By Neil Earle
2001 – KABUL, Afghanistan: 300,000 REFUGEES FACE WINTER IN FRAGILE TENTS
1999 – VELES, Macedonia: THOUSANDS FLEE KOSOVO AS BELGRADE BURNS!
1994 – NAIROBI, Kenya: ONE MILLION RWANDANS FEARED DEAD, MISSING!!
1991 – MIAMI, Florida: COAST GUARD PICKS UP 119 FLEEING HAITIANS
1979 – SYDNEY, Australia: THOUSANDS OF VIETNAMESE ADRIFT ON OPEN WATER
1956 – MONTREAL, Quebec: CANADA TO ACCEPT HUNGARIAN REFUGEES
Even as the US-led war against terrorism plays out in Afghanistan the fears of "collateral damage" – the military's euphemism for unanticipated casualties – continue to play out among UN and Red Cross officials.
The plight of Afghanistan and Pakistan's more than one million refugees disappeared from the headlines as the collapse of the Taliban and the battles for Kandahar and Khunduz gripped world attention. This somewhat calloused oversight comes a bare two years after the biggest humanitarian disaster since the end of World War Two which played out on the highways, railways lines and hilly passes of Macedonia, Albania and Montenegro in 1999.
Remember? An estimated 300,000 refugees fled the Serbian province of Kosovo in cattle trucks, tractors, Mercedes-Benzes and with worn-down shoes.
Have we already forgotten that inhuman exodus, the "distress express" that sped scared and terrorized Kosovars to swell the ranks of the world? 12,000,000 or more refugees? The scenes in the Balkans were in stunning fulfillment of a grim prophecy written in the New York-based Atlantic Monthly in February, 1994.
Writing of the breakdown of order in West Africa in the early 1990s, contributing editor Robert D. Kaplan was stark: "I got a general sense of the future while driving from the airport to downtown Conakry, the capital of Guinea. The forty-five minute journey in heavy traffic was through one never-ending shanty town: a nightmarish Dickensian spectacle to which Dickens himself would never have given credence."
Kaplan's editors ran on the front pages this dismal prophecy for the 21st Century: "The Coming Anarchy: Nations break up under the tidal flow of refugees from environmental and social disaster. As borders crumble, another type of boundary is erected – a wall of disease. Wars are fought over scarce resources, especially water, and war itself becomes continuous with crime, as armed bands of stateless marauders clash with the private security forces of the elites."
Thank God the full effects of this scenario did not play out in the Balkans. Thanks to the effective efforts of government agencies, Christian relief efforts, private trusts, the International Red Cross and the United Nations a form of order was restored rather quickly in the Balkans.
But it was a close call.
There were all too many scenes of worried-looking grandmothers and the seemingly interminable pictures of screaming infants as lives were uprooted, families were separated, husbands and wives torn apart.
A U.S. State Department official put it very well: "The numbers blur the starkness of women and children, separated from the men in their family, seeking shelter under plastic sheeting – they do not convey the desperation of people cut off from home and services, often for years at a time, trying to put together makeshift schools for their children and to retain their dignity in a situation of total dependence." This quote seems sadly applicable to the stark scenes of human beings in open fields around the main cities of Afghanistan today.
In 1995, my wife, Susan, and I were in San Francisco as journalists covering the 50th Anniversary of the United Nations Organization. How well I remember standing before a makeshift model of a canvas tent, cans of water and artificial food displayed outside and realizing that this cramped and reduced existence was daily life for millions and millions of people in Iraq, or Kenya or Cambodia. I remember breathing out a quiet prayer that at least something was being done, that the efforts of a host of international organizations – the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, the International Organization for Migration, the International Red Cross and others – were bearing some fruit.
The words of Matthew 25 came quickly to mind: "I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me" (verse 35-36).
As Christians, when we see such stark tragedies erupt with depressing regularity we are challenged to the depths of our being. Or at least some of us are. Many others shrug it off saying: "Those refugees were there before our camera crews went in. It's hardly our concern, is it?"
