Episcopal Press and News
Plight of Refugees Stressed at First Annual Refugee Day
Episcopal News Service. November 8, 1990 [90295]
Jerry Hames
Three refugees brought to the United States by Episcopal Migration Ministries (EMM) were among seven people honored for outstanding achievement and humanitarian service at the first annual Refugee Day on October 30 sponsored by the U.S. State Department.
The award presentation completed a day-long series of addresses and discussions by leaders of national and international organizations to more than 200 professionals working with refugees.
Jesus Garcia, 33, fled from his native Cuba in a boat with 12 others in 1980. Today, he teaches piano and voice at an arts school in Miami and is organist and choirmaster at Todos los Santos Episcopal Church.
Dagne Toka, 29, and his wife, Zahra Yusuf, 21, arrived in Springfield, Massachusetts, last February from Ethiopia by way of a refugee camp in Somalia.
Both Toka, who spent five years in jail as a political dissident, and Yusuf have had family members who have been killed or imprisoned for speaking against the Marxist policies of the Mengistu government.
Toka said his decision to flee to Somalia when he discovered he was under surveillance by informants was a difficult one. "I wanted to live with my family, my people, but I feared for my life," said Toka. He also told about being tortured in jail.
Toka currently has two jobs, as a full-time mechanic at a car dealership and a part-time parking attendant; his wife has a part-time job at a nursing home and is attending classes at a career development institute.
Donna Ashton of Springfield, Massachusetts, who helped to bring the Muslim couple to the United States through the EMM and a local ecumenical committee, said she nominated them because their story of escape from persecution was typical of many political refugees who find their lives endangered.
The EMM is one of 13 agencies through which the State Department places refugees.
In a proclamation to mark Refugee Day, President George Bush acknowledged that, despite the efforts to assist in resettlement, the population of refugees in the world has increased dramatically, doubling to more than 15 million persons in the past decade.
Millions of others are displaced by war, famine, or civil unrest but are not regarded as refugees, according to Jewel Lafontant-Mankarious, ambassador-at-large and U.S. coordinator for refugee affairs, who hosted Refugee Day.
Lafontant-Mankarious announced that 131,000 refugees would be accepted in the United States during 1991 for permanent resettlement -- which represents an increase from 122,000 refugees in 1990.
Speaker after speaker, including Canon Burgess Carr, director of EMM, cited the soaring statistics of the refugee problem caused by famine and fighting across the African continent, in Afghanistan, and the throughout the Middle East.
The plight of Palestinian refugees was underscored by Giorgio Giacomelli, commissioner-general of UNRWA, the relief agency of the United Nations established in 1949, who said 300,000 more Palestinians who lived in Kuwait have now been displaced.
"The invasion of Kuwait has been a personal catastrophe for Palestinians, many of them becoming refugees for a second time," he said. "Most have returned to Jordan or the West Bank, but with very little or no money,"
He said 3,000 additional children have been placed in UNRWA schools since the Iraqi invasion, complicating an already difficult issue that has. remained unresolved for too long.