The permanent refugees

...Naturalization as citizens of Bnrundi, Rwanda, or Zaire is not an available choice: the refugees are not wanted...

...It also acts in an advisory capacity in the supervision of the camps or zones in which many refugees are settled...

...By the age of~eight, many have become middlemen in the sale of foodstuffs or curios...

...It is of course true that expatriation is now the more brutal because of modern weaponry and technology in general...

...The Hutu themselves may well have been the victors in a similar conflict against resident pygmies, long since decimated and now nearly vanished...

...The gap between the highly sophisticated presentational skills and the choreographic pap is vast...

...I Dance THE BOLSHO...

...Estimates are made of the total "cost" of the conflict to President Julius K. Nyerere's Tanzania, completely ignoring the "price" to be paid by those nations, by this unfortunate region forced to cope with invasions of these unarmed and uprooted peoples...

...The prices of these goods rise accordingly, often exceeding the reach of the poor refugee farmers...

...Indisputably the industrialized countries, and mainly the U.S., are presently supporting, directly or indirectly, nearly three million people in central Africa, many of them widows and children...

...Soviet pedagogy regularly produces dancers of special grace and Soviet political concerns just as regularly strangle creative choreographic expression...

...In Bujumbura, Burundi's capital, Rwandese refugees swell the phalanxes of the urban under- and unemployed, thereby increasing already surplus capacity in labor and keeping wages intolerably low...

...Ugandan exiles were an important consideration in Mwalimu Nyerere's decision to make war, is not lost on other African leaders tenuously holding onto the reins of power...

...The core of the new generation consists of Ludmila Semenyaka, Nadezhda Pavlova (no relation to Anna), Vyacheslav Gordeyev and, until he left, Alexander Godunov...

...And it is true, we do meddle...

...and yet the company presented five full evening ballets with great panache and artistry...

...T HE DESPERATE SITUATION of the refugees is revealed in the countryside...

...I I I RUINED LIVES & WASTED TALENTS The permanent refugees JAMES I. WASSERSTROM A LTHOUGH THE recent war between Tanzania and Uganda ended to the smug satisfaction of most black African states, it has been reported that cascades of refugees have been let loose into adjacent countries...

...The most significant part of the Bolshoi visit was the demonstration that the company has an entire new generation of dancers capable of taking over from the principals who have dominated the company for the past fifteen years...

...This trip was made without Maya Plisetskaya, Vladimir Vasiliev, Ekaterina Maximova, Maxis Liepa, Nina Sorokina, Mikhail Lavrovsky, Yuri Vladimirov and Shamil Yagudin, to mention only the top people...

...we have paid for innumerable political births, marriages, divorces and deaths with our aid...

...The latter is consistently more interesting than the former...

...Obviously, such stopgap measures fail in the face of a highly contagious disease like cholera, which will flare up and engulf an already weak, malnourished community in a matter of days or weeks...

...Refugee families survive as much on donations from organizations like the Catholic Relief Services as on their own meager salaries...

...Semenyaka is a total Just Published...

...that is, a genteel discrimination by the Hum against the Tutsi...

...Audiences are inevitably forced to choose between looking at the design of the ballets the dancers are given to perform or the manner in which they dance them...

...It is very difficult to question the value of food aid in countries which must carry the burden of large-scale population dislocation...

...At the same time, refugees become a dangerous source of frustration and malcontentment...

...The only secular organization that appears to operate somewhat effectively within these abject states is the United Nations High Commission for Refugees...

...I Africa, as any number of groups, particularly the Fulani in the West, the Masai in the East--forced from their traditional homelands centuries ago, wandering ever since--can bear witness...

...The problems are as serous as those that bog down our own welfare bureaucracies...

...later in order to pay the bride-price, some become smugglers, a pattern supporting the trend towards an absent or deceased father...

...As a result, most African states can afford to remain partly anesthetized, not feeling the full effects of these amputations of their own bodies politic...

...It attempts to keep accurate accounts of refugee movements, and with the cooperation of host goverhments, it provides subsidies for housing, education and medical treatment...

...One can only imagine the situation in adjacent Tanzania with 150,000 refugees located in a province practically unreachable by overland transport, 800 miles from the small UNHCR office in Dar-es-Salaam...

...CONTINUES DANCING SKILL & CHOREOGI:tAPHIC PAP W ITH THE UTTER conviction that broad heroic gesture is still the most appropriate movement for dancers, the Bolshoi continues to present melodramatic ballets with technical eloquence...

...Of the senior artists, Natalia Bessmertnova looked as lyrically assured as she has in the past and Nina Timofayeva, nearing retirement age at present, is still a compelling presence despite some fussy mannerisms such as dropping out of character when not center stage...

