Refugees; the rising flood.

• Author: Newland, Kathleen
• Position: Cover Story

SPREADING VIOLENCE IS DRIVING GROWING NUMBERS OF PEOPLE FROM THEIR HOMELANDS, AND THE COUNTRIES OF ASYLUM ARE FINDING IT HARDER TO ACCOMMODATE THEM.

Virtually every political upheaval in today's increasingly crowded and dangerous world uproots people from their homes and sends them fleeing from violence and persecution. Those who manage to cross an international border to seek protection are called refugees. Their numbers now approach 19 million worldwide. In addition, 2.7 million Palestinian refugees and their descendants live in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and the occupied territories. There are at least another 25 million people who have fled from violence and persecution but have not crossed an international border: the internally displaced. All told, roughly one of every 123 people on earth is among the dispossessed.

The number of refugees has been climbing for the past 30 years or more. The reasons are complex: an amalgam of political violence, conflict over economic resources, environmental degradation, ethnic or religious persecution, and abuses of human rights. Increasingly often, such turmoil takes place against a background of disintegrating governments--the very institutions that should be expected to mediate conflict, or at least shelter people from its worst effects. In many cases, the government itself is the agent of persecution.

The inability to count on the protection of their own governments is what sets refugees apart from other migrants, however desperate, and other people in need of humanitarian assistance. Refugees know that they cannot expect, at home, the protection of the police, access to a fair trial, redress of grievances through the courts, prosecution of those who violate their rights, or public assistance in the face of disaster. In a world made up of sovereign states, people who do not have access to the legal and social protection that a properly functioning government normally extends to its citizens, as best it can, must look to the international community for protection.

Refugee laws, laid down in international treaties and adopted into national legal codes, acknowledge and spell out legal obligations toward people whose own governments are unwilling or unable to protect them. These laws define a refugee as any person who, "owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable--or, owing to such fear, unwilling--to avail himself of the protection of that country. . . ." The most fundamental obligation to refugees is to ensure that they are not sent back to a place where they would face persecution.

The international system of refugee protection was consolidated in the aftermath of World War II and during the tense early stages of the Cold War. To negotiators looking back to the Nazi persecutions and Stalinist repression, the causes of the refugee problems did not seem excessively complicated. A political consensus among Western democracies that the people of Eastern Europe were persecuted by their governments meant that the limited numbers who managed to flee were automatically granted asylum. As conflicts over decolonization in the late 1950s and 1960s--such as those in Algeria, Angola, and Zaire--generated large numbers of refugees, the causes again seemed self-evident.

But refugees' numbers escalated sharply in the 1970s, and set off a vigorous debate about the root causes of their movement. Although individually targeted persecution was still rampant, more and more people were fleeing from general violence, severe disruptions of public order, and the inability to feed themselves in the midst of armed conflict. Moreover, many refugees were intermingled with people who moved not out of fear for their lives and freedom, but in search of better economic opportunities. As the numbers continued to rise throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, policymakers began to focus more sharply on how they could prevent conditions from deteriorating to the point at which people feel compelled to flee.

POLITICAL ROOTS

The main instrument of international refugee law, the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, identified what is still a major reason that people are forced out of their native countries: persecution based on who the refugee is (race, nationality, membership in a particular social group) or what he or she believes (religion or political opinion). Persecution usually takes place when there are fundamental political disputes over who controls the government, how society organizes itself, and who commands the power, privileges, patronage, and perks that go with political control. These disputes are at their most heated during periods of intense change--in the aftermath of a revolutionary struggle (successful or failed), at the moment of a far-reaching change of regime, or at the emergence of a new state.

Virtually all of the conflicts that caused people to flee their homes during 1993 and early 1994 were civil conflicts. Weak states, such as Liberia or Haiti, are especially prone to internal violence, since credible mechanisms for resolving conflicts peacefully or seeking redress for violations of rights in such states have usually eroded or ceased to function altogether. The lack of representative political institutions, an independent judiciary, impartial law enforcement, or free elections may lead people to conclude that armed resistance is the only way to bring about change. In many cases, no party or faction is able to establish control, and political conflict degenerates into anarchy, with no one able to provide security to the people. Somalia, with its tens of thousands of dead, hundreds of thousands of refugees, and millions of internally displaced, is today's example of this kind of nightmare--but elements of the pattern have also been visible in Afghanistan, Haiti, and Liberia.

As the superpower rivalry of the Cold War all too clearly demonstrated, external political support for one side or the other prolongs internal conflict and raises the level of violence. The largest refugee movements of the last three decades--from Afghanistan, Vietnam, Cambodia, the Horn of Africa, Angola, and Mozambique--were exacerbated by superpower involvement. External intervention in local disputes often disrupts local traditions of bargaining and compromise by giving one party, clan, or faction a definitive upper hand. An outside patron may prop up leaders who have little if any domestic legitimacy, and give them the firepower to enforce their will. An infusion of military aid increases the destructiveness of confrontation, while economic aid raises the stakes in the contest for control of domestic institutions.

ECONOMIC ROOTS

Economic tensions are among the major...