I was idly flipping through a Canadian newspaper while waiting to catch a flight back home from Toronto, when I read about a report that Canada is the second largest country after USA allowing refugees in for permanent resettlement. In 2002 USA resettled about 25,000 refugees, while Canada took in about 10,000 refugees in 2002. Canada and USA are quite liberal indeed in so far as handling refugee populations, while the European countries, although suffering from a population crisis, are hypocritical with respect to the refugee situation. Be that as it may, refugees are definitely in no-man’s land. The above mentioned resettled refugees are lucky, most will not get this benefit. War or instability breaks out, people leave their hometowns in search of safety and become internally displaced people or move out of the country to neighbouring countries. War ends, and most of these refugees drift back, while some decide to emigrate. The people who emigrate or resettle in foreign countries make their choices and settle into their host nations as my father and grandfather did. But did you know that there are refugees who are stuck in refugee camps for years and decades? This column looks at this amazing phenomena which brings together human misery, war, nationalism, charity and philanthropy and utter selfishness in a noxious cauldron, specially in the post WW2 period.
In particular, this situation relates to Palestinians in various countries, Tibetans and Kashmiri Pandits in India, East Pakistanis (Biharis) in Bangladesh, Afghans in Pakistan and Iran, Sudanese in Egypt, Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya and other countries and Kurds in several Middle Eastern countries. All the above mentioned refugees have been displaced internally or externally for more than 10 odd years now. What is worse is that they haven’t been assimilated in their current place of residence and are in a half way limbo. But first, some definitions.
A refugee is someone with a well-founded fear of persecution on the basis of his or her race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinion, who is outside of his or her country of nationality and unable or unwilling to return. Refugees are forced from their countries by war, civil conflict, political strife, natural conditions or gross human rights abuses. There were an estimated 14.9 million refugees in the world in 2001 - people who had crossed an international border to seek safety - and at least 22 million internally displaced persons (IDP's) who had been uprooted within their own countries. This is unbelievable, these numbers equal almost to 2/3rd of the population of the United Kingdom and gives an idea of the scale of the problem.
The problem of refugees was first addressed on a global basis after the sheer horror of the World War II. Millions of people were uprooted from their homes because of the war and to handle this situation in the future, an explicit clause was adopted in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. The clause says explicitly: "to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution." As we will see, most of the countries are pretty much hypocritical in this case. Forget about other countries’ citizens, many governments turn a blind eye to their own citizens as well. The United Nations setup the UN High Commissioner for Refugees to protect, assist and eventually help resettle refugees in 1950, while a special UN convention relating to the status of refugees, was adopted and ratified by most of the countries in the world. Despite the high sounding words spoken during the ratification process or the fact that most of the countries have well established departments, processes and procedures for handling refugees (either inside or outside their countries), the refugees still exist in huge numbers. These poor people are unfortunately the victim of several conflicting demands. These conflicting demands are not able to be resolved and hence this problem cannot be sorted out smoothly. These demands range from a feeling that these refugees are not their problem, very restrictive immigration laws in most countries, the refuges being treated as political pawns or by simple wilful ignorance.
In an ideal world, given a war or some other natural disaster creating a refugee situation, the refugees will be smoothly evacuated to a place of safety, either inside or outside the country. They will be housed and taken care of in a humane way. The international community will take steps to defuse the war situation, have a ceasefire, calm things down and get the refugees re-settled back in their original location or get them resettled in another country. This ideal situation needs sufficient funds, a determination to stop war breaking out in the first place and to stop one if one begins and has a cut off level when the refugees will be resettled elsewhere if the original condition hasn’t improved.
Ha! Ideal situation indeed! The UNHCR is allocated a pittance from the world community (compare the allocations made to UNHCR to that of UNESCO or the EU farm bill subsidies, etc.). The UNHCR is starved of funds and can barely have sufficient wherewithal to help the millions of refugees. The IDP's have it worse! They are considered to be the responsibility of the domestic government and more often than not, they are overlooked, ignored and frequently forgotten. Look at the case of Kashmiri Pandit's. These Kashmiri Pandits were ethnically cleansed from Kashmir by Islamic Militants. Most ended up in pathetic conditions in Jammu and in New Delhi. Say what you may of Indian Foreign Ministries, they are not afraid to say their self-righteous opinion about anything and everything in the world and follow it up with aid and what not.
Putting it in another way, if the Indian government had spent 10% of the amount of men, money and energy into the plight of Kashmiri Pandits, as it did for the Palestinian Refugees, their plight would have been less. But Oh! No! Let them rot and it’s such a big blot on Indian Democracy. India was willing to go to war over refugees (ostensibly in 1971) but is willing to let their own citizens rot. It’s even more ironic that the Indian government has expended much more on the Tibetan refugees and on getting them resettled in India, than their own internal refugees. Shame on the Government of India and the rest of the Indians who keep banging on about refugees all over the world and ignore the tragedy in their own backyard. I have this suspicion that it may well be their religious background which is working against them. Given the religious overtones of the Kashmiri conflict, giving sympathy to the Hindu refugees may well rub up some people in the wrong way indeed.