...Despite bureaucratic resistance, in most cases the UNHCR is successful in discharging its responsibility to support the refugees under its aegis...

...As a result, approximately 100,000 Tutsis fled to neighboring nations...

...That the credibility and legitimacy of African rulers can ~questioned is ~ly underscored by the continning flow tide of refugees, a tide that is still coming in...

...Written in the form of a Mass by a medieval scholar, this strikingly original novel takes medieval philosophies and events and makes them accessible to today's readers...

...In Burundi, the Tutsi hold almost all the Cabinet positions in the military government of Colonel Jean-Baptiste Bagaza, while in Rwanda the government of Major-General Juvenal Habyarimana is controlled by Hums...

...Genocide of large numbers of Hutus (estimated variously at 50-300,000) occurred during three weeks in May 1972...

...9 Only those who are well enough to walk the long miles over exhausting, rolling hills can afford to wait up to three days in 9 line for an examination by a nurse...

...Whatever the cause, the Hutus lost miserably...

...Sensing that a similar frustration must be felt by the 150,000 Hutu refugees in Tanzania, the Burundi Tutsi government is terrified by the threat of an invasion of these exiles and the thought of an alliance between the Hum living within the country and those outside...

...Now that President Nyerere with the tacit approval of his colleagues in the Organization of African Unity, has eliminated the power of a man widely regarded within the black African community as essentially evil, perhaps it is time for the OAU to face another one of its omnipresent and widespread griefs, the malignancy of the refugee problem...

...about half went to Burundi...

...Indeed, it has been persuasively argued that Europeans have themselves exacerbated these problems...

...Refugee girls, some as young as thirteen-years-old, are known to form the bulk of the prostitutes in Bujumbura...

...Among diplomats in Bujumbura, it was rumored that some of these Hutu are receiving guerrilla training by presumably experienced professionals...

...The Rwandese government now encourages these refugees to return...

...Male children grow up quickly...

...In Rwanda in the late 1950s and again in the '60s, Hums rose up against their traditional Tutsi masters, and took control of the infant government...

...As receiving countries, Burundi and Rwanda will have to act as host indefinitely...

...No one but Timofayeva could get away with it for a moment, but it has become part of her persona and therefore accepted along with the artistry...

...The hazard of supporting a privileged international bureaucratic class becomes apparent when a war like the TanzaniaUganda conflict erupts...

...The Tutsi of Rwanda and Burundi, victims of the same process, departed one region of the Nile years ago, eventually to become the overlords of another group, the Hum, already established there...

...But Americans, rightly or wrongly, are now reacting cynically, at least in part due to African policies of thanklessness and abuse...

...Pavlova and Semenyaka are both extraordinary examples of Soviet training and, in particular, that of Leningrad's Kirov, the successor of the czarist Maryinsky school...

...These newest refugees said they feared their local version of Kristallnacht...

...This possibility has not gone unnoticed by the Burundi military, which absorbs at least one-fifth of the government budget...

...But in order fully to appreciate the utility of these two instances, it is necessary for us to quickly recall certain fundamental facts of modern history in Africa...

...In central Africa, these services cannot always be performed...

...Burundi officialdom publicly blames these socalled "events" ("les ~v~nements") on exiled inheritors of Patrice Lumumba who allegedly incited the ordinarily docile Hutu to rebellion in order to establish a base for themselves from which to attack the Mobutu regime in neighboring Zaire...

...Many of these Tutsi were highly educated and rose to positions of prominence in the government, particularly in the administration of eastern Zaire's Kivu province...

...In this way, not only were traditional ethnic rivalries assuaged but new opportunities for increased graft were created overnight...

...Although aware of the notorious caprice and corruption of the Mobutu regime, the offer of citizenship was one that many could not afford to refuse...

...The overworked UNHCR representative in Burundi has had five staff members with responsibility for 50,000 or more official refugees...

...But by all traditional measures, these are destitute nations...

...These figures translate into the unbelievably high murder rate of somewhere between 100-600 people every hour, every day...

...In a crisis, the additional UNHCR support personnel in regional capitals do not relish the thought Commonweal:9 594of leaving the comforts of Nairobi, or even Addis Ababa, to become involved in the vast amounts of nettlesome red tape and unimaginably unpleasant details which large-scale population movements involve...

...In these two countries, of like ethnic character, the Tutsi represent 15-20 percent of the population, while the Hum form virtually all of the remainder...

