NARRATOR: While the world watched the war in Kosovo unfold, Slobodan Milosevic was engaged in a little known or understood military strategy. His troops were directed to force ethnic Albanians from Kosovo into Macedonia rather than Albania. Why? It was a cynical method of using refugees as a tool of war.

["America's Defense Monitor" program introduction.]

NARRATOR: Kosovo was the first war in which a flagrant abuse of human rights was cited as the primary justification for military intervention in the affairs of a sovereign state. This was based on the emerging concept that all people are entitled to human security, which is a basic right to personal and community security. This new standard is based on the simple proposition that people, even within their own countries, are entitled to be free of flagrant abuse.

While NATO used this criteria on which to launch a military operation for the first time, it will surely not be the last. The abuses to which people were subjected both in their homes and as fleeing refugees was a manifest abuse and violation of every definition of human security.

Worldwide, there are 13.5 million refugees and an additional 17 million displaced persons in their native countries. Refugees are the Albanians, Palestinians, and Guatemalans living outside their country of origin. Internally displaced persons are best defined as people such as Kurds, Colombians, and Sudanese who have been routed out of their homes, but still living in shanty towns and camps in their home country. They have few rights and are routinely forced to live in fear, hunger and dread.

The world has always had refugees. Historically, refugees are the consequence of wars between states. They have always posed problems for political leaders, but they are increasingly being used to achieve a military or political goal within one country.

Winifred Tate is a fellow at the Washington Office on Latin America.

WINIFRED TATE: They're used by people who are trying to prevent any kind of civic or military opposition to their particular projects and they're used to demoralize and frighten people in other parts of the country into submission.

NARRATOR: When refugees are brutally treated in one area, the word soon reaches neighboring villages. This can sometimes have the desired effect of tempering what might otherwise turn into resistance to the offending authorities.

MS. TATE: Refugees and internally displaced people who don't cross borders are used as weapons of war by people who are trying to consolidate territorial control over strategic parts of the country.

NARRATOR: This program will look at three examples where refugees have been used as weapons of war: Kosovo, Colombia and Turkey. We could as easily have chosen Sudan, East Timor, Angola, and many more. All of these countries use refugees as weapons of war. They deliberately move and create refugees for military advantage.

Kathleen Newland is senior associate and co-director of the International Migration Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

KATHLEEN NEWLAND: So, the creation of refugees -- that is, expelling people from their homes, making it impossible for them to live either by attacking them directly or by depriving them of their means of livelihood -- has been a way of depriving a fighting force of their logistical base, their supplies, their cover, as depriving them of their ability to blend in with the general population.

NARRATOR: Destroying the support system of a rebellion gives the opposing military force an upper hand. Military forces uproot people considered sympathetic to the uprising, creating refugees and depriving the rebels of their support.

MS. NEWLAND: By striking terror into the heart of a civilian population, driving them from their homes, you may demoralize the fighting force that's associated with them.

NARRATOR: The refugee problem is creating a worldwide crisis. Women, men, and children, young and old, rich and poor, are all potential refugees if perceived to be supporting the wrong side in a conflict. The increasing number of countries using refugees as a weapon of war is a result of several factors.

Since the end of the Cold War, several countries, once part of the Soviet bloc, now have autonomy. Many of these countries have experienced ethnic and religious rebellions. This has spawned many intra-state conflicts where cheap, portable, small arms are readily available and where refugees are commonly used as weapons of war. With the globalization of media, long pent-up conflicts are brought directly into our living rooms where abuse of human rights are plainly visible for all to see.

MS. NEWLAND: And so, refugees are an important weapon in the propaganda war, as well as the actual military fighting.

NARRATOR: Images of starving children and heartbroken parents generated widespread international support for the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.

MS. NEWLAND: The images of refugees and accusations of mistreatment of refugees have been bandied about by both sides in most wars recently that I can think of, certainly in Kosovo. Certainly in most of the civil wars, including the one in Colombia now and in Turkey, there have been accusations and counter-accusations about who is the source of attacks.

NARRATOR: When NATO finally intervened in Kosovo, a small stream of refugees became a flood and throughout the war, refugees were mercilessly uprooted in villages thought to be harboring members of the Kosovo Liberation Army, known as the KLA. This tended to expose the KLA to Serb forces.