Another example is that of the Biharis in Bangladesh. These people sided with West Pakistan during the 1971 civil war and suffered terribly because of it. There are thousands of them, stuck in legal limbo, being neither Bangladeshi's nor Pakistani's. They are not looked after well by anybody, Bangladesh obviously looks at them as traitors and foreigners, Pakistan doesn’t care about its own ordinary citizens, forget about these Bihari's. The UNHCR tries to do what it can, but it is very little. The end result? Disaster, no employment opportunities, living in absolutely abject conditions in Bangladesh, with no way to emigrate to Pakistan or elsewhere, surrounded with hostility. And that is not including the numbers of Rohingyas and the Paharis, also sharing the same sad fate of the Biharis.
The Afghans had it quite bad for years, but thankfully, the situation is getting better. Although, anything better than zero is good. The security situation in the south and west is still not stable because of the Taliban, but thousands and thousands of Afghans, who were previously in Pakistan, Tajikistan and Iran, are now streaming back to Afghanistan to start rebuilding their lives. Many of these refugees left when the soviets invaded in the late 70's, then there was the interminable warfare between the warlords, then the bizarre Taliban regime, then the Americans and Northern Alliance turfed them out. But the interesting thing in this matter is that the Afghan refugees in Pakistan and Iran were able to develop their economic lives, people set up business (legal businesses or drug or gun running), made or bought their own homes, were economically productive. Assuming that the Afghanistan problem was not sorted, these refugees would have been absorbed into the mainstream of the countries that hosted them, as has happened since time immemorial.
Now we come to the granddaddy of all refugee problems, the Palestinian one. Everybody knows the history behind the Palestinian refugee crisis and I wont repeat it here. Its been going on for more than half a century now. The Palestinians who managed to escape the Middle East and settle in the USA/EU or other countries were lucky. I understand that some of the richest people in Lebanon and Egypt are erstwhile refugees, who came over from Israel with barely the clothes on their back, integrated into their new societies and climbed up by dint of their sheer hard work. The poor refugees in Lebanon, Egypt, Syria and Jordan were and still are crammed into the camps. The pressure became so big that the UNHCR had to setup a special organisation to take care of these poor people. The refugees are political pawns, of the Palestinian leadership, of the Arab leadership and of the terrorists. The Palestinian leadership treats them as cannon fodder, the terrorists find these poor benighted places as ideal breeding grounds for fanaticism, the Arab leadership prefer to spend time on speeches and money on arms rather than getting them integrated into their own societies. Yes, they have a moral right to get back to their birthplace, but HELLO?? Its 50 years now, almost 2 generations. How long will these people be kept under the barriers? And now the UNHCR is saying that the Palestinian refugees are facing donor fatigue. Umm, D'OH.
If one considers sheer numbers, then Africa takes the cake, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast, Zimbabwe, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Sudan and Congo. All these countries have large refugee situations, either emigrating to neighbouring countries or getting refugees. These guys don’t get a pittance of what is spent on the Palestinians. After all, they don’t really count, do they? Helping the poor Congolese or Rwandans doesn’t help in fighting the evil Zionists, does it? Think about the Kurds, before Iraq got liberated from that monster Saddam, can you think of one country or international organisation which was significantly helping the Kurds in Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey, as compared to the help the Palestinians get? Well, I can’t think of any, if you do, please do let me know.
At end of the day, all these long-term refugees are treated like brown organic matter, they are insignificant, reduced to being political pawns or cannon fodder, propaganda material, to be ignored for so called lofty high ringing principles. The core human principles of being a good Samaritan, helping massive human misery to abate, getting these refugees settled or resettled? Nope! These principles go by the by. If one wants to verify this, ask anybody about their efforts on refugees and ask what are they doing for this refugee group or another, and on what basis they are ignoring the others? The answers will be fascinating and at the end, very disheartening.
Nation-states are basically concerned with their own ”national interests”. They generally tend to overlook the plights as well as human rights of the displaced people. Not only nation states but several NGO's and other humanitarian agencies (with the honourable exception of the UNHCR) also have a very jaundiced blinkered view. Just look at the terminologies that have been created by various nations and organisations to be used relating to the term ‘refugee’. They range from: political refugees, economic refugees, environmental refugees, resource refugees, developmental refugees, eco-migrants, religiously persecuted refugees, internal refugees or internally displaced people, external refugees etc. To me this indicates not its multi-context usage or a certain degree of confusion over its definition, but sheer snobbish obfuscation and cold determined blurring of the situation to avoid any permanent solution. Alexander Theroux said: “Hypocrisy is the essence of snobbery, but all snobbery is about the problem of belonging.”
All this to be taken with a grain of salt!
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