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Posted on 10/29/2001 1:38:27 AM PST by sarcasm

s many as 20,000 refugees from across the world, cleared to come to the United States to escape persecution in their homelands, have had their arrival here delayed indefinitely in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

What is in effect a temporary moratorium on refugee admissions has resulted from both concerns about security and the fact that a White House consumed by its fight against terrorism — here and in Afghanistan — has not issued its annual refugee quota, administration officials said.

For now, the nation's door remains closed to refugees, including women fleeing the Taliban, Iraqis fleeing the regime of Saddam Hussein, children escaping civil war in Sierra Leone. Refugee resettlement groups say many of these people have been longtime residents of disease-prone, star- crossed refugee camps.

And so, if the Sept. 11 hijackings exposed the alarmingly large gaps in the government's ability to track who comes into the country, they also made indirect casualties out of otherwise deserving refugees.

State Department officials say that they regret the situation, but that the policy is justified given the heightened alert in the country. They say that the policy will stay in place until the department completes a thorough review of security clearances for all refugees seeking to come into the country.

In addition, the White House, preoccupied by other concerns, has not yet issued its annual order setting the number of refugees the nation will ultimately accept during the current fiscal year, which began on Oct. 1.

A State Department official who spoke on the condition of anonymity said in an interview last week that it was impossible to predict when the White House would act. "The security climate that we are in requires us to take every precaution that every person coming in is properly vetted," the official said.

As a consequence, refugee organizations say, about 40 Afghans who were scheduled to arrive at Kennedy International Airport from Pakistan on Sept. 29 never left. Razia Ahmed Gul had qualified for a visa under a refugee program for Afghan widows and expected to leave Quetta, Pakistan, with her five children last month. The family even sold its furniture to raise money for the trip. But they are now stuck and facing eviction from their apartment.

Elsewhere, in a refugee camp in Gambia, a batch of 17 refugees fleeing civil war in Sierra Leone, mostly women with grandchildren in tow, were supposed to leave for New York in mid-September. They remain in the camp.

There is, too, a family of Armenian Christians from Iran, including a woman who is terminally ill, whose flight out of Vienna was canceled. A Jewish family from Ukraine, scheduled to fly out of Moscow last week, has been stuck there, waiting for word from Washington.

All those who have been approved have undergone a medical review, a security check and a one-on-one interview with an American official overseas.

There are up to 20,000 refugees in similar situations worldwide; all had been approved for entry into the United States as refugees fleeing persecution in their homelands, according to Immigrant and Refugee Services of America-U.S. Committee for Refugees, an advocacy and resettlement organization in Washington.

In another measure of the pullback on refugees, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which interviews potential refugees in camps, has called back most of its field workers for security reasons. No potential refugees are being screened for entry except for those who can make it to a handful of United States embassies that are still conducting interviews.

Advocates for refugees say that they understand the need for careful scrutiny, but that they worry about a prolonged delay. "You have refugees who are condemned to a life in a refugee camp, which means not only an uncertain future but perhaps no future at all," said Robert J. Carey, vice president of the International Rescue Committee, an agency based in New York City that helps refugees come into the country. "It would be a great irony and a double tragedy for the United States, in part because of a very legitimate security reason, to withdraw its future commitment to refugees."

The annual quota for refugees coming into the United States has declined steadily for most of the last decade. In the 2001 fiscal year the refugee cap was set at 80,000; about 68,000 of them made it in. For the 2002 fiscal year, the State Department had proposed a ceiling of 70,000, most of them to come from Africa, countries in what was the Soviet Union, and Central and South Asia.

The State Department's proposed numbers are customarily submitted to Congress, where they are occasionally tinkered with but usually approved with little or no controversy. Sometime around Oct. 1, the annual refugee quota — a presidential directive, as it is called — is issued by the White House.

The House of Representatives has approved the State Department's proposed numbers this year, but the Senate has yet to do so. While a one- or two-week delay is not unusual, refugee resettlement officials say they cannot recall the last time the directive was nearly a month overdue.

Then again, as the State Department official said last week, government business has hardly been business as usual in recent weeks. Once Senate approval is received and the presidential directive is issued saying how many refugees will be allowed in, the official said, "We will have a clear idea — a clearer idea — of what the new security requirements are going to be, so we can pretty much start moving ahead on refugee resettlement."

Neither State Department nor immigration officials would say what new security measures would be put into place.

For the time being, security concerns, war and distractions on Capitol Hill have indefinitely delayed a new life for a family of 14 from Ethiopia, members of the Oromo ethnic minority group who have lived in a refugee camp in Kenya since May 1996. They were scheduled to leave on Sept. 25 and join a relative in San Diego. Their flight was canceled and never rebooked, according to officials with the International Rescue Committee, which was assigned their case.

A chartered flight of Afghan refugees, mostly widows and their children, was scheduled to leave Islamabad for New York on Sept. 13. And a commercial jet bound for New York City, carrying 40 refugees with one- way tickets in hand, was supposed to leave in late September. Neither jet got off the ground.

Lavinia Limon, a former State Department official in the Clinton administration who is now executive director of Immigrant and Refugee Services of America, said she was sympathetic to the need for vigilance in admitting people to the country.

But, she said, someone who wanted to come into the United States to inflict harm would be unlikely to take the refugee route, which usually involves spending some time living in a refugee camp, "often on the margins of existence."

Refugees already undergo the most stringent background checks of any people seeking admission to the United States.

"If you wanted to come to this country as a terrorist, coming as a refugee has to be the stupidest way to come," Ms. Limon said.

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