The Kosovo problem had been brewing since 1989, when Milosevic rescinded the autonomous status which Tito had accorded them in 1974. As the KLA gained strength and became a more effective military force, the Serbs, who controlled the Yugoslav army, began a campaign of torching ethnic Albanian villages and killing those who resisted or who were considered KLA sympathizers. This policy was effective in forcing Albanians out of the country.

Bill Frelick is senior policy analyst for the US Committee for Refugees.

BILL FRELICK: But in large part, they were doing it, I believe, at that time not as a strategy of ethnically cleansing Kosovo of its ethnic Albanian population, but as their way of trying to defeat the KLA, and then to control and repress that same population.

NARRATOR: The military implications of the refugee crisis was a two-edged sword. Both the Serbian forces and the KLA consistently used non-combatant civilians to gain military control. The KLA positioned barricades outside villages and challenged Serbian forces to attack. The KLA also attacked police patrols, and then left civilians to bear the brunt of retaliatory attacks, which were swift and deadly.

MR. FRELICK: And the KLA, which was not in a position to fight a straight out battle between standing armies, used their civilian population as part of its tactic to win international support and to really bring the international community as an ally in their struggle against the Serbs.

NARRATOR: Refugees also proved to be an excellent source of manpower for the KLA. Just as the KLA recruited among refugees, the Serbs used refugees to confuse and disrupt any strategy the KLA might be planning. They wanted to deprive the KLA of as much support from the refugees as possible. During the Kosovo war, television coverage of the refugee crisis prompted former Senator David Pryor to volunteer in the international efforts to alleviate their misery.

Senator DAVID PRYOR: We would go out each day and set up a clinic in one of the camps.

NARRATOR: While he worked in the camps, Senator Pryor interviewed some of the refugees. During these interviews, he was told horrifying stories of how refugees were brutalized by Serbs.

Senator PRYOR: The barbarism was so ferocious and so brutal that it's hard to imagine how people can -- how humans can do this to other humans.

NARRATOR: Serbian troops engaged in forced separation of Albanian families as they were expelled from Kosovo, making it difficult for them to reunite after the war.

Senator PRYOR: They would send one family to the Macedonian border and one family to the Kosovo border and make them get out and walk the last three or four miles. They would separate these families, and thus it would add to the confusion.

NARRATOR: Separation of families and forced migration were part of a calculated effort to divide and conquer the KLA.

Senator PRYOR: It was a weapon of war and a way of creating division and a way of creating chaos, a way of creating confusion.

NARRATOR: The chaos created by the air war allowed Slobodan Milosevic, the president of Yugoslavia, to conduct ethnic cleansing on an enormous scale. More than 800,000 people were displaced and over 10,000 were killed.

MR. FRELICK: His forces on the ground, with little more than sidearms and billy clubs, could go through against unarmed civilians and displace 800,000 people over the course of a very short period of time.

NARRATOR: The displacement of such a large group of people was also calculated to fracture the NATO alliance. NATO members such as Hungary, Greece, Turkey, and Italy were terrified at the possibility of ultimately being flooded with refugees. This concern led to intense efforts to stop the refugee flows.

MR. FRELICK: So, there's sort of an anti-immigrant strategy, if you will, that is at work, as well as trying to attenuate the causes of the refugee flow.

NARRATOR: The fear was that once refugees become established in their new home, they would not return to their own land, thereby straining the economic and social structure of the host country. Milosevic attempted to turn this fear into a military advantage. Ethnic Albanians were pushed into Albania, where they were welcome, and Macedonia, where they were not. NATO's European members feared the war would spread to Macedonia and possibly Greece. It was important that Macedonia be a stable, if not welcome recipient of refugees throughout NATO's bombing campaign.

MS. NEWLAND: Milosevic very consciously directed refugee flows from Kosovo toward Macedonia rather than toward Albania because Macedonia had a much more complicated ethnic mix, was politically more fragile, and had its own problems with its own ethnic Albanian population.

NARRATOR: Milosevic's hope was that the destabilized countries would fracture the NATO alliance and perhaps interfere with the air strikes. Although this ultimately did not work, it was a deliberate use of refugees as tools of war.

NARRATOR: Colombia, like Kosovo, also has a huge refugee crisis. Colombia's refugees, however, are not driven across international borders. They are internally displaced people living in relatively safe areas of their country, a growing phenomenon in the post-Cold War era. Colombia has 1.4 million internally displaced people who have been uprooted from their homes and 180,000 who are outright refugees.

