Usean refugee crisis

The Usean Refugee Dispute was a humanitarian crisis created by the Federal Republic of Erusea in the wake of the Ulysses 1994XF04 asteroid's planetfall in early July 1999.

Summary of events

After Ulysses made planetfall on July 3, 1999, the nations of the Usean continent were inundated with civilian refugees displaced by the impacts. Despite Stonehenge's best efforts to mitigate the destruction, the damage was more extensive than the nations had expected; overnight, more than one million Usean civilians had become refugees.

After a meeting of the Central Usea Treaty Organization (UTO), the Usean nations began working together to relocate and accommodate the refugees. The UTO set "quotas" of how many refugees each nation was to admit based on a variety of factors, including the degree and extent of the damage inflicted on each country by Ulysses. Suddenly, in April 2000, the Federal Republic of Erusea announced that it would no longer accept any foreign refugees.

Erusian hostilities

The Erusian Minister of Foreign Affairs had stated that Erusea had taken in some 200,000 refugees, alone, while the other nations of Usea expected them to take in even more. The Erusian government released a statement deeming it impossible to accept any more refugees and simultaneously manage the recovery efforts within the country. Erusea had experienced the horror of Ulysses firsthand: fragments of the asteroid had killed tens of thousands of Erusians and displaced thousands more. The Erusian Prime Minister denounced the UTO's expectations as "completely unfair" to the Erusian public, which shared his feelings on the matter. As the number of people gathered at the Erusian borders neared upward of 600,000, Erusea began sending them to refugee camps or flying them to different nations as part of its "Humane Transport Plan".

The UTO's Secretary-General commissioned inspections of these refugee camps and found that they were inadequately supplied and many of the refugees were sick or malnourished. The international community was outraged; many Useans began to boycott Erusian exports, and the UTO levied harsh trade sanctions against Erusea in protest. However, this only worsened the situation: the sanctions put added stress on Erusea's fragile economy, further intensifying the Erusians' distrust and resentment towards the rest of the continent.

Then, in August 2003, Erusea launched a surprise invasion of neighboring San Salvacion and commandeered the Stonehenge railgun facility. During the takeover, UTO personnel stationed at the STN were taken into Erusian custody, and military equipment was seized. This incident would rally the UTO-member nations to re-form into the Independent State Allied Forces and be the catalyst for the Second Usean Continental War.

Trivia

• The Usean Refugee Dispute is a pre-Ace Combat 04 event which sets up the story for that game. The information known about the dispute was translated and interpreted from the "GAZE Special Edition: "War?" (August 22, 2003)" magazine.
• The events of the refugee dispute became a major plot point in Ace Combat Infinity, in which the autonomous region of Iyuli suffers similar economic problems related to an influx of refugees.