Preventing Conflicts--Exploring the Alternatives
January 2000
Banner photo: ©Yasuharu Kitamura/amana images
Refugee Survey Team Visits Kosovo and Western Tanzania
Areas in Tanzania visited by the Soka Gakkai Refugee Survey Team
On September 14, the Youth Peace Conference of the Soka Gakkai in Japan launched its 20th fund-raising appeal for refugee relief.
War and internal strife have given rise to unprecedented numbers of refugees during the 1990s, and the situation worsened during the last year with the massive movements of displaced persons from, and back to, Kosovo. The Soka Gakkai youth division, which has raised over 10 million U.S. dollars from similar fund-raising efforts since the 1970s, has renewed its efforts to combat the escalating refugee problem in the belief that the solidarity of youth will help solve the world's problems in the 21st century.
Burundian refugees at Kibondo, Tanzania
The focus of the 1999 appeal was refugees and displaced persons from Kosovo. In advance of the appeal, a Soka Gakkai delegation spent three days in the devastated region to observe the situation firsthand and to discuss with workers from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) the best way to provide humanitarian assistance. Part of the recent delegation's mission was to assess the realities of the current situation in order to allocate funds most effectively.
The Soka Gakkai's fund-raising effort was not targeted solely at Kosovo, however. Hiroki Nagano, director of the SGI Office of Peace and Cultural Affairs, led a fact-finding mission to Tanzania to assess medical and hygiene conditions in refugee camps as well as to meet the UNHCR representative, Marjon Kamara, who is based in the capital, Dar es Salaam. Ms. Kamara emphasized the importance of being sensitive to local concerns and of expressing appreciation to the Tanzanian people for their efforts to help refugees. Tanzania has taken in tens of thousands of refugees in a tradition of goodwill dating back to the 1960s, and it is currently sheltering refugees from neighboring Burundi, Rwanda and The Democratic Republic of Congo.
At a refugee camp in Ngara, Tanzania
Mr. Nagano stressed that although the focus of the recent Soka Gakkai fund-raising campaign is on aiding returnees in Kosovo in response to public interest in the area, the Soka Gakkai also has a steadfast commitment to addressing the less publicized plight of other refugees who are no longer the focus of the world media. In recent years, Soka Gakkai funds have supported refugees from Afghanistan, Sudan and Somalia. After visiting refugee camps in Tanzania, the delegation reported that it was struck by the paradoxes it witnessed--in particular, the folly of an international system capable of creating such great numbers of displaced persons alongside the nobility of individual refugees who refuse to give up on life.
A family returning from Australia at a bus terminal in Pristina, Kosovo
At the conclusion of its investigation, the Soka Gakkai delegation visited the UNHCR headquarters in Geneva to report on its findings and discuss further ways to cooperate with the United Nations in providing humanitarian support to refugees. At the headquarters, UNHCR's NGO Unit Head Arnulv Torbjornsen stressed the importance of the role that the Soka Gakkai and other organizations play in gathering contributions from Asia to help displaced persons in other parts of the world and commended the policy of visiting trouble spots to assess the situations there firsthand.
