She won't settle for less

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Cairo Times, Egypt, 24-08-2000

For over thirty years, Barbara Harrell-Bond has worked to help immigrants who never wanted to leave home in the first place

Forced migration and the unique problems of refugees have attracted much attention from academics over the past thirty years. Barbara Harrell-Bond wrote the groundbreaking but controversial book Imposing Aid: Emergency Assistance to Refugees on the trappings of emergency assistance to refugees, in which she asserted that traditional models of humanitarian aid were inadequately conceived, and in many cases downright detrimental to the interests of the very people they were supposed to help. In 1982, she set up the Refugee Studies Center at Oxford University. Now she is doing the same at the American University in Cairo, where a graduate program in Forced Migration and Refugee Studies will start in September. Martin Stolk spoke with her about the plight of refugees, the humanitarian aid regime and the absence of freedom of movement.

Harrell-Bond made herself quite unpopular publishing her findings  Photo by Christoph Kohler

Migration is one of the most basic demographic processes common to all human societies, along with birth and death. But while there are many reasons for people to move from one place to the other, they do not always do so willingly. For a large part of the earth's population, the world remains a dangerous and brutal place. War, political persecution, famine and other natural and manmade disasters force people to leave their lives behind and walk into the unknown with sometimes nothing more than the clothes on their backs and the money in their pockets.

Although there have always been refugees, it was not until the 1940s--at which time Europe was brimming with post-war refugees--that they were recognized as a special group that needed special protection. In 1951, the United Nations adopted the Convention relating to the Status of Refugees. Still the most important document regarding the rights of refugees, the convention states that a refugee is someone who fled his country due to a "well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion." Although the Organization of African Unity (OAU) went a little further in their 1969 Convention Governing the Specific Aspects of Refugee Problems in Africa--they added internally displaced persons (IDPs) and people who had fled "owing to external aggression, occupation, foreign domination or events seriously disturbing public order"--most nations refer solely to the classic 1951 UN-convention.

Like many researchers, Barbara Harrell-Bond started working with refugees and immigrants before she realized their unique social, economic, legal and psychological problems. In some of her earliest fieldwork in Oxford's housing estate Blackbird Leys, for her studies in cultural anthropology, and in her 1967 research in Sierra Leone she discovered that many of the people she was studying had actually for one reason or the other been forced to move. Slowly she discovered that the problems of these forced migrants were different from those people that had moved of their own free will. Her interest got piqued.

"The two pillars of Refugee Studies are law and psychology," says Harrell-Bond. "The main things that makes a refugee different from a migrant who voluntarily relocated are his legal status and the psychological state he is in because he was forced to move. It turns out that everybody in the world likes to move, but people do not like to have to move." She explains that since many refugees are forced to move by situations involving war, torture, trauma and other catastrophes, they can develop serious mental health problems.

At her 14th floor Garden City residence Photo by Christoph Kohler

Taking these two pillars as her guide, Harrell-Bond did much research around the social, psychological and legal problems of refugees in the years that followed her research in Sierra Leone. She paid special attention to the vulnerability of female refugees, who are all too often victims of rape, mistreatment and neglect. In 1982, she was invited to set up Oxford University's Refugee Studies Center. "It was just the right idea at the right moment and it grew like topsy," she says.

Harrell-Bond's real breakthrough, however, came after she went to the Western Sahara in the beginning of the eighties. There she wrote about the liberation war of the Saharawis' Polisario movement against Morocco. In the Saharawi camps near Tindouf in Algeria, she found a very different type of refugee than she had learned to expect--nothing like the desperate refugees suffering the dependency syndrome that international aid agencies always went on about.

Instead the Saharawi were living together as an autonomous community with virtually no aid from non-governmental agencies, with the exception of some minimal assistance of the Algerian Red Crescent. "They were self confident and strong. Surviving under extreme conditions in an incredibly difficult climate, people were actively using their time in exile to prepare themselves to be part of their own new state," explains Harrell-Bond. "They had schools, health care and women participated in defending the camps. I was really impressed."

As a result of what would prove to be a formative experience, Harrell-Bond left with more questions than answers. "I asked the English development agency Oxfam, how come your refugees are so different from the Saharawi? 'Oh well,' they said. 'We are so busy saving lives that by the time we actually get time to think, we have made so many mistakes that it is too late.'" Clearly the international aid agencies were not as omnipotent as they sometimes pretended to be.