MS. TATE: Colombia is currently experiencing the longest ongoing guerilla war in Latin America. It's a war with very complicated and long-entrenched roots in the country.

NARRATOR: For 35 years Colombian military and police forces, right-wing paramilitaries, and leftist guerillas have been at war with each other. All sides use non-combatant civilians as pawns. They create and use refugees to increase their power and gain control of valuable land. Where displacement of people was once a symptom of the Colombian conflict, now it is a key war tactic.

MS. TATE: And this is the result of an attempt by paramilitary groups to link to the Colombian military as part of a counter-insurgency strategy which is trying to take territorial control away from areas where the Colombian guerillas have historically been strong.

NARRATOR: When most Americans think of Colombia, they think of cocaine and heroin. But drugs are only one part of the conflict in Colombia. The roots of the civil strife are in lands that are rich in natural resources. Colombia has enormous natural wealth in coal, gold, silver and oil. Control over these resources is a primary goal of many guerilla and paramilitary groups.

MS. TATE: But instead of engaging in actual combat with these groups, what they are doing is targeting the civilian population in an effort to ensure that only people who are sympathetic to their groups and only people who support the paramilitaries are still going to be living in these areas.

NARRATOR: To gain territorial control, guerilla and paramilitary groups have routinely committed human rights violations.

MS. TATE: In general, the vast majority of these violation are extra-judicial executions, where people are killed in their homes or their places of work.

NARRATOR: People disappear on a regular basis because of their political views. Torture and forced migration have become daily occurrences and wholesale massacres are becoming more commonplace.

MS. TATE: Primarily paramilitary groups will come into a town and kill between five and up to 15, or even 30, in some instances, members of the community.

NARRATOR: Guerilla attacks are mostly aimed at local officials and are an indirect effort to intimidate local populations to force their support. These tactics often create refugees who flee the violence, leaving guerilla forces in control of their villages, farms, and the natural resources in the area. Rich landowners -- with ties to guerilla or paramilitary forces -- and national and multinational investors are free to buy abandoned land rich in exportable resources at minimal cost.

MS. TATE: If you look at areas within Colombia where these mega-development projects are being carried out, which is dramatically increasing the value of that land, those are areas where paramilitary activity has become very pronounced and many people have been forced off their land.

NARRATOR: The United States has been funding an intense war on drugs in Colombia in an effort to curb cocaine and heroin production. Over the past decade, the United States has given Colombia $914 million in counter-narcotics aid and over the next two years, the US plans to substantially increase that funding. The money is meant to fight a drug war, but Winifred Tate says the money is being used by the Colombian military to fight a civil war against a growing rebel force.

MS. TATE: These operations are still being carried out under the rubric of counter-narcotics operations.

NARRATOR: The United States has been using the counter-narcotics operations as an excuse to fund and train the Colombian army and to share intelligence. Tate believes the US is getting too involved in Colombia.

MS. TATE: The US is getting much more deeply involved in Colombia through funding the Colombian security forces and is now getting directly involved in counter-insurgency operations.

NARRATOR: This could lead to increased violence in Colombia and worsen the refugee crisis.

MS. TATE: Our concern is that this will lead to escalating violence in Colombia and, as has been the case throughout this decade, the major casualties of this conflict is the civilian population, who are the targets of these massacres and forced to flee their homes, becoming refugees and internally displaced people.

NARRATOR: Turkey's refugee crisis shares similarities with both Kosovo and Colombia. It has a large population of internally displaced people, mostly ethnic Kurds. The Kurds, numbering about 25 million, are the largest ethnic group in the world without a homeland of their own. The estimated 12 million Kurds in Turkey represent about 25 percent of the Turkish population. For thousands of years, the Kurds lived in what is now parts of Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria.

Turkey, like Kosovo, represents one of the most disturbing threats to human security: Ethnic cleansing. For several decades, the Turkish government has been fighting a Kurdish insurrection. Since the early 1900's, Turkey has had a policy of assimilation of minorities, but most Kurds refuse to support the Turkish government.

Their recalcitrance has resulted in their being forced out of their homes, off their farms, and many have fled the country. This forced migration policy is Turkey's response to the Kurdish Workers Party, or the PKK, which is the leader of the Kurdish rebellion.

MR. FRELICK: What developed was a civil war, a very bloody one, particularly in the early 1980's. And part of the strategy of the armed forces was what they called "evacuation" of villages in the southeast, which is where the Kurds are concentrated.