But many Christians can't let it go this easily. World events assault us like the waves of the churning ocean. But we cannot allow the media tragedies depicted on the wide screen of television to block our "bowels of mercy" or overwhelm us with feelings of helplessness, hopelessness and guilt. No. Not in this season of Advent. Christmas commemorates Christ's first coming to this earth as the child of Bethlehem. It was predicted of Jesus that he came to "give his people the knowledge of salvation, to shine on those living in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the path of peace" (Luke 1:77-79).
As Christians, we cannot allow ourselves to end up believing that the last word in this world goes to the forces of disease and death. Can we? Should we?
No. That is where the Christmas Story speaks to us so powerfully in a time of war and dislocation. Jesus Christ, Savior of the world and the Christian's King and Ruler, was also a refugee. He came to this earth in the humblest of circumstances. He was born in a crowded house where animals were kept and laid in a manager. While still very young he was the near victim of a state-sponsored act of terrorism and had to flee as a political refugee for asylum into Egypt.
Remember?
"When they had gone, angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph [his human father] in a dream. 'Get up,' he said, 'take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay here until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him.' So he got up, took the child and his mother during the night and left for Egypt, where he stayed until the death of Herod. And so was fulfilled what the Lord had said through the prophet: 'Out of Egypt I called my son'" (Matthew 2:12-15).
Yes, Jesus was a refugee and by so becoming ennobled the pain of all who suffer unjustly. He is coming again to restore peace to the world – indeed that is his mission. But until then we have to do good works in his name when the need arises. We can sign up for volunteer work at a mission; we can collect for the various needy agencies that set out to relieve suffering. We can do a lot when we just look around us.
The late, great scholar from Manchester, F.F. Bruce, summarized the implications of the coming of Jesus to this earth under such humble circumstances. For Bruce it meant present encouragement and future hope:
"God is on the side of his people; the once crucified and eternally exalted Christ is their advocate in God's presence, and from his love no power in the universe, here or hereafter, can separate them. The last word in history thus belongs not to the [clenched] fist but to the pierced hand. The day is coming when the children of God, liberated from all that is mortal, will be manifested to the universe in the glory for which they were created; and on that day all creation will be liberated from the frustration under which it groans at present and will share the glorious freedom of the children of God."
God speed that Day!
The true Christmas Story is a call to action. All over the world there are Christians who respond to the image of the child of Bethlehem. His very weakness as the special child of God elicits our sympathy. From the Salvation Army bell tinkling on your street corner to the homeless shelter in your city to those burdened with the plight of this world's 12,000,000 refugees – there are millions of Christians who care. There are those who reach out to refugees and other hurting people because they feel compelled to do so by the Spirit of Christ in them, because they know, deep down, that Jesus himself was once a refugee.
In the early 1990s the Seventh Day Adventist Church had only about 35 members in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia. But that did not stop them delivering more than 50,000 parcels of food and messages to people uprooted and cut off from family in besieged Sarajevo.
In 1993, World Relief, a branch of the National Association of Evangelicals, fed 9,000 famine refugees in Malawi and Zimbabwe.
In the aftermath of the Rwandan tragedy of the mid-1990s, the Anglican Church of Canada's Primate Relief Fund sent some thing like $40,000,000 in famine and refugee relief. Think of it – $40,000,000. Nuns volunteered to staff orphanages for Rwandan refugee children in Zaire. They helped feed them, clothe them, and load their names into computers in an attempt to reunite them with relatives in other refugee camps.
Christians do good works because there is a need. They do good works because they reflect Christ-like compassion. They reach out to refugees, I reflected that week in San Francisco, because Jesus Himself was a refugee.
Christian hope and good works often shine forth in tough times. The Christian message is made for tough times. It faces the pain of the negative with the joyful hope of those first shepherds who were summoned to Bethlehem: "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men on whom his favor rests" (Luke 2:14).
Christians know this: Jesus did not come to Bethlehem to release us from all suffering. No. He came to participate with us in our suffering. That mission of Jesus is described succinctly by the writer of the New Testament book of Hebrews. It says: "Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death – that is, the devil – and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death. ...For this reason he had to be made like his brothers in every way, ...made a little lower than the angels so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone" (Hebrews 2:14-15, 17, 9).
Jesus was a refugee. His life was one of denial and doing without. "Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests," Jesus told one would-be disciple, "but the Son of man has no place to lay his head" (Matthew 8:20). That is part of the traditional Christmas story that should make us think.