Refugees

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) currently recognizes 27 million persons as refugees (persons who have sought refuge across national boundaries) and another 26 million as internally displaced persons (IDPs) (persons who have sought refuge within their own countries). These people have fled war and political persecution based on ethnicity, religion, or race. Sometimes refugees result from natural disasters that force the migration of people into regions away from their homes. The Geneva Convention of 1951 defines a refugee as one who, “owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted … is [living] outside [their] country of nationality.” Advocates for refugees suggest the broadening of the convention definition to include IDPs.

Most of the world's displaced persons (refugees and IDPs) are found in Africa, Asia, and Europe, with a disproportionate number in the developing world. Ninety per cent of war refugees exist in the developing world, with the poorest countries—such as Malawi, Pakistan, and Zaire—harboring that same percentage. In 1999, about 9 million refugees existed in Africa, as a result of conflict in Rwanda, Liberia, Somalia, and Sudan. Asia harbors 8 million refugees who fled political persecution and war in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, and Palestine. In Europe, the conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina and in the Caucasus region (Armenia and Georgia) resulted in the creation of 8 million refugees. Significant numbers of IDPs are in Sudan, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Algeria, Ghana, Nigeria, Republic of Congo, India, Myanmar, Cambodia, and Croatia.

A significant cause of the refugee crisis around the world is ethnic, political, and military conflicts fostered by the process and ideology of nation and state building. For example, the partitioning (boundary revising) of Africa by Europeans at the 1878 Berlin Conference ignored the territorial and ethnic collectivities of African social groups, thereby dividing traditional ethnic communities and encompassing socially distant African communities into a common territory (“nation”). This nation-building process set off conflict between the dominating colonial governments and the subjected Africans, as well as conflict between culturally different ethnics forced to live together in the arbitrarily drawn African nations.

Throughout the 20th century, the conflict between the colonized Africans and European colonizers manifested into the major African independence movements of countries such as Rwanda, Burundi, Angola, Namibia, Rhodesia, South Africa, and Mozambique and exacerbated the conflict between the culturally diverse Africans living within the same territorial and political boundaries. An example of this bi-ethnic conflict is the ongoing war between Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda. The mass slaughters in 1994 of Tutsis by Hutus resulted in a forced migration of millions of Rwandans into Zaire, Burundi, and Uganda.

Although the ideology of nationalism assumes the right of nations to protect their people (“citizens”), its extreme version often creates a refugee crisis. In the 20th century, for example, ethnic nationalists interpreted this vying for nationhood as a right to expulsion, abuse, genocide, exclusion, and political persecution, leading many people to flee into neighboring countries.