World Refugee Day 2008
Today is World Refugee Day. I hope the events in Buffalo went well.
This article was in the New York Times on June 18:
Refugees From Wars and Persecution Increase, U.N. Agency Says
GENEVA — The number of refugees fleeing to other countries to escape conflict and persecution rose in 2007 for the second year as factors from climate change to over scarce resources threatened to increase the flow, the United Nations refugee agency warned Tuesday.
A total of 11.4 million refugees were under the care of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in 2007, including some 400,000 feeling conflict in their home countries, the agency said. The report for 2006 numbered 9.9 million.
The total was modest compared with the 17.8 million refugees in 1992 at the time of the Balkan wars, but after a steady drop between 2001 and 2005 it represented a worrying trend , the relief agency said.
“We are now faced with a complex mix of global challenges that could threaten even more forced displacement in the future,” Antonio Guterres, the high commissioner for refugees, said in a statement. “They range from multiple new conflict-related emergencies in world hotspots to bad governance, climate-induced environmental degradation that increase competition for scarce resources and extreme price hikes that have hit the poor the hardest and are generating instability in many places.”
The number of people displaced by conflict but remaining within their own countries also rose in 2007 to 26 million, the agency said, citing statistics provided by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, a private organization.
The conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan accounted for more than half the world’s refugees in 2007. More than 2 million Iraqis have sought refuge in Syria and Jordan, and 3 million Afghans in Pakistan and Iran, the refugee agency said…
The latest statistics contradicted a number of misconceptions about the impact and distribution of refugee patterns, officials said, starting with the notion that Western countries admit most fugitives from conflict.
Instead, 80 percent of refugees remain in developing countries in the immediate vicinity of their own country, the UN agency said.
Pakistan accepted more than 2 million refugees and Syria 1.5 million in 2007 while the United States sheltered 281,000, the statistics showed.
The U.S. Committee for Refugees released its 2008 World Refugee Survey, which includes a list of the worst places for refugees to be in displacement or to try to resettle. These countries include Bangladesh, Russia, Europe, Malaysia, China, Iraq, India, Kenya, Sudan, and Thailand. More than 2 million of the world’s refugees are located in these countries. Ukraine, despite the small number of refugees residing within its borders as it rarely grants refugee status, has a serious problem with refoulement, and a rising problem with violence against visible minorities, is also among the world’s least safest places for refugees.
As the New York Times article stated, Iraq produced the highest number of refugees worldwide. According to USCR, this is the third year in a row that this has been the case. Although the U.S. stated in 2007 that it would resettle 7,000 Iraqi refugees, the U.S. only resettled 1,608. Refugees International, UNHCR, and Amnesty International recognize the situation facing Iraqi refugees as a crisis in desperate need of attention.
Refugees International’s page on the situation states that one in five Iraqis have been displaced:
According to the UN Refugee Agency and the International Organization for Migration in 2007, almost 5 million Iraqis had been displaced by violence in their country, the vast majority of which had fled since 2003. Over 2.4 million vacated their homes for safer areas within Iraq, up to 1.5 million were living in Syria, and over 1 million refugees were inhabiting Jordan, Iran, Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey and Gulf States.
There were reports last year that Iraqi refugees were actually returning to Iraq because of the decrease in violence. However, UNHCR noted that these refugees often returned to Iraq because they had ran out of resources in whatever country they had fled to after violence continued to spiral at home. As well, once they attempted to return home, they often found that their homes had either been destroyed or taken over, which forced them into secondary displacement contributing to an increased number of internally displaced persons.
With the number of refugees at over 14 million worldwide, there are, of course, other crisis situations that have lacked the kind of international attention needed to provide assistance to people fleeing from conflict and persecution:
Sudan, which is dealing with two separate refugee situations: Darfur/Chad and Southern Sudan. While the resettlement process is ongoing in Southern Sudan, it has been a fragile process as the situation regarding the Peace Agreement tends to shift on a regular basis. The crisis in Darfur continues to destroy the lives of hundreds of thousands of Sudanese, and is especially affecting women. In fact, it has come to a point where gender-based violence is a regular part of the lives of female refugees of all ages trying to survive the conflict that plagues their homeland.
Sudan is also home to over 300,000 refugees from the neighboring countries of Eritrea, Chad, Ethiopia, and the Central African Republic. Unsurprisingly, it has been found that the human rights of these refugees are not protected during their time in Sudan.
Refugee International on Sudan, UNHCR on South Sudan, UNHCR on Darfur/Chad
Burma (or Myanmar), where refugees are displaced not only by the persecution they suffer in their home country, but also from the recent Cyclone that forced over a million people out of their homes and has shown that the government could care less about the survival and protection of its citizens.
Millions of people are currently forced from their homes in a kind of horror that no one should ever know. Today, we should remember them and pledge to support them as they struggle to survive.