POPULATION: Report Sees More Refugees, Fewer Havens

By Jim Lobe Reprint | | Print |

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Jun 6 2002 (IPS) - The number of refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) worldwide reached a seven-year high in 2001, a year marked by new restrictions on the ability of refugees to gain safe haven in rich countries after the Sep. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States, says a new report by a major U.S. advocacy group.

As of the end of 2001, 14.9 million refugees and 22.5 million IDPs were uprooted from their homes by civil conflict, violence and political or other forms of repression, according to the annual ‘World Refugee Survey’ published by the U.S. Committee for Refugees (USCR). It stressed these estimates were conservative.

Last year’s figure was about 2.5 million greater than the previous year’s. The report attributes most of the increase to the displacement of almost two million Afghans, some 350,000 Colombians, and hundreds of thousands more in Angola, Burundi, Liberia, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and 15 other African countries where violence broke out.

Despite the growing need, however, international agencies, notably the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) failed to receive the financial support from major countries needed to keep pace, the report says.

Shortfalls of some 20 million dollars hindered UNHCR’s efforts to care for some two million refugees across the middle of Africa from Liberia through the DRC to the Horn of Africa.

Shortfalls have even hit refugee assistance in Afghanistan, despite its much greater media prominence. Last month, UNCHR warned it might have to close down some operations there by the end of this month if it did not receive more than the 171 million dollars it has received out of the almost 300 million dollars promised by donors.

“Failure of the rich countries of the North to bear their fair share of the human and financial cost in assisting and protecting refugees is shortsighted and likely to multiply future costs,” says Bill Frelick, the Survey’s editor.

The report also takes to task wealthy nations for their response to September’s attacks and the subsequent anti-terrorist campaign.

Last October, for example, the United States suspended its refugee admissions programme for three months, leaving in limbo some 23,000 people, mainly from Asia, Africa and the Middle East, who had already been approved to enter the country.

The suspension ended in December, USCR says, but the admissions programme resumed at a much lower level with the result that in the first six months of 2002, only 8,000 refugees have been admitted out of a total annual quota of 70,000.

Western European countries also tightened laws and regulations concerning refugee admissions, effectively building new barriers to people fleeing violence and persecution, says the report, adding that Germany for the first time began deporting Chechens to Russia.

“It is terribly wrong to allow refugees to become collateral damage” in the war on terrorism, says USCR Executive Director Lavinia Limon. “At a time when freedom is under attack, the world is turning its back on people fleeing war, persecution and terror in search of freedom. This indifference towards refugees undermines our stated values.”

Five countries accounted for roughly half of the world’s 37.5 refugees and IDPs last year: Afghanistan (4.5 million refugees; one million IDPs), Palestine (4.1 million refugees, including 1.4 million living in camps in the West Bank and Gaza); Sudan (440,000 refugees, four million IDPs); Angola (445,000 refugees, as many as three million IDPs); and Colombia (23,000 refugees, and 2.5 million IDPs).

Altogether, the Survey cites 61 countries which acted as a source of “significant” numbers — more than 5,000 — of refugees and IDPs.

Nearly half of all IDPs can be found in Africa, it says. Of 31 countries that have produced more than 100,000 IDPs each, 17 are in sub-Saharan Africa.

The most significant displacements and returns in 2001 took place in Afghanistan, where some 700,000 Afghans became internally displaced and some 400,000 more fled to Pakistan and Iran before the U.S. military campaign began there in October. As the war intensified, all of Afghanistan’s neighbours closed their borders, trapping tens of thousands in frontier areas and camps.

By mid-2002, almost one million Afghans, including tens of thousands who have lived outside their homeland for 20 years or more, have repatriated. “It is an important reminder that refugees will go home,” says Frelick.

But without substantially more aid and a favourable security situation, he adds, the repatriation might not be sustainable.

Other significant movements of people in 2001 included the displacement of 350,000 Angolans as a result of the 27-year-old civil war there, which finally ended earlier this year after the death of rebel UNITA leader, Jonas Savimbi. Humanitarian agencies have only just recently re-entered UNITA-controlled areas where they have found extremely high levels of malnutrition and disease.

Repatriation continued in Bosnia as 99,000 people returned to their homes, the vast majority to areas where they are an ethnic minority; some 80,000 returned voluntarily from Guinea and Liberia to Sierra Leone; and 33,000 Eritreans and 30,000 Ethiopians returned to their homes from Sudan.