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The shocking truth about covering refugeesBy Christiane Amanpour Editor's note: CNN's Christiane Amanpour has reported on refugee crises from many of the world's conflict zones including Sudan, Somalia, Rwanda, the Balkans and Iraq. Here are her reflections on the U.N.'s World Refugee Day.  Christiane Amanpour in 2004 reported from Darfur where tens of thousands were in need of aid. SPECIAL PROGRAMMINGYOUR E-MAIL ALERTSLONDON, England (CNN) -- I suppose I am most attuned to the plight and particular circumstances of refugees, because I am one myself. When the Islamic Revolution swept Iran, my homeland, back in 1979, I left the country and came West. I ended up at a university and later at CNN in the United States. I think this experience has helped me in my work as I have spent the past 16 years on the road covering war, crisis, poverty and famine. Their inevitable byproduct is refugees. In 1991, shortly after the United States and its allies declared victory in the first Gulf War, I found myself covering the Iraqi Kurds -- nearly 2 million of them, according to U.N. officials -- who fled to neighboring Turkey and Iran and became refugees. They had followed a not-so-veiled suggestion by then-President George H.W. Bush to rise up against Saddam Hussein. A violent crackdown by Saddam killed many and forced the rest to flee. They came back only when the United States and its allies created a protected no-fly zone for them in northern Iraq. Just a few months later began the Balkan revolving-refugee crisis, ethnic cleansing and genocide that consumed the 1990s. I witnessed that war for all those years and watched in horror as millions of men, women and children walked, ran or drove away from their killers and tormentors, to end up homeless, friendless and rootless in strange countries far from home. I'll never forget the sad, lost, tear-stained little faces pressed against the rain-streaked windows of the buses they were packed in. They wanted to believe they would be leaving for only a short time, but they ended up staying away for years. About 650,000 have never returned 10 years after the war ended, U.N. refugee officials say, but the good news is that more than 2.5 million have come back A few years later, Kosovar refugees would tug at our heartstrings as they fled Slobodan Milosevic's murderous campaign. I still have the walking stick of an old man who had stumbled across the border to relative safety in Albania. I also remember with rage the Serbian officials who launched a propaganda campaign against CNN and me. Under intense pressure from the world about their actions, they accused us of paying the Kosovars to walk around in circles behind us for the cameras. Bulldozing bodies into shallow pitsPerhaps the most shocking experience was in Rwanda in 1994. In the space of three short but brutal months, Hutu extremists launched a highly organized campaign to wipe out the country's Tutsis and moderate Hutu population. With clubs and machetes, they managed to bludgeon and hack to death 800,000 people as the world stood impotently by. Then, a Tutsi exiled army came in and chased the Hutus out to neighboring Zaire. There, it was as if God took his revenge on the "genocidaires." Hundreds of thousands of them fell ill and tens of thousands died of cholera, U.N. officials say -- simply falling where they were along the road. Bodies stacked up like cordwood. I'll never forget what one emergency doctor told us: Bodies could explode in the sky-high summer temperatures. Even when American troops and French Foreign legionnaires came to try to bury the bodies, their heavy diggers could barely break the hard volcanic soil. I was stunned to see these battle-hardened soldiers shed tears at their impossible task. In the end, they had to bulldoze the bodies into shallow pits. After this, you think nothing will shock you again, but it does. The crisis in Darfur in Sudan is appalling and getting worse. A Sudanese government-backed Arab militia, known as the Janjaweed, has kept up a reign of terror in the Western region of Darfur, the United Nations says, slashing, burning, killing and raping the indigenous African tribal people. Three years after this war began, it says, nearly 2 million people are crowded into camps where health and food crises are rampant. These are people who have fled their homes, but are officially known as "internally displaced persons," or IDPs. About 200,000 have fled to neighboring Chad. And yet, on World Refugee Day, a little good news: The number of refugees around the world has dropped to a 26-year low. But the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is, in fact, caring for more people -- some 21 million, mostly because of the world's internally displaced, such as in Sudan. These are the people who live as refugees within their own country. And then there are the perpetual political refugees, such as the Palestinians. The United Nations puts their number at 4.3 million. They have been in camps for so long, the UNHCR does not even include them in their overall figures. 
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