This past Saturday, President Mugabe of Zimbabwe celebrated his 83rd birthday by throwing himself a lavish, $60,000 party in Gweru, Zimbabwe. Mr. Mugabe's backers, though, claim to have raised over $2 million for his party. The money raised for his birthday, partly through deductions from the salaries of grossly underpaid civil servants, is enough to "supply 300 AIDs sufferers with anti-retroviral drugs for a year in a country where only 50,000 people out of 500,000 infected have access to them," according to the London Times.

Meanwhile, mass starvation, skyrocketing unemployment, and the world's highest inflation rate have driven 3 million to 5 million Zimbabweans — an exceptionally high number considering that the country's total population is about 14 million — to neighboring countries, mainly South Africa.

While the world's attention remains transfixed on the supposed Palestinian refugees, a far more dire, and actually genuine, refugee crisis exists in southern Africa due to the disastrous seizure of private farms enacted by Mr. Mugabe.

Yet the world community does next to nothing to help the refugees from Zimbabwe. On a weekly basis, South Africa actually deports thousands of Zimbabweans back to their country, where many are later imprisoned and tortured. The complete abandonment of Zimbabwean refugees and the simultaneous indulgence of the Palestinians supports the contention that the United Nations serves as a political tool for the Muslim world as it did for the Soviets during the Cold War.

A year after the Arab world declared war on Israel, the world body established the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees in 1949. All the rest of the world's refugees, irrespective of the origination of their plight or the privation of their circumstances, fall under the jurisdiction of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

In 2006, the Unrwa budget was $462 million while the Unhcr budget was $1.4 billion. The Palestinians, most of whom cannot even claim the status of "refugee" in international law, receive about a quarter of the U.N. budget allotted to refugee affairs. The Unhcr's definition of a refugee is an individual who, "owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted … is outside the country of his nationality."

Unrwa, however, defines refugees as either those who were "in Palestine between June 1946 and May 1948, and lost both their homes and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 Arab-Israeli conflict," or the "descendants of persons who became refugees in 1948." Due to this special definition, less than 5% of those Palestinians deemed "refugees" by the agency would be considered refugees in any other conflict.

Of all the world's refugee populations, the Palestinian Arabs are least deserving of our sympathy. Never mind the international aid that has gone into the bank accounts of Yasser Arafat and his associates, but this is a people killing each other in an internecine civil war. A dispossessed people, perhaps, but they are a people who have turned that dispossession into a decades-long terrorist campaign against a democratic member state of the United Nations.

Nothing like this can be said about the refugees of Zimbabwe. Last year, I spoke to many of these refugees, hundreds of whom are sheltered in squalor at Johannesburg's Central Methodist Church. While Palestinians have an entire U.N. relief agency dedicated to their perpetual "refugee" status, these men, women, and children would be living on the streets were it not for the generosity of their Christian brothers.

Some of these refugees are political opponents of Mr. Mugabe and are afraid to talk to journalists. Zimbabwean intelligence has sent spies to refugee enclaves in South Africa to silence the refugees and bring them back home to meet their fate — imprisonment, house arrest, or death.

I had to meet with the church's minister, Bishop Paul Verryn, before I was allowed to speak with anyone. Mr. Verryn interviews every refugee who streams into his church and provides for them solely through donations he receives. "If this worked properly," he said of South Africa's response to the refugee influx, "we should provide a room with a bed and a basin, proper cleaning facilities … This is like a slum in here," he said of the church's condition despite his efforts to maintain it.

Every night, hundreds of people sleep head to foot on crowded floors. The church's small staff does its best to operate a makeshift jobs program. They drive Zimbabweans to government offices where the refugees can obtain asylum papers, and they set up nurseries for children and sewing and cooking classes for women. Imagine what could be accomplished here were the United Nations to devote just an ounce of the political willpower or money to this crisis that it dedicates to the Palestinians.

What should be done?

Dismantle the U.N. Relief and Works Agency. Use its $462 million to establish the United Nations Zimbabwean Refugee Agency, and alleviate a real refugee problem — the one that Robert Mugabe has inflicted on the Zimbabwean people. Then, perhaps, will the United Nations live up to its reputation as the protector of the world's refugees, rather than being the political pawn of the Muslim states using the Palestinians to discredit Israel.

Mr. Kirchick is assistant to the editor in chief of the New Republic.

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