Forced Out: The Greatest Tragedy of Our Time

SAN FRANCISCO -- When hurricanes Katrina and Rita displaced nearly a million people, a few of these displaced became quite testy when the media described them as refugees. One woman, who was homeless, seemed to speak for the rest when she declared to the TV camera, "I am not a refugee. I am an American."

That America traditionally serves as the ideal destination for the dispossessed is a source of nativist pride. "Refugee" and "American" are deemed mutually exclusive terms. But in reality, one status can slide into the other as quickly as a change in the weather. And for those who are uprooted, to be recognized as a refugee portends some modicum of hope.

Here's the 1951 U.N. definition of a refugee: "A person who is outside his/her country of nationality or habitual residence; has a well-founded fear of persecution because of his/her race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinion; and is unable or unwilling to avail himself/herself of the protection of that country, or to return there, for fear of persecution.

The United Nations High Commission on Refugees estimates that around 21 million people currently fit that category. But the number is a quickly fluctuating one. The war and violence in Iraq, for instance, in what the United Nations high commissioner on refugees called "the largest mass migration in the Middle East since the displacement of Palestinians following the creation of Israel in 1948," has sent more than 2 million scurrying across Iraq's borders since the U.S. invasion in 2003. In recent months that number has spiked.

Those who fit the strict definition given by international law are provided some legal protection by the Geneva Convention, such as rights to food and shelter and the freedom to practice their religion. Of course, distributions of food and medicine vary from place to place, and refugee protection depends on where the refugees find themselves. For instance, after three years of fighting in Darfur, hundreds of villages have been destroyed, 400,000 have died, and 2.2 million are displaced and facing starvation and ongoing violence. It's a humanitarian crisis in which the international response is shockingly slow and ineffectual.

More unfortunate than international refugees are those who are forced out and uprooted without being acknowledged as refugees at all, simply because they have not yet crossed international lines. There are, for instance, 2 million of such people in Colombia, .5 million in the Ivory Coast, 1.5 million inside Iraq and 1.5 million in Uganda. The numbers add up. Some organizations estimate the number of internally displaced persons (IDP) is easily twice the number of international refugees, if not triple.

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