...Losers in these struggles, "refugees" as we now call them, have therefore constituted a permanent feature of life in JAMES I. WASSERSTROM has served as a Diplomatic Intern with the State Department at the U.S...

...How does one determine a refugee according to the tortuous conventions and regulations required to implement this international welfare scheme...

...In Zaire, for example, during the early 1970's the naturalization of many Rwandese refugees had taken place...

...Cruel lessons like this one need hardly be taught twice...

...Screened from educational advancement by a discriminatory scoring system on the national exam, excluded from the economic mainstream by poor land, hindered in their ability to amass capital in a capitalist society, terrified of involuntary repatriation or deportation, the present generation of refugee youth is no less in limbo than their elders: two decades of this state is creating an eerie listlessness, a profound anomie...

...African nations complain that the United States does not take them seriously...

...The clearest illustration of these costs is provided in vitro by the tiny countries of Rwanda and Burundi, microcosm of their much larger neighbors...

...another 20,000 managed to make it into Rwanda and Zaire...

...These 170,000 people have remained more or less in the same places ever since...

...As late as last fall, however, a steady trickle of Tutsis came into Burundi as the Rwandese government talked of introducing a system of identity cards...

...Malnutrition is pervasive...

...Second in importance is the "threat cost," that is, the large amounts spent on military preparedness by home countries in order to repulse guerrilla movements composed of exiles...

...Unfortunately, Europeans exerted no positive influence on the patterns of culture and history...

...Famine during certain seasons is common as the more prosperous Burundi farmers sell their main cash crop, coffee, for high prices, and spend their increased income on staples and other foodstuffs...

...But there are other profound effects, if only subliminal ones, on the African and Western consciousness...

...The object lesson of the Tanzania-Uganda war, where Uganda ex-President Milton Obote and other...

...In Rwanda and Burundi, therefore, (as in Malawi and Nigeria during the recent past, or currently in Chad, Uganda, Zaire, or Zimbabwe-Rbodesia), vast number of refugees are victims of African culture and history intensified by European colonial and post-colonial policy...

...The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) has estimated that the five countries of Burundi, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda and Zaire have now created or now support approximately three million refugees...

...Who is merely taking advantage of the confusion to establish a new identity for purely economic profit...

...Pavlova received her schooling in Perm, a Siberian city to which the Kirov company and school were removed during World War II...

...During hundreds of years before Europeans arrived, ethnic groups competed for grazing and hunting rights, and for arable land...

...like Bangladesh they can in no way afford to allow displaced persons to assimilate, to further tax limited resources such as food, jobs, or almost non-existent public welfare and educational structures...

...In Burundi, land available to refugees is infertile...

...approximately 150,000 poured across the nominal border into northwestern Tanzania...

...Most burdensome of these is the longterm social cost, in most cases the commitment of resources to support refugees for an indefinite period where these resources are fewest and most precious...

...Last, a political price is exacted from world, or in this case, American opinion...

...On this recently completed tour, politics prompted three requests for asylum in the United States, the first ever by Bolshoi dancers, who enjoy more privileges than most in this normally privileged class, who are exempt from military service, among other things...

...they felt increasingly unwelcome in their own country, not withstanding the reported relaxation of strictures against them...

...The decree was eventually modified slightly, but Rwandese and other refugee minorities became stateless persons...

...PILGRIMS ON STRANGE STRANDS by David Horsman A fascinating, fictional retelling of the story of the renowned 12th Century religious figure, Peter Abelard...

...It claims to have consolidated its power and educated its citizenry to exercise maximum restraint...

...The last twenty years in both countries have been characterized by periodic bloody convulsions as a result of intra- and inter-ethnic fratricide, and occasional invasions by repressed or renegade political movements...

...In addition, many refugees view offers of citizenship cynically, and rightly so...

...This influence was prominent in the school left behind them when they returned to Leningrad in 1944...

...Refugees represent three recognizable "costs" to the countries of central Africa...

...This category also includes the incalculable price of ruined lives and wasted talents...

...During mid-1978, these new citizens were stripped of their Zairois nationality by an edict that must have been approved, if not initiated by the highest level of government...

...Medical services, such as doctors, drugs, or simple information about preventive medicine, are often left to irregularly supplied and inadequate 9 missionary dispensaries or occasionally to primitive hospitals...

...7.95 Through your bookstore or postpaid from: Vant~0 Pross 516 W. 34 St., Now York 10001 26 October 1979:595...

...Embassy in Bujumbura, Burundi...

...Given the country's stark poverty, this proportion becomes especially telling and depressing...

...26 October 1979:593In Burundi, tension between the two groups remains very high, and government holds power, literally, by a process of elimination...