"An American Refugee Crisis"

Austin Bay:

An American Refugee Crisis

Yesterday I saw tv footage of New Orleans residents huddling around the Superdome. I also saw footage of a family walking along a road in Mississippi. The family was fleeing their drowned suburb.

The Katrina victims’ evident anxiety reminded me of the worry and fear on the faces of refugees I enountered along the Uganda-Congo border in Fall 2002. Those refugees had fled fighting in the DRC (Democratic Republic of Congo). If not for the UNHCR and western aid organizations (mostly US, British, and Canadian), and the willingness of the Ugandan government to allow them sanctuary, the refugees I saw in Uganda would have died.

I’m not drawing a one-to-one comparison between Katrina’s victims and central African refugees. War drove the Congolese into Uganda; Katrina is a natural disaster. The looting in New Orleans, while viciously criminal, is dwarfed by the anarchy and murder afflicting central Africa. In these Third World tragedies information usually moves on foot; Fox and CNN only show up if there’s combat. All too often there are no medical and food supplies, or relief is weeks away, at best. The human waves really have no place to go; they wash from one poor country to another. America has infrastructure, abundant supplies, logistical capacity, a plethora of means combined with the will to act. Forgive the pun, but our media have now flooded the disaster area. However, at the level of human suffering the comparison is apt, instructive, and illustrative.

We’ve a million people dispossessed and they are suffering. Critics grouse that the response to Katrina’s devestation has been abysmally slow. Compared to what? Slow compared to our expectations is the correct answer. Compared to every other nation on the planet, we’re moving at warp speed to address a natural disaster of extraordinary magnitude.

Watch what happens over the next week, as American aid organizations, religious groups, and willing individuals act. America’s great wealth is matched by its generosity. America is responding decisively to Katrina’s tragedy.