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AUC-Today, Egypt/USA, Winter 2001
As AUC announces its new program on forced migration and refugee studies, Martin Stolk examines some of the problems faced by refugees.
By the time the tanks roll into town, you would have left your house. Maybe you had enough time to throw a suitcase, crammed with a few belongings, into the back of your car. As you pull out of your driveway, you wave goodbye to your fridge, the newly laid floor and your daughters teddy bear. Unrealistic? Well, that is what fifty million people worldwide thought before they became refugees.
Daily, thousands of people are forced to leave their lives behind because of war, political persecution, famine and other natural and man-made disasters. Sometimes with nothing more than the clothes on their backs and the change in theìr pockets, they walk towards an unknown future.
The United Nations (UN) adopted a convention in 1951, defining a refugee as someone who has 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."
At its 1969 convention, the Organization of African Unity (OAU) expanded the definition of a refugee to cover groups of people rather than just individuals. The decision meant that those who fled "owing to external aggression, occupation, foreign domination, or events seriously disturbing public order," could also be considered refugees.
The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR)—an organ set up after the 1951 convention—lends assistance to some 22 million of the total 50 million refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) in the world. In 1995, the total value of assistance to such victims of war and disaster reached US$8 billion.
Host communities tend to view refugees as a problem. The notion that immigrants are a burden rather than an opportunity has been repeated so often that people regard it as fact, even though, historically speaking, countries have always seen great cultural and economical progress shortly after another fresh influx ofimmigranis.
"In a globalizing world in which the ideology of market forces predominates, why do economists not regard people as assets?" asks Dr. Barbara Harrell-Bond. HarrelI-Bond set up the Refugee Studies Center at Oxford University in 1982. Currently she serves in an advisory position to AUC’s Forced Migration and Refugee Studies Program, which started Iast September. "The scale and geographical sweep of current migratory movements indicates that the causes are located in the basic structures of an increasingly interlocked world system," says Harrell-Bond. "In this system, movement of people is not merely a condition of success, it is part of its modus operandi."
Restrictionist immigration policies have not been limited solely to recent times. In fact, the principle of asylum was never apolitical. The UNHCR was mainly set up as a Cold War instrument to receive refugees from the Communist countries. When the flrst waves of non-Europeans fleeing perseculion 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 lron Curtain, suddenly became the least desirable solution. The emphasis came to lie on voluntary repatriation to the refugee’s country of origin, or otherwise integration in the country of first asylum, as those were mainly neighboring countries in the region. Only as a last resort could there be naturalization or resettlement in a third—meaning western—country.
Recently, however, tiny cracks have appeared in the walls of Fortress Europe—as the European Union (EU) is now known in light of its restrictionist immigration policies. A small group of politicians have been making statements in favor of easing the EU’s attitude towards immigrants. Europe’s population is getting older and there are fears that in a few decades the work force will be too small to support its pensioners, the policymakers of today. These fears were fuelled by a recent UN report, which shows that the population of the EU 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 and the only western country predicted to have a population increase is the United States. The UN estimates its population will grow from 270 million to 349 million people in 50 years.
While the media in western countries is conjuring up images of impoverished hordes from the south coming to take their wealth, the vast majority of refugees and IDPs just want to go home. This year the biggest civilian displacement came in the wake of Ethiopia’s offensive on Eritrea during the early summer. The Ethiopian army pushed far into Eritrean territory and over half a million people fled the intense fighting. Following the fighting, the few Eritrean IDPs that returned to their native villages and towns, found their houses broken into and robbed empty by the occupiers.
Moreover, the devastation is more than skin-deep. During a recent visit to an IDP camp near Agordat in western Eritrea, an elderly woman from the destroyed town of Barentu, was asked whether she was prepared to return home. She could not answer in words. There were only tears.