Harrell-Bond got intellectually curious about how humanitarian organizations in general operate in emergencies. She went to study Ugandans fleeing to Sudan at the time of the ousting of Idi Amin in 1982-1983. "To my big surprise, the research showed that in many ways those living outside the umbrella of assistance--outside the UNHCR refugee camps--were actually better off than those living under it," she says. "According to the self-settled refugee, a refugee is someone who accepts assistance. The able refugees stay away from the camps, which consequently become little welfare communities of the temporarily and permanently disabled. They have entered the black hole of relief aid." Harrell-Bond goes on to describe how different the standard of living was between the two communities. "In fact," she says, "in times of crisis it was the self-settled refugees outside the camps that were feeding the ones inside."

Host communities around the camps are often envious to see where all the money goes. In contrast, the self-settled refugees that are fending for themselves garner much more respect. So, Harrell-Bond asked herself, "why help refugees to survive in their host country, send them back as poor as they came and then bestow development projects on them there? Why not make it a community affair? If the host area as a whole would somehow benefit, refugees could be looked upon as an opportunity rather than a burden." In short, why try to turn qualified Ugandan refugees, for example, into farmers when their arrival on the scene represents a positive infusion of other training and skills?

According to Harrell-Bond, an essential problem is the assumption on which humanitarian relief programs around the world are based: that the helpers are rescuing helpless victims. "For one, that is a highly ideologized overestimation of their capacity to respond and further it is a mistaken assumption that without them no one would survive. Too often, the approach humanitarians take makes their assistance a liability rather than an asset. The refugees are treated as statistics, rather then consulted with as responsible equals," she says. The way the power relationship is currently constructed, she explains, humanitarians feel that their giving is beyond criticism--certainly on the part of the recipient. "I would be quite satisfied if humanitarian agencies would simply begin to treat refugees as human beings," she says.

According to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) there are at the moment as many as fifty million refugees in the world; more than one third can be found in the Middle East and Africa. The UNHCR gives assistance to around 22 million refugees and IDPs--refugees that have fled within their own country. Sometimes it simply aids with resettlement or asylum procedures; in other cases, it sets up complete tent cities in places as diverse as southern Sudan, Kosovo and east Timor. In 1995, the total value of assistance to such victims of war and disaster reached some US$8 billion.

When Harrell-Bond challenged the way that relief programs dealt with the world's refugees and the way their money was being spent in Imposing Aid, such observations were not particularly welcomed, much less acted upon. "Doing good is the hardest thing in the world to do well," says Harrell-Bond. "Using the participatory methods of an anthropologist allowed me to document the negative impact of aid on both refugees and their hosts and thus demythologize it. What started as a critical evaluation became an almost political research, and I quickly found that demythologizing the humanitarian regime--that vast, complex and expanding network of inter-governmental and non-government relief organizations--is quite a hazardous activity." Worse than the emnity her book inspired, however, is the fact that not much has changed since she wrote it in 1986. "In fact, it has become worse than ever," she laments.

The notion that immigrants--whether forced or not--are a burden rather then an opportunity, has gained more ground of late. But then, humanitarianism and the principle of asylum were never apolitical. The UNHCR was mainly set up as a Cold War instrument to receive refugees from the Communist countries. When the first waves of non-Europeans fleeing persecution and terror started to lap on the shores of the West, the UNHCR quickly changed tack. Resettlement, the standard approach with those who had scaled the Iron Curtain, suddenly became the least desirable solution. The emphasis came to lie on voluntary repatriation to the country of origin, or otherwise integration in the country of first asylum, as those were mainly neighboring countries in the region. Only as last resort could there be naturalization or resettlement in a third--meaning western--country.

In the last decade Europe especially has tightened their asylum procedures and adopted restrictionist immigration policies. Harrell-Bond points to the events of December 1998, when the Tanzanian army received $US2.7 million out of the international humanitarian aid budget to drive Rwandan refugees home, as a turning point in humanitarian relief. "It may well have marked the beginning of the end of safe asylum anywhere in the world," she says.

