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IN THE past few months, rebels from Sierra Leone and soldiers from Liberia have clashed with Guinea’s army in a piece of land known as the Parrot’s Beak, where the borders of all three countries meet. Now the armies of Liberia and Guinea are threatening full-scale war in the area. This is where 250,000 refugees, mostly from Sierra Leone, have been sheltering for several years, many dependent on food from the United Nations and foreign aid groups.

As fighting has worsened, their plight has become more desperate. Aid workers have fled and supplies of food and medicine have been disrupted. Fearing a huge humanitarian problem, Ruud Lubbers, the new UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), made his first official trip abroad last month to West Africa and the Parrot’s Beak. He heard that tens of thousands of people are even volunteering to return to Sierra Leone—until now known, reasonably, as the worst place in the world.

As Mr Lubbers is finding, similar nightmares exist in every continent. Go, for example, to Asia and the border of Myanmar, formerly Burma. Roughly 1m people have fled Myanmar for Thailand in the past decade, in search of food and jobs but also fearing for their lives. Around 100,000 refugees are crammed into camps along that border. They tell of slave labour, violence, murder, torture and destitution back home.

Life is not easy in the camps. The one at Umpiang, near the town of Mae Sot, is squalid, wet and cold. Slippery orange mud makes it almost impossible to walk up the steep hill from one smoky hut to the next. In a crowded schoolroom, children cannot hear their teacher when the rain thunders on the iron roof. Camp leaders worry that there is too little for the 4,000 youngsters to do. They are turning to yabba, an amphetamine made nearby, or to heroin, smuggled across the border from Myanmar. In the makeshift hospital the doctor talks of typhoid, dysentery, respiratory and urinary infections, malaria and malnutrition.

Yet these displaced people are relatively lucky. They are officially considered to be refugees, as defined by the UN refugee convention that was drafted half a century ago:

the term “refugee” shall apply to any person who...owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality, and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country.

Mr Lubbers and his commission believe that respect for that narrow definition of a refugee—someone driven “outside the country of his nationality”—is extremely important. Protecting refugees who have fled their own country is his “core concern”. Preserving their legal rights, such as ensuring that governments do not practise “refoulement” (forcing them home), is a top priority.

The good fortune of these refugees is that they have some legal protection and some political value. Refugees from Myanmar show how unwholesome that regime is, much as, during the cold war, defectors to the West from Eastern Europe were welcomed as heroes who demonstrated that life was more attractive under democracy. Vietnam’s 1.3m boat people delivered a similar message in the 1970s and 1980s. And although few of today’s refugees carry an equivalent ideological value, they have a legal claim to assistance merely because they have crossed a border—even if, as in the case of the people at Umpiang, they have hardly come very far.

According to UNHCR, which has just marked its 50th anniversary, in December 1999 there were 12m such “genuine” refugees who had spilled over borders. The refugee agency also keeps a watchful eye on 1.2m asylum-seekers and on 2.5m refugees who have returned home. That is not so many in a world of 6 billion, given the wars and chaos of the past decade. Just after the second world war, in Europe alone, there were an estimated 40m displaced people.

However, with a broader understanding of the term “refugee”, today’s number quickly grows. There are now thought to be 150m people living outside their own countries. Many, of course, do so of their own free will. Large numbers do not. According to groups less attached to the UN definition, such as the United States Committee for Refugees, at least 14m people have fled over a border. And an estimated 3.5m Palestinian refugees are usually not counted in such totals at all.

But all these figures miss the fastest-growing group of displaced people: those who do not cross borders, but are adrift inside their own countries. UNHCR, which has no explicit mandate to care for these people, says it has helped to care for roughly 7m of them last year. In fact there are closer to 25m such displaced people, in over 40 countries. About half are in Africa, with the rest mostly in the Balkans, Central Asia, Sri Lanka and Latin America.

Because they are harder to define than refugees and because, until now, no effort has been made to count them, nobody knows for certain how many exist. There are thought to be 4m displaced people in Sudan alone, and over 2m in each of Angola and Colombia. Dennis McNamara, a veteran of the UN refugee body and now the UN’s co-ordinator on internal displacement, says that there are many millions more people displaced within their own countries than there are refugees, especially in Africa. This month he will give a report to the UN’s secretary general, Kofi Annan, on these “internally displaced people” (IDPs), demanding that more be done to help them.

