Refugeehood, Loss and Social Change

Eritrean Refugees and Returnees

Gaim Kibreab

The chapter discusses the losses experienced by Eritrean refugees; analyses the processes of social change; and examines whether such changes constitute stimuli or constraints on development. Involuntary Displacement and Losses Refugees are people who flee against their will because of fear for their lives. They are pushed from their social, cultural and economic moorings by conditions that are or are perceived to be potentially or imminently threatening to their physical safety, security, dignity, liberty and property. An actual or a perceived threat to these central tenets of human existence renders the place of abode hazardous and consequently makes the need to seek safe haven and succour in a neighbouring country or elsewhere imperative.

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Repatriation

Angolan Refugees or Migrating Villagers?

Oliver Bakewell

Repatriation is often presented as the optimum durable solution to the refugee problem in Africa and it is taken for granted that the return of peace to a country will entail the return of the refugees who fled the war. This chapter questions this assumption by looking at the movement of self-settled refugees from Zambia to Angola as a process of migration rather than the end of the refugee cycle. Before considering voluntary repatriation as a solution, it is worth considering in greater detail the nature of the refugee problem it is expected to solve. It has three aspects that can be clearly identified. Firstly, at the start of any refugee emergency is a humanitarian problem as refugees flee their homes, families are separated and they arrive in a neighbouring country exhausted and with very few possessions. Aid operations may be essential to help refugees through these critical times. After the crisis when refugees have been able either to settle temporarily among local communities or in settlements, it is still assumed that there is chronic suffering caused by exile.

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Space and Movement in the Sri Lankan Conflict

Oivind Fuglerud

Based upon fieldwork among Tamil refugees from Sri Lanka's Northern Province living in Norway and among Muslims in Sri Lanka's Eastern Province, I will in the following discuss migration and nonmigration as related to social practices and political imagery in Sri Lanka. Available data suggest that we find very different responses to the situation of war among the Tamil population in the Northern Province and the Muslim population in the Eastern Province. The questions of when and for what particular reasons people decide to flee from conflict situations have been of interest to refugee research since its inception (Kunz 1973). In this chapter I argue that in dealing with these questions we need to take into consideration broader issues and more deep-seated traditions than the immediate trigger mechanisms that make people break up and leave. In particular we need to understand how the people concerned conceptualise space and their own communities within it. To grasp the social dynamics behind processes of displacement we need to realise that individuals and communities do not respond in an equal manner to situations of conflict and violence.

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Contested Refugee Status

Human Rights, Ethics and Social Responsibilities

Philomena Essed and Rianne Wesenbeek

The question of who counts as 'refugee' in the enactment of international human rights is a continuous source of struggle among governments, state bureaucracies and critical movements (Lauren 1998). Individuals who leave behind home and country in the hope of surviving elsewhere and who subsequently knock on Dutch (or other European Union) doors may find that their primary agency, the definition of their own reality, throws dice in a political casino — the passing test. Eligibility for asylum depends on whether the home country situation is taken to produce refugees and whether the individual applicant has a plausible story to fit certain bureaucratic criteria. But the different bureaucratic categorisations and procedures are unable to catch the variegated realities of flight, a global condition shaping the lives of millions of people. As a result those who get to be rejected after a period of waiting for the outcome of the decision-making process might go underground to join the 40,000-100,000 undocumented immigrants — a relatively new category consisting of immigrants who entered on a tourist visa and then decided to stay, those who crossed the border illegally, and those who became illegal when they were refused refugee status (Leun et al. 1998).

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A Life Project out of Turmoil

Displacement and Gender in Colombia

Donny Meertens

The continuous escalation of the armed conflict among guerrillas, paramilitaries and the regular army in Colombia has caused an enormous humanitarian crisis. One of the most visible and disrupting effects of this crisis is the internal displacement of more than one and a half million people during the last two decades. This chapter explores the gender-differentiated ways in which women and men negotiate their identities during the process of displacement and the rebuilding of their daily lives and social networks. Women, in contrast to men, tend to gain some autonomy and visualise new horizons for their life projects in the urban environment. The argument draws on 150 testimonies, life histories and open interviews collected by the author in Bogotá and provincial capitals between 1994 and 1999.1

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Permanent Refugees

Female Camp Inhabitants in Bihar

Kathinka Sinha-Kerkhoff

This chapter concerns forced migrants who hitherto have been completely ignored by scholars. It focuses on (widowed) women now living in two so-called permanent liability camps in Bihar, a state known as one of the poorest, most populous and underdeveloped states of India. These women belong to a small section of the linguistic and historic minority of Bengali-speaking Hindus who migrated from East Pakistan to the State of Bihar in India during the aftermath of the 'Partition'. At the juncture of the British withdrawal in 1947, British India was divided into India and (East and West) Pakistan. This division is commonly referred to as 'the Partition'. It was associated with extreme violence and massive transfers of populations. No one knows how many were killed during the Partition violence. No one knows how many were displaced and dispossessed. What we know is that, between 1946 and 1951, nearly nine million Hindus and Sikhs came to India and about six million Muslims went to Pakistan. According to the newspaper Hindu (3-1-2002), of the said nine million, five million came from what became West Pakistan, and four million from East Pakistan. Most left their place of birth due to a sense of insecurity. Many had experienced extreme violence during Hindu- Muslim communal riots, others had suffered discrimination and again others severe economic deprivation.

