From the age of eight, when Abraham Awolich first fled with another child to escape rampaging Sudanese soldiers and built a mud hut in Ethiopia to stay alive, he believed his days as a refugee would be short-lived.

Yet after four years of moving from camp to camp, Mr. Awolich in 1992 found himself "warehoused" in a Kenyan camp where work and short-distance travel were prohibited for security reasons. As 10 more years slowly went by, food rations shrank to 1 pound per person for a week, cholera and dysentery killed masses, and neighbors often became desperate.

"There were no opportunities for smart people to show how smart they were, or for hard-working people to show how hardworking they were," recalls Awolich, who sought asylum in the United States and now studies at the University of Vermont in Burlington. "The situation makes people give up.... Some commit suicide, some turn to crime or do other things. There was lots of violence."

Some 7.4 million of the world's 11.9 million refugees have lived for 10 years or more in a warehousing situation, according to the US Committee for Refugees' World Refugee Survey 2004. With their home countries in turmoil and host countries unable or unwilling to assimilate them, refugees are languishing in permanent camps and urban ghettos long after the original newsmaking crisis has fallen off the radar.

This year, new efforts are under way to address the complex costs of warehousing. The US Committee for Refugees is insisting refugees have the right to work and travel even before political solutions come to pass. The standing committee of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) tackled warehousing as a central issue for the first time at its June meeting in Geneva. Fresh scholarly research on solutions to warehousing will be published in coming months.

In one respect, the time might be ripe to dismantle some of the hurdles that have kept refugees warehoused. Nations sensitized to terrorist threats are increasingly concerned about fixing the hopeless refugee communities that can become breeding grounds for terrorists.

Yet in an ironic twist, experts say the border-tightening and budget-slashing policies adopted since the Sept. 11 attacks may have further diminished the options available to long-term refugees. Thus, more people may be forced into extended warehousing just as nations are waking up to the dangers it poses.

"Most countries are not keen to use their resources to protect refugees," says Karen Jacobsen, director of the refugees and forced-migration program at Tufts University. "They want to use them to protect their own people and their own borders.... But the worst thing you can do is let the funds dry up because it means these cesspools will get worse."

Monitoring organizations counted 38 warehousing situations in the world at the start of 2004. Most are in Africa (2.3 million), the Middle East (about 2 million), and Southeast Asia (600,000). Best known is the Palestinian situation, in which more than 2 million Palestinian refugees in the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Egypt, and Syria trace their plight back to war with Israel in 1948-49.

Most warehousing situations began with violent conflict, which set in motion mass exoduses, and gradually led to hopeless entrenchment on a border, in a remote hinterland camp, or in a metropolitan shantytown.

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