ABSTRACT
Humanitarian agencies had only begun to deal with the debris of World War II when independence struggles and the revolutionary and counterrevolutionary movements spawned by the Cold War generated new waves of refugees. Compounded by ecological and economic trends and disasters, such spillovers of dispossessed and desperate peoples continued to build during the Cold War years. The refugee population in the Horn of Africa and in southern Africa increased by a million between mid-1988 and mid-1989 alone. More than a million Mozambicans fled the terror of the South African-backed guerrilla organization, the Mozambique National Resistance Movement. Indigenous peoples have been under assault for centuries, of course, but the plight of unintegrated vestiges of so-called primitive cultures is set in relief as their numbers dwindle. The most common means of measuring development—national aggregate data—tell one's nothing about the fate of such peoples.
