REFUGEES: Out of Luck

Whether sleeping on the sidewalks of Hong Kong, in a mud hut in Jordan, or in the clean, curtained rooms of converted Luftwaffe barracks, the refugee is the man who cannot go home again. Behind him lie the major conflagrations of the past 20 years—World War II, the Palestinian war in 1948, Dienbienphu in 1954, the Algerian strife, the Hungary of 1956, Tibet in 1959—or the drab, day-in-day-out drudgery of life in Communist Europe or Red China. Sometimes beckoned by hope, usually driven by despair, he has forsaken his homeland to the number of nearly 40 million since the end of World War II.

For the most part he has found sanctuary. Yet. when the U.N. launched its World Refugee Year last July, it estimated some 2,500,000 displaced around the world still unsettled, stateless and subsisting on U.N. doles. Clotted chiefly in three points on the globe, they are the refugee problem: the hard core left in the camps of Western Europe; the political pawns in the Arab-Israeli dispute, languishing in Gaza, in Jordan and in Lebanon; the unwanted Chinese in Hong Kong. How do these stubborn people survive, and what are their prospects at the midpoint of the U.N.'s campaign to dramatize their plight to the world?

The Reluctant. In three cluttered rooms of a West German refugee camp near Hamburg live Tadeusz Bojarski, 52, his wife and their three children. Tadeusz went there ten years ago as a bachelor, today boasts his own garden plot, raises pigs and chickens for profit, and never intends to leave the camp if he can help it. Reason: his U.N.-subsidized rent is under $6 a month. "Where," he says, shaking off the efforts of resettlement officials, "could I find another place to live in Germany for that?" His attitude is by no means unique among the 22,000 stateless refugees who remain in West European camps. Many have lived there for more than a decade, have not even learned the language of their host country. Their dormitory barracks abound in radios, newly bought furniture; more than 50% of the refugees in Germany own TV sets. At times they seem to have the best of both worlds: convenient housing in the midst or on the outskirts of large cities, where they earn the standard German worker's wage of $105 a month, while paying almost no rent and receiving social welfare in the bargain.