Refugees

ISIKVEREN, Turkey -- Kurdish refugees piled in makeshift camps up and down the steep mountainsides here continued to insist yesterday that they would not go to the refugee centers the United States plans to build inside Iraq as long as Saddam Hussein remains in power.As word of the U.S. plan for relocating the Kurds spread over the peaks and into the caves where the frightened refugees have gathered, people echoed the fears expressed Wednesday by refugees in more accessible sites."Where will they build camps?"

NOVSKA, Croatia -- Some 462 Muslims, ethnically expelled from Serb-controlled Bosnian territory last week, have been refused entry by Croatia.United Nations peacekeepers -- Jordanian and Nepalese troops -- have pitched tents at the border for the bewildered refugees, who include 110 children and 12 civilians in need of medical evacuation."

NGARA, Tanzania -- Barely two days after a harrowing and exhausting escape from Rwanda, the more than a quarter-million refugees who arrived here were soaked by heavy rains, adding to the miseries of their makeshift lives with little shelter or food.Some had umbrellas to hide under, and a few strung out plastic tarpaulins or thatched together grass huts. But in this wide-open land, most just weathered the downpours with nothing.Barefoot children squatted on the roadside, shivering in oversized torn sweaters.

SID, Yugoslavia -- As her baby starts screaming, Zorka Novakovic looks up sharply, despair and exhaustion on her face."I'm sick and tired of this. I don't care what happens -- we've got to go home," she says as she hurries off to feed 4-week-old Jovana in the tiny room and single bed they share with her two other young children.The Novakovics are among 86,000 registered Serbian refugees who have fled the fighting in Croatia as the Serbian army moves through the breakaway republic. Tens of thousands more have not registered but have gone to stay with friends and relatives.

WASHINGTON -- Rallying outside the Capitol, hundreds of Central Americans demanded yesterday that the United States accept refugees from their war-torn homelands the same way it welcomes those who fled from Cuba and Nicaragua.The demonstration renewed a bitter debate about whether those who flee leftist regimes should get preferential treatment over those who escape other forms of oppression or upheaval.Salvadorans, Guatemalans and Hondurans streamed in from various parts of the Eastern Seaboard to rally behind legislation that would make tens of thousands of Central Americans permanent legal residents of the United States.

GOMA, Zaire -- Death struck yesterday with a vengeance.More than 800 bodies of Rwandan refugees, many of them wrapped in straw mats or pieces of cloth, were laid out along a three-mile stretch of road from the center of Goma to Munigi, a volcanic expanse.At Munigi, a small boy walked barefoot across the rocky ground carrying a bundle in his arms. Wrapped inside the dirty piece of cloth was his little sister.As he laid her gently on the volcanic rock, a few tears running down his face, two men carried a woman in a blue and yellow striped shirt and pleated skirt by the arms and legs.

HRTKOVCI, Yugoslavia -- She was overwrought and suffering in the humid weather, damp patches appearing under the sleeves of her flowered house dress. "My daughter is expecting a baby, and we are unable to put her up," she said bitterly. "What are we to do?"That night, Obrenka Kozomara, 51, took matters into her own hands in the name of justice. She broke into one of the big empty Croatian houses in the village, installing her daughter-in-law and son there. The photos of another family's children were quickly taken down from the walls.

WASHINGTON -- President Clinton has won a six-month reprieve before he confronts what may be inevitable -- that only military force can restore democratic rule to Haiti.By agreeing to allow U.S. screening of Haitian refugees, Jamaica and the British-ruled Turks and Caicos Islands have provided the United States with a safety valve to prevent any rush of Haitian refugees from sailing to Florida.At the same time, the president's special envoy, former Pennsylvania Rep. William H. Gray III, is spearheading an effort to squeeze Haiti's ruling military clique and its wealthy supporters economically.

LONDON -- A very peculiar thing has happened, perhaps unprecedented in human history. As wars have diminished -- all wars, but wars between states in particular -- the wars that remain have become more blood-curdling, more no-holds-barred, particularly when it comes to women and children, and have produced proportionately more refugees than previous eras of conflict.We should use the momentary lull in Bosnia, Rwanda, Burundi, Zaire and Afghanistan to resolve what seems to have caught a grip on the post-Cold War world and delivered it a degree of ethnic strife and population displacement not seen since the Nazis turned Europe on its head.

LUENA, Angola -- There are 5,000 people in the railway station in this city on the high plateau in eastern Angola. They are not waiting for the trains.It has been more than a decade since one of those pulled into this station, plying the once-important but now deserted route between the Atlantic and Indian oceans.The 5,000 here are waiting for food.They are part of the 70,000 refugees who have come to Luena, tripling its population since April. It is a pattern repeated in besieged cities throughout the country.