"It is a case of supreme irony as Fortress Europe has been organized around the recognition of the economic, as well as social advantages of the free movement of people and goods," she says. "In a globalized world in which the ideology of 'market forces' predominates, why do economists not regard people as assets? After all, the scale and geographic sweep of current migratory movements indicates that the causes are located in the basic structures of an increasingly interlocked world system. In this system, movement of people is not merely a condition of success, it is part of a ++modus operandi." Harrell-Bond speculates about what the fate of the millions of post-World War II refugees would have been if they were forced to deal with the strict asylum procedures now in place.

But recently there have appeared some tiny cracks in the walls of Fortress Europe. When France took over the chair of the European Union at the end of July, French Minister of Interior Jaques Chevènement made a fierce statement in favor of easing up the EU's immigration policy. Europe's population is getting older and there are fears that the working part of society in a few decades time will be too small to support its pensioners, the policymakers of today.

These fears are confirmed by a recent UN-report. This report showed that the population of the European Union will drop from its current level of 370 million to 331 million in 2050, yet the world's population as a whole will grow from six to ten billion. The only western country that shows a contrary development is the United States. The UN predicts its population will grow from 270 million to 349 million people in fifty years.

But then the US--as well as Canada and Australia--have always followed a strong pro-immigration policy. These countries realized early on that for their economy to grow, a constant infusion of new people is needed. "The idea that refugees are a problem is in everybody's head, while in fact they can be a true advantage," says Harrell-Bond. "They bring skills and knowledge, and they bring true survival energy."

In the twenty years that Harrell-Bond has been organizing and promoting the idea of Refugee Studies, she says that the program has expanded enormously. There are currently embryonic programs in Uganda, Tanzania, South Africa, Morocco, Jordan, Italy, and--coming this fall--in Egypt.

Egypt signed both the 1951 UN convention as well as the OAU's 1969 Convention. In fact, the country is unique in that it has the right to asylum embedded in its constitution. Article 53 states that "the right of political asylum shall be guaranteed by the state for every person persecuted for defending the peoples' interest, human rights, peace or justice. The extradition of political refugees is prohibited." In reality, however, the country has no national legislation governing the granting of asylum. Since its inception, the UNHCR has been responsible for determining refugee status in Egypt.

In 1998, almost 1300 Egyptians asked for political asylum abroad, and as of mid-1999 there were some 6,600 UNHCR-recognized refugees in Egypt, mainly Somalis, Sudanese and Yemenis. While the number of official Sudanese refugees may seem low compared to the estimated 25,000-30,000 Sudanese living in Cairo and Alexandria, it is largely due to Egypt's open-door policy for their southern neighbor's citizens. Many Sudanese that would qualify for refugee status thus are treated as normal immigrants. This does not mean, however, that they do not experience the same social and psychological problems as other refugees.

Harrell-Bond maintains that Islam itself is in fact the religion of asylum. "It adheres to a law which is of higher standard than international law," she says. "According to Islamic law, every Muslim has the duty to provide asylum, also to non-Muslims. Political leaders have the obligation to recognize you fulfilling your religious duty to give asylum to refugees." One Moroccan social scientist is currently researching whether the more-than-usual tolerance for refugees in some Islamic countries is due to legislation, tradition or religion. In Egypt, however, civilian Muslim organizations seem somehow to have missed out. Christian churches run most of the aid projects for refugees, though quite a few NGOs are also involved in the plight of the uprooted.

Harrell-Bond hopes that the Refugee Studies Center in Egypt, as in other places, will have a tangible effect on the way the country's refugees are treated and dealt with. Although the program is academic, she does not see it as "an ivory tower thing," but as a way of promoting awareness through the university, which will then hopefully be passed on to government, NGOs, and aid donors. These bodies would ideally use the knowledge and information gathered by the center in policymaking. The center also seeks to devise programs to educate officials that have daily contacts with refugees: immigration, police, welfare, ministries and the different aid agencies.

"The vision of the Refugee Studies Center continues to be based on the belief that independent research which actually brings the voices of the beneficiaries into the equation, and provides those who are employed in the field an opportunity to reflect and change," says Harrell-Bond. "Refugees are not a metaphysical issue."

The Forced Migration and Refugee Studies Center at the American University in Cairo is a one-year program consisting of three courses per semester. The program can also be taken part-time and will be rewarded with a graduate diploma.