NARRATOR: Both the Turkish army and the PKK have engaged in widespread violations of human rights. There have been reports of torture, murder, kidnapping, and police brutality. In addition, the Turkish military has consistently practiced a "forced migration" policy which, by some accounts, has created as many as two million refugee-like people, virtually all of them ethnic Kurds.

MS. NEWLAND: In southeastern Turkey, in the Kurdish areas of Turkey, there has been a long-standing policy -- since the early 90's at least -- of depopulating the countryside that's perceived to be supportive of the Kurdish autonomy forces, or the Kurdish liberation forces, the PKK, in order to deprive the PKK of their base of support.

NARRATOR: Over the past 20 years, the United States has sold or given to Turkey, a NATO partner, over $10 billion worth of military equipment, $803 million worth in Fiscal Year 1999 alone. Many of the US-made weapons were used by the Turkish military to depopulate Kurdish areas. In some cases, entire villages were obliterated from the air.

MR. FRELICK: The Bureau for Human Rights has documented quite a number of cases where Cobra helicopters, Blackhawk helicopters were used in the forced evacuation of villages, where armored personnel carriers, US-made, were used in such human rights abuses, as well.

NARRATOR: The Turkish government has created a "village guards" network, a state-sponsored paramilitary force made up of local Kurds designed to split the Kurdish movement. This security force is often associated with right-wing political movements who are paid to battle the PKK. Kurds who refuse to pledge support to the Turkish government either flee the country or are forced out of their homes, which are often burned. Those that do not leave the country are relocated into urban areas.

MR. FRELICK: And it was a classic counter-insurgency strategy to deny support to the PKK, which was the armed opposition group that was waging this war against the Turkish state.

NARRATOR: Most forced migration activity occurred in the early 1990's.

MR. FRELICK: The army did go in, particularly in the early 1990's between '91 and '93, and forcibly evacuated a large number of villages in the southeastern part of the country, which is where the PKK was waging its war and where the Kurds are largely concentrated.

MS. NEWLAND: So, there are whole swaths of southeastern Turkey that are pretty thoroughly depopulated at the village level.

NARRATOR: By forcing the Kurdish population from rural areas to urban areas, the government has effectively cut off all logistic support to the PKK. The PKK forces have retreated into the mountains.

MR. FRELICK: And they don't have an ability to find support in villages that are no longer in existence. So, they're really in the margins, on the borders, across the borders into neighboring countries, in areas where they find little support from a population that's no longer there. So, in a sense, it has been a successful military strategy.

NARRATOR: The Turkish government's treatment of ethnic Kurds has caused the United States to rethink its arms sales policy toward Turkey. In December 1997, the US State Department finally agreed to link licenses for arms sales to Turkey to improvements in Turkey's human rights record. This could go a long way toward protecting Kurdish rights. In practice, it has yet to show its effectiveness. In October of 1998, a weapons deal was slowed -- but not halted -- by this new arms sales policy.

In the last decade, the Turkish army has burned, leveled, or forcibly evacuated more than 3000 Kurdish villages. This forced migration policy is allowing the Turkish government to win the war. The PKK has recently laid down its arms and its leader has been captured and sentenced to die. Still, there is a long way to go to achieve a lasting and equitable peace.

NARRATOR: The United States supports the militaries of many countries, including Turkey and Colombia, which have very poor records on human rights. The result has been large flows of refugees, and the number of refugees is a huge test of how well human security is working.

MS. NEWLAND: For those of us who think it's too idealistic to imagine that we're going to succeed in abolishing war any time soon, I think there needs to be a lot more attention to protecting civilians in the context of war.

NARRATOR: How can the US help improve human security and stop refugee flows?

MS. NEWLAND: The approach to managing the refugee problem that I would like to see followed much more systematically is to make it not worthwhile for fighting forces to manipulate civilian populations, particularly in ways that force them to become refugees.

NARRATOR: There are several international initiatives and treaties, such as the treaties to ban the use of child soldiers and eliminating the manufacturing and use of landmines, aimed at promoting human rights. The International Criminal Court allows individuals to be tried for crimes against humanity. They all focus on protecting civilians rather than nations. In short, they are designed to promote human security for all. However, the United States is not a party to any of these treaties.

The US cites human rights as the reason for military intervention in Kosovo. If human security is truly the United States' mission, then it should sign and promote international treaties and initiatives designed to protect individuals.