Although these people are not recognised as refugees, they are often just as vulnerable. At least 70,000 Guineans, for example, have been displaced and trapped along with the refugees from Sierra Leone in the Parrot’s Beak. Many also wander back and forth in the Great Lakes region of Africa. In Burundi, the government has forced hundreds of thousands of people into “protective villages”, supposedly to guard against rebel attack, but in reality to prevent them giving support to rebel armies.

In a valley in western Uganda, near a small town called Bundibugyo, there is a camp roughly the same size as Umpiang in Thailand. Again, it is full of frightened people: Ugandans forced by a cruel rebel army from their farms and homes in nearby hills. As in the Thai camp, people live in small huts, some of them just straw or rags, the more substantial of wood. Although it is safer to be in the camp than outside it, women leave during the day to tend their fields up on the valley sides. At night rebels often enter the camps to steal, to abduct children as soldiers or guides, or simply to spread terror. Whole families have been murdered as they slept.

The camp suffers a longer list of medical ailments than the one in Thailand, but has an even more ramshackle hospital. There are also hundreds of youngsters with little to do and only a makeshift school. But, unlike Umpiang, this camp receives few visits from journalists or diplomats. The UN Children’s Fund stops by to help; the World Food Programme delivers grain, but it is sometimes the wrong sort. The Ugandan army tries to give protection and a few young men also carry guns, but they can give little security to most families.

In this part of the country, 90% of the inhabitants, about 100,000 people, have been forced from their homes by fear and violence. Many have travelled long distances on foot to get to a camp or to the relative safety of the town of Bundibugyo, which is now several times its old size. But none has crossed an international border. None can claim to be a refugee. They are not the concern of international law, or of the UN. Although their needs are great, efforts to help them are therefore quite inadequate.

Future wars are likely to produce far more such people, rather than official refugees. Most wars are now within, and not between, countries. Especially in Africa, but also in the Balkans, Chechnya, Sri Lanka and Afghanistan, civil wars have pitted civilian militias against government armies; rebel groups have forcibly recruited civilians to fight; and the populations of whole villages or towns have sometimes become hostages of one side or the other.

Today there are some 35 armed conflicts going on around the world. Some of these wars are the result of a geopolitical shaking-out after the cold war, and so might be expected to abate. But others are the product of collapsing states, heightened ethnic tensions and violence driven by economic goals (such as diamond extraction in Sierra Leone and battles for oil in Angola). Some are simply the result of large-scale banditry.

Repressive rulers, such as Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, also displace their own populations. Ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia sent millions back and forth as nationalist Serbs, Croats and Bosnians formed their own fiefs. The outpouring of refugees from Kosovo into Macedonia and Albania caused a subsequent displacement of Albanians in their own country. Inside Kosovo, hundreds of thousands were displaced but never crossed a border. As once-stable countries fall apart, new internal borders are drawn up and fought over. But as long as locally displaced people never cross an internationally recognised frontier, the outside world (and UNHCR) has no duty to take action.

Even where a duty is felt, as in the case of Kosovo, it is far harder to help somebody who is displaced within a country than a refugee who has crossed a border. Assisting the displaced requires intervention into sovereign territory, often against the wishes of the government. Even where outsiders have been available to give protection, there have been many failures. The Iraqi government’s attacks on Kurds led outsiders to create a “safe-haven” for the displaced, but Kurds have still been constantly attacked. In 1995, UN soldiers were unable to stop massacres of displaced Bosnian Muslims sheltering in Srebrenica and Zepa. In Sierra Leone, where hundreds of thousands of displaced people have now taken shelter from rebels in areas controlled by UN soldiers, it is unclear whether they could be protected against a sustained rebel attack.

Interventions by bodies such as UNHCR and its 500 partner-NGOs are increasing, sometimes in combination with military forces. Yet these still lack the legal imperative of actions to help refugees. The International Committee of the Red Cross, by contrast, assumes responsibility for some locally displaced populations, and is given certain legal dispensations to allow it to help needy people who have not crossed a border. Should the UN, openly and officially, take on a similar charge?

