Uzbeks
and Meskhetians set off a murderous riot. Uzbeks went gunning for
Meskhetians. The Soviet army evacuated 70,000 of them. About 18,000, Ms.
Mamedova's family included, ended up in Krasnodar, a Russian province
north of their native Georgia.

>From the first moment, Ms. Mamedova knew that "the local people didn't
like us." But since she left Krasnodar in 1992, the province has been
consumed by Russian nationalism. The local government refuses to give
Meskhetians residency permits. Without permits, they can't buy houses or
cars, obtain medical care, enter college or work. Their marriages,
births and deaths go unrecorded. Trying to survive as subsistence
farmers, they are harassed by gangs of Cossacks with deep roots in
Czarist xenophobia who are pledged to seeing them deported.

At the end of December, their old Soviet passports will expire. After
that, the Meskhetians will be undocumented aliens in their own country -
and technically stateless.

But does that qualify them for a flight to New Jersey?

Not necessarily. The attacks of Sept. 11, refugee workers say, have
brought to a head a decades-long debate within the State Department over
the wisdom of resettling large numbers of refugees in America at all.

The question is this: Should the U.S. take in as many as it can? Or
should it help feed and clothe many more in camps, or in the countries
where they have tried to find refuge, until a day comes when they can
return to their own homes? Caring for them costs less, but their lives
remain in limbo; bringing them here costs more, but their trials will
end.

For the U.S., the answer has never been pat. Before World War II, it
welcomed hardly any refugees. Afterward, some were taken in mainly to
stabilize Europe. Those accepted during the Cold War served to display
communism's failings. The U.S. did set up a refugee bureaucracy and
learn to move big, orderly groups of Soviet Jews and Vietnamese, but
once the Cold War ended, many of them began to look like plain
immigrants.

The easy gets were gone, and the world was turning upside down: Failed
states from Bosnia to East Timor generated millions of new refugees.
None had propaganda value. And instead of being caught in two relatively
peaceful places - Vietnam and the Soviet Union - they were caught in 60
hazardous ones.

During the Clinton administration, the U.S. decided to focus on
resettling only those it deemed to be in deepest trouble and in need of
"rescue," while helping larger numbers in camps abroad. The Bush
administration contests that view. It wants to broaden the definition of
"rescue."

"A rescue situation doesn't only mean a guy's got a gun to your head,"
says one State Department official. "It means kids growing up with no
schooling. Those kids could be in the United States. Those kids could be
going to medical school."

Kelly Ryan, a conservative Republican who took office in February as
deputy assistant secretary for admissions, has been charged with
building up the numbers brought into the U.S. Though the State
Department declined to make her available for interviews, a refugee
worker who knows her says Ms. Ryan favors resettlement as "an expression
of American values."

In practice, however, security remains America's priority, and that
gives a powerful lever to long-serving civil servants responsible for
making resettlement work. At least some of them, it's said, still doubt
its 
usefulness.

Like other foreigners coming to the U.S., refugees are subject to strict
new background checks imposed by the Department of Homeland Security.
While the checks haven't unmasked any terrorists, they have exposed
large-scale fraud in the refugee pipeline. Thousands who falsely claimed
American family ties to help them get in have been rejected. For those
in the government who think the system is lax, aid workers contend, this
has been a handy justification for cutting admissions.

"For people who view this program as compromised, it's an opportunity to
make changes," says Kathleen Newland of the Migration Policy Institute,
an independent think tank. In fact, a new rule has narrowed the family
category to immediate relatives.

Security, moreover, has come not only to mean defending the homeland but
defending the homeland-security officers sent to vet refugees in risky
places. Unless it's safe, they won't go - and that means many genuine
refugees will have to stay put.

Well before the 2001 attacks, the U.S. offered to resettle 12,000 Bantu
tribespeople. Once enslaved in Somalia, they had fled civil war to a
camp in Kenya. Sending American interviewers to the camp was judged to
be so hazardous that in 2002 the U.S. spent $5 million to bus all 12,000
Bantu across Kenya to another camp. Last June, the State Department
reported, U.S. interviewers had to be "evacuated in the midst of
gunfire" from the second camp.

For another $500,000, the U.S. has now built fences and guard towers
around its camp compound. All 12,000 Bantu, it hopes, will at last make
it to the U.S. before the end of 2004.

"It tells you what a complicated business it is to select people and
bring them in," a government consultant says. The extra security has
doubled the cost of admitting one refugee - to $4,800 - in a system that
spends about $750 million all told. "Which groups do you take?" Ms.
Newland says. "How do you decide?"

Adding new names to this list, specialists agree, requires more than
assurances of security. A mass move to America shouldn't provoke a rush
of fakers hoping to join the crowd; it shouldn't reward the inhumanity
that made people flee in the first place; and it shouldn't come until
every local exit proves a dead end.

Only two new groups have made that cut for 2004 - a sign that the Bush
administration's internal debate is far from over. The Bhutanese in
Nepal are one, the Meskhetian Turks the other. As Cossacks hound them
toward statelessness, the Meskhetians seem to satisfy all views on the
uses of resettlement: They are both long-sufferers and urgently in need
of rescue.

>From the safety of her living room in Wayne, N.J., Feruza Mamedova put
through a phone call to her uncle Asnar in Krasnodar. "If you had a
chance to come to America, would you take it?" she shouted down the
line.

Asnar Mamedov shouted back: "Of course!" He is 43, jobless, and tries to
live by selling fruit and vegetables in the market.

"How are things now?" his niece asked.

"They're strangling us," said Mr. Mamedov. "They take our produce and
throw it on the ground. They take people to jail just for selling. The
way it was is the way it is. It never stops. I would be happy to go to
America!"

There is, however, one loose end: Russia, a friendly country with
democratic ambitions, has not yet signed on to the deal. Alexander
Verkovsky, who tracks ultranationalists for Panorama, a Moscow think
tank, says, "It is a scandal. Nobody in the Kremlin will agree with such
a decision."

Mr. Verkovsky wants Russia to grant the Meskhetians citizenship and move
them to safer surrounds. America's offer - limited to only 5,000, under
a third of the total - may, in fact, turn out to be a form of diplomatic
arm twisting. As one U.S. official says, "One thing Russia still
responds to is shame."

Alexander Osipov of the Russian human-rights organization Memorial gives
his government less credit. "They've talked for years about taking any
opportunity to let these people go," he says. "Now it's working. We
cannot object. This is the real life of real people. It's their one
chance to save themselves."

The Kremlin has made no public comment on the U.S. offer. In a document
summarizing its still-unsettled refugee resettlement campaign, the State
Department devotes three words to the prospects of a Meskhetian move to
New Jersey: "Sensitive negotiations underway."

Write to Barry Newman at barry.newman@wsj.com