* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.
At the end of June, Refugees International's Senior Advisor Dawn Calabia and I headed to the Fergana Valley, to southern Kyrgyzstan where from June 10 to 14, attacks by unknown assailants triggered violence between majority Kyrgyz and minority Uzbek communities, particularly in the urban centers of Osh, Jalal-Abad and Bazarkorgon. More than 300 people died, scores of others were injured, several thousand homes and businesses were burnt to the ground, and an estimated 400,000 people were displaced, about a quarter of who crossed into Uzbekistan as refugees but later returned. A crisis.
As I inhaled my first breath of the still smoky air Osh air and stepped gingerly through the mounds of ash and broken glass in the once beautiful homes, my mind flipped back to doing the same exact same thing ten years ago, almost to the day in fact. In June 2000, when I'd been working at RI less than a year, I had the opportunity to join an advocacy team headed to Kosovo to follow up the organization's earlier emergency missions in the region and to assess the progress of reconstruction efforts. Though our arrival in Kosovo took place well after the end of the conflict and the air there smelled of ripening grain instead of smoke, our primary concerns then, as it is now, was ensuring adequate shelter for the displaced before the cold, harsh winter arrived.
Afraid my memory might has lost some of the details over the years, last night I searched for and found one of the reports from our visit to Kosovo. The first paragraph read:
Across Kosovo, new bricks, walls and roofs are replacing the 120,000 houses burned and blown up during the war. Yet, in many places, particularly in western and central rural areas, villagers remain in temporary shelter amid the ruins of their homes without prospect to rebuild. The international community pledged to reconstruct Kosovo, but the number of families needing help far exceeds those who will receive it this year. Rapid, proactive, coordinated action is needed to increase the number of houses rebuilt this year and to ensure that shelter needs are met this coming winter.
One could simply change the name of the country, the numbers of homes destroyed, and thankfully delete the fact that no bombings rocked southern Kyrgyzstan this summer; but the findings and humanitarian concerns are actually very much the same. I couldn't help but wonder what difference the passage of time has meant for crisis response. What have governments learned about conducting inclusive rebuilding efforts? Are the wishes and desires of homeowners regarding compensation or reconstruction heard and addressed? But perhaps the bigger question is why do humanitarian tragedies of this scale still happen? Where have we gone wrong with tolerance education and peace-building initiatives?
Standing under the bright blue skies of the Central Asian summer sun, in the burnt-out courtyard of an Uzbek family's mahala (usually a gated multi-family residence) I saw a single flower standing there, still blooming. As I listened to a family member recount the violence , my mind raced through a series of scenes and stopped on the memory of a photograph I'd taken in Mitrovica, an image that to me had somehow managed to capture the spirit of the place -- a red rose standing by a door-less and wall-less house, but still in bloom. Loss and destruction in the Balkans and in the Fergana Valley were huge and words cannot describe them, but in both places, bright spots remained.
The flowers, alive and blooming in the middle of such destruction remind me of the good done by bold and brave humanitarian aid workers who lost their lives in the course of their work - like RI board members David and Penny McCall and our indomitable advocate Yvette Pierpaoli. They were killed in a vehicle accident in April 1999 in Albania while preparing to deliver radios to displaced people in the Balkans. You can find that same commitment in Kyrgyzstan and other crisis areas today among humanitarian aid professionals who overcome obstacles and find ways around safety protocols and security restrictions to bring relief to Kyrgyz and Uzbek victims alike and to rebuild shattered lives and communities.
To me, the flowers symbolize a spirit of survival - of those who lost loved ones, livelihoods, and living rooms and now must find a way to go on. And finally, every now and then, on one day set aside each year, we should stop to remember and reflect, or perhaps plant flower seeds to honor the memory of countless victims of discrimination and injustice. On August 19 we honor the heroic men and women who try to come to their aid.
