RIGHTS: ‘Dismal Decade’ for Refugees and Displaced

By Jim Lobe Reprint | | Print |

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Jun 13 2000 (IPS) - The 1990s proved a “dismal decade” for refugees and others uprooted from their homes, and 1999 was a particularly bad year, according to a new report by a major US refugee rights organisation released here Tuesday.

In the latest of its annual series of ‘World Refugee Surveys’, the Washington-based US Committee for Refugees (USCR) notes that some 35 million people had been forced to flee their homes by the end of 1999, up from fewer than 29 million people in 1990, as the Cold War ended.

And far more of those people were “internal refugees” û- people who were displaced from their homes but unable to gain refuge in a foreign country where they could gain greater international protection.

At least 21 million people were internally displaced by the end of the decade, compared to 13-14 million ten years ago.

Almost half of the victims were to be found in sub-Saharan Africa, where civil conflict has driven millions from their homes across a broad swathe of territory ranging from Sierra Leone and Angola in the west across to the Horn of Africa and Tanzania in the east.

Indeed, Africa has suffered a disproportionate share of the global refugee crisis, especially in the latter years of the decade, according to the report. Altogether, Africans made up about 40 percent of all people displaced from their homes by the end of 1999.

Three million people in 15 African countries were forced to flee their homes in 1999 alone -û a significantly greater number than in Kosovo and East Timor both of which elicited strong international responses on behalf of the victims, the vast majority of whom have since returned home under some form of international protection.

In a special section of the report, USCR executive director Roger Winter charges that the response to Africa’s plight by the international communit y and the United States, in particular, has raised troubling questions about double standards based at least in part on racism and prejudice.

“Africa finds itself on the short end of any accounting of international response,” according to Winter, citing shortfalls in international funding in 1999 for everything from children’s health programmes for Uganda to humanitarian aid to cope with famine in the Horn of Africa.

“The world must forthrightly ask itself: Why do we let some populations die, while for other populations we jump to the rescue?” he asked.

“My gut feeling is that body counts in Africa do not have the same impact on Western policymakers as body counts in Europe or North America. If they did, Western leaders would act differently,” Winter writes. “Their callousness is not expressed in their words, but in their inactions.”

The study’s findings tend to confirm the view that the end of the Cold War, which initially raised great hopes for a new era of stability and peace, has actually contributed to greater turmoil and human suffering, particular within many Third World countries.

“That’s reflected in the enormous number of people who fled their homes during the decade because they feared for their lives,” says Bill Frelick, USCR policy director. “It was a disappointing decade, and a sad beginning to the new millennium for tens of millions of people who fear death if they dare to return home.”

In that respect, 1999 proved to be one of the worst years. The number of refugees worldwide climbed by 600,000 during 1999, the first significant increase in refugee numbers in seven years. Most of the increase took place in Africa.

But the increase in the number of internally displaced persons û- from about 17 million to 21 million — was even more dramatic.

Sudan remains the world leader in the number of internally displaced people within its borders û four million; followed by Angola, with as many as two million; Colombia, 1.8 million; Burma and Turkey each with between 500,000 and one million; Iraq, 900,000; Bosnia, 830,000, and Burundi, Congo-Kinshasa and Russia with 800,000 each.

In Africa, major sources of both refugees and internally displaced persons included Angola, where between 500,000 and 900,000 people were uprooted by renewed civil war and Burundi, where an estimated 410,000 people fled ongoing civil conflict.

Others are Congo-Brazzaville, where 800,000 people were displaced by violence; Congo-Kinshasa, where 400,000 more were newly displaced from fighting throughout the country; Sierra Leone, where at least 200,000 people were uprooted by insurgency and atrocities; and Eritrea and Ethiopia where some 350,000 people were displaced by the border war between the two erstwhile allies.

Renewed fighting between them in the last month has uprooted hundreds of thousands more in Eritrea, according to recent reports.

Outside Africa, some 600,000 Chechens were displaced by Russia’s renewed war against rebels in Chechnya and almost 300,000 Colombians were forced from their homes as the civil conflicts there intensified.

In Indonesia, some 750,000 East Timorese were ousted from their homes after voting for independence last year and more than a half million more fled communal violence in Aceh, the Moluccas, and Borneo. Some 350,000 Afghans were uprooted during the year, as were 100,000 Sri Lankans trying to flee fighting between Tamil rebels and the Colombo government.

On the one hand, according to the report, the year witnessed “two outstanding examples of intervention on explicitly humanitarian grounds: Kosovo and East Timor”.

Both events, according to the report, saw the international community “responding to a moral imperative when less-obvious-than-usual economic or strategic interests were at stake” on behalf of oppressed minorities and in defiance of traditional notions of state sovereignty.

“Yet, looking back on 1999, we see other humanitarian disasters that elicited little or no such response,” writes Winter, who draws particular attention to the ongoing conflict in Sudan and Sierra Leone where forces “were killing, maiming, orphaning, and forcibly displacing civilians in measurably greater numbers”.

On the more positive side, the 328-page report notes significant repatriations in 1999, including the return of 250,000 Afghans from Iran and Afghanistan, the return of some 120,000 displaced people to their homes in Croatia and Bosnia, the return almost all of the one million ethnic Albanians to Kosovo after the NATO campaign against Serbia.

Likewise, almost 100,000 Liberians were repatriated from Sierra Leone, Guinea, and other nearby countries last year.