Agencies divided on policy of relocating refugees

Irish aid agencies are divided over the Government's decision to support the relocation of Kosovo refugees in Ireland.

Goal's director, Mr John O'Shea, said that protecting families who remained in Kosovo should be the priority, while Mr David Begg, chief executive of Concern, said moving refugees outside the region would relieve pressure on already over-stretched humanitarian services in Macedonia and Albania.

The Catholic aid agency Trocaire was the first to raise doubts about the relocation strategy, proposed by the Minister for Justice, Mr O'Donoghue, along with other EU ministers. Trocaire's director, Mr Justin Kilcullen, said: "By sending the refugees out of the Balkan region entirely, NATO will send a clear message to the Yugoslav regime that their tactics can and have worked".

Instead of moving refugees to far-flung corners of Europe, he said, "surely we should be devising a strategy to help the governments in neighbouring Macedonia, Montenegro and Albania to meet their basic needs. Although expensive, such a strategy would be a fraction of the cost of the war".

Trocaire's view was supported by the London-based Kosova Information Service which said refugees should remain in the region in order to assist their repatriation at the earliest possible date.

Mr Iza Zymberi, director of the group, said: "The further the people are taken from the region, the less likely they are to return home. In Albania and Macedonia, they are in an environment which is not new. There are no language barriers. It would be better to send aid relief to these countries to help them deal with what we hope is a short-term problem."

He added that the airlifting strategy was creating further tensions in the Balkans, with Albania resisting the relocation of Kosovans of Albanian origin in Europe.

In contrast, Ireland-Kosova Solidarity said in a statement people should be relocated abroad if they were unable to receive proper medical or psychological treatment in refugee camps.

However, the organisation stressed the controversy was "another distraction" from the central concern of what was happening to the 1.5 million people who remained in Kosovo.

"The single most pressing issue - the prevention of genocide of the remaining population, the main goal of the current NATO intervention - is being sidelined."

Mr Begg said that based on Concern's experience in handling other humanitarian disasters it was "very concerned about having a large congregation of people in an area with bad sanitation where disease can spread". During the Rwandan genocide, he said, 80,000 people died in two weeks from cholera in refugee camps.

"Anything that relieves pressure on the ground should be welcomed. The infrastructure is very weak and there are a lot of logistical bottlenecks which are making it difficult to treat refugees."

He said the issue of what to do about the population still in Kosovo was a separate and "very much a military" question.

Mr O'Shea said by airlifting Kosovans out of the region, rather than sending in ground troops, "we are assisting Milosevic in his ethnic cleansing. What has to be done ultimately is for someone to have the moral and physical courage to stand up to the aggressor".

Sanctuary in other countries "should be used only if all else has failed, but all else hasn't failed because all else hasn't been tried".

Refugees who wished to leave the area should not be refused entry, he said. However, "it would be far better if they were cared for near their own country".

It was sadly ironic, he added, that airlifting refugees was never proposed in the case of recent African humanitarian crises when it would have been of huge assistance.