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New Opportunities

Angry Young Men in a Tanzanian Refugee Camp

Simon Turner

This chapter sets out to explore how life in a refugee camp has affected gender and age relations among Burundian refugees in Tanzania, and how refugees interpret camp life in terms of gender, age and class. How do young men manoeuvre in this new space, finding a place for themselves and making sense of their new setting?1 The chapter is based on a year's fieldwork in Lukole Refugee Camp in northwest Tanzania. At the time of fieldwork, 1997-98, around 100,000 Burundian Hutu refugees lived in the camp. In conversations and group interviews the refugees gave the impression of living in a world of social and moral decay. This was often expressed in terms of deteriorating gender relations. Responding to a question on the general changes in the camp, one of the men related his hardships directly to problems between husbands and wives.

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Identities and the Sense of Belonging

Iranian Women Activists in Exile

Halleh Ghorashi

The Iranian revolution of 1979 forced many people to leave their country. Among them were the Iranian women of this study, who as political activists within leftist organisations had to leave Iran when the Islamists assumed absolute power in 1981 and suppressed all opposition. These women became exiles throughout the world, including the Netherlands and the United States, where I conducted my research. My fieldwork, which took eight months in each country, was concentrated in Amsterdam in 1996 and Los Angeles in 1997. During that time, for some months I participated in and observed the Iranian communities in both countries to grasp the dynamics in each context. The majority of women interviewed in both cities have a higher education and jobs related to their fields of study.

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A Community Empowered?

The Bosnia Project in the U.K.

Lynnette Kelly

This chapter is about a British programme launched in the early 1990s for the resettlement of refugees from Bosnia Herzegovina. The problem addressed is how refugees have experienced the particular policy interventions implemented in the name of humanitarian aid. The purpose is to offer a critical view based on the presupposition that intentions meant to increase refugee empowerment are one thing, to operationalise these intentions effectively is quite another step. The outbreak of war in Bosnia Herzegovina in April 1992 produced the largest flow of refugees and displaced persons in Europe since the Second World War. Thousands of people fled outwards and sought safety in other European countries, and the term 'ethnic cleansing' entered the world's vocabulary. The discovery by journalists of the existence of concentration camps in Bosnia eventually led to the closure of those camps, and UNHCR appealed for countries to offer a place of safety for those who had been detained. Britain offered to take one thousand persons, plus their dependants, and eventually around 2,500 persons in total arrived as part of this quota.

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Refugee-generated Return

The Case of Guatemala

Anita Rapone and Charles Simpson

Refugee populations constitute a set of unresolved problems. Given the desire of most refugees to return to their country of origin, the strain which refugees represent for less-developed countries of first asylum, and the increasing reluctance of the industrial world to accept refugees, the best available solution to the refugee crisis is repatriation (Coles 1989). But often the problems which generated a particular refugee flow — civil war, the destruction of infrastructure and the collapse of marketing systems, landlessness and deepening poverty, and government sponsored repression — are chronic and systemic, not episodic. Yet in the view of many refugees as well as host countries and the international community, return cannot await structural reform in their countries of origin. Although the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) has represented refugees in negotiations with host countries and countries of origin in an effort to assure safe reintegration, successful repatriation under hostile conditions has remained elusive (Goodwin-Gil 1989; Stein and Cuny 1991).

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Between Victim and Agent

Women's Ambivalent Empowerment in Displacement

Darini Rajasingham-Senanayake

Highlighting gross violations of women's bodies and space in situations of conflict and displacement has been part of an important intervention by activists and women's groups to promote women's rights as human rights internationally. The various and systematic forms of violence that women experience at the hands of armed combatants, whether state armies or paramilitary personnel, in situations of armed conflict and displacement was extensively documented in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and other parts of Africa and Asia. This process culminated in the UN resolution that established rape as a war crime and saw the appointment of the first UN Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women in 1994. But the focus on women as 'victims' of war and displacement in international human rights and humanitarian discourses may have also resulted in the elision of how long-term social upheaval might have transformed gender roles and provided new spaces for women's agency.

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Refugees between Relief and Development

Georg Frerks

The last decade has seen an intensive debate on linking relief and development. Below the main arguments are reviewed. Which conceptual approach is most appropriate after considering the arguments pro and contra linking? Is that a model based on a continuum between relief and development or one which believes that the concept of discontinuity can better deal with the empirical, political and practical realities regarding refugees?

Introduction
The debate on linking relief and development started in the late 1980s with workshops, academic literature and policy discussions devoted to the subject. The magnitude of funds spent on an ever-increasing amount of complex humanitarian emergencies forced humanitarian and development workers to find ways of mutual coordination and even linking their efforts.

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Rethinking the Relation between Relief and Development

'Villagisation' in Rwanda

Dorothea Hilhorst and Mathijs van Leeuwen

In the aftermath of the 1990-1994 war and genocide, Rwanda had to face the return of an estimated 2.5 million refugees in a four-year period. In order to address the housing need of these people, the Rwanda Government, with the support of international organisations, started a villagisation programme by the name of Imidugudu. From early 1997 on, this programme came to target the entire rural population: the government had decided that all scattered households in the countryside had to be regrouped in villages. Within four years, international organisations helped to build about 250 communities with 85,000 houses. Many more were constructed with local means only. What started as an emergency project turned into a far-stretching development programme.

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Dilemmas of Humanitarian Aid

Supporting Internal Refugees in Sri Lanka

Joke Schrijvers

With the increase of long-lasting intrastate conflicts, the extent and nature of forced migration have changed. Today, 'internally displaced people' by far outnumber refugees. According to conservative estimates, there are altogether 20-25 million internal refugees as against 12 million refugees (Hampton 1998: xv; UNHCR 2001). The 1951 UN convention does not protect internal refugees, but all agencies providing humanitarian aid in crisis situations are confronted with people who are uprooted within their own countries. More often than not these people belong to minority groups. The question of how to provide help to internal refugees in situations where sovereign governments fail to do so urgently needs attention.

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