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Security in Refugee Movements
Promoting