Book dossier

Disposable people?

by Judy A. Mayotte

Why are there refugees? Who are they? What is their fate? Refugees from war and persecution - an estimated 18 million people - can be found on all the inhabitable continents. Most flee from poverty-stricken lands to other lands just as desperately poor. The pattern repeats itself endlessly: in the agonies of Somalia, and those of what used to be Yugoslavia. Author Judy Mayotte lived among refugee peoples for two years: staying in their make-shift homes, sharing their food, running with them to escape shelling, listening to their stories. Her family became the "long-term" displaced: Khmer refugees on the Thai-Cambodia border, Afghan refugees in Pakistan, and Eritrean and internally displaced Sudanese in Sudan. She tells their stories, and their countries' tortured histories, sharing their lives, and bringing home the immensity of their struggles. Every statistic, Mayotte points out, "is a person. ...?Refugees? are not simply masses of people we see on our television screens huddled, squatting, staring with vacuous eyes. The human dignity of each calls for our concern - a concern that will not tolerate the waste of lives in camps where people sit and wait and wait like a long row of empty bowls waiting for someone to come and fill them." Startling and informative, Disposable People? describes the geopolitics, the economics, and the social conflicts that propel people into flight from their homelands. More important than the reasons why, we come to know these refugees as men and women, children and elders. Homeless and totally dependent on others their lives have been shattered yet their hope remains alive - as do their dreams of returning home. Disposable People? drives home the simple point that the world community must be aware and involved in constructive responses to the "refugee problem." It is imperative not only in monetary terms - building peace is less costly by far than waging war - but in terms of our shared humanity as well. As the UN High Commissioner for Refugees says in her Foreword, "A vivid appreciation of the human costs of displacement, as presented in this book, reinforces the determination to act upon our moral and political obligations to help them rebuild their countries and their lives."