Some officials, such as Kofi Annan, the UN’s secretary-general, Sadako Ogata, the outgoing UNHCR, and Richard Holbrooke, the former American ambassador to the UN, have argued that it should. The UN already helps some displaced people alongside refugees. Since 1999, it has spent over $100m on programmes that partly cover IDPs in Sierra Leone, Angola, East Timor and elsewhere.

Mr Annan and Mr Holbrooke called for a broad expansion of UNHCR to take care of all such refugees. Mrs Ogata talked in October of expanding its brief, but admitted that could be difficult: “In Africa, the number of refugees is large, but the number of IDPs is huge. We cannot be responsible for all of them, [and] sometimes IDPs are much worse off than the refugees.” She argued that expanding the responsibilities of the UN refugee body would be a “resource problem”, but no more than that; with the help of enough people, it ought to be possible.

Mr Lubbers, her successor, has a very different view. He expects the UN organisation and its budget (recently $1 billion a year) to shrink. More of its work will be farmed out to aid groups or other parts of the UN, and even private companies or rich individuals will be asked to help refugees.

Mr Lubbers wants to concentrate on official refugees alone, although he accepts that, as part of the “UN family”, his organisation must take note of internal refugees. He cautions against trying to help too many. There is a risk, he thinks, that refugee rights could be blurred if extra help goes to those who have not crossed a border. UNHCR’s statute makes clear where its responsibilities lie, even if, on the ground, it is sometimes very hard to distinguish official refugees from the locally displaced.

Yet the UN as a whole, through bodies such as the World Food Programme and Unicef, the children’s agency, could do much more to help internal refugees if local governments allowed it. That will be the proposal in Mr McNamara’s report, which also points out that those governments have primary responsibility for people displaced in their territory. The first step, in many cases, is to get governments to admit that they have displaced populations at all.

Sometimes, as during civil wars or when states are collapsing, it will be impossible to get permission from host governments to help IDPs. But outsiders know that help is ineffective without co-operation, or at least non-interference, on the part of local officials and soldiers. In Uganda or Burundi, for example, aid and protection get to internal refugees only when the governments allow it. In the Parrot’s Beak in West Africa, help for refugees and displaced people depends on the goodwill of at least three governments and one rebel group. Without it, do-gooders risk becoming entangled in a civil war.

How can the UN persuade aid-donors and host countries to take more responsibility for the internally displaced? It can argue that stable populations are essential for economic development. It can push for efforts to remove the causes of mass displacement, by tightening rules on the trade in small arms, diamonds, timber, oil and other goods which helps fuel wars in poor countries. Peacekeepers help too: hundreds of thousands of IDPs will soon go home in Eritrea and Ethiopia as the UN redeploys after a peace agreement there. “It must be part of a broader effort to deal with the nasty side of globalisation,” says Mr McNamara.

If donors consider their own interests, they may also want something to be done about the internally displaced before they become refugees, and then asylum-seekers, in rich countries. Already, the biggest donors to UNHCR tend to be the countries that receive the highest number of official requests for asylum. These countries have every incentive to dry up refugee flows at source, if possible by containing people within their own borders.

After the cold war, asylum applications rapidly increased in Europe, peaking at 700,000 in 1992. After a decline, they have been going up again, reaching nearly half a million a year once more by the end of 1999. Cheaper air travel, an increase in trafficking in humans, a growing wealth gap between poor and rich countries, and demands for cheap labour in Europe and America will all encourage more such applications.

Western European countries have responded to bigger flows by tightening asylum procedures, granting only temporary asylum to those fleeing wars and speeding the repatriation of people who lose claims to stay. Some western countries have also diverted such applicants to Eastern Europe, which since 1997 has become a net importer of asylum-seekers rather than a net exporter.

It may be prudent, therefore, to give IDPs aid and protection before they decide to seek a better life elsewhere. Delivering that aid and protection may be cheaper than dealing with huge increases in the numbers of asylum-seekers. Such help will not be easy. But as borders weaken in a globalising age, the importance of internally displaced people will come to rival that of refugees; and the duty of outsiders to do something should become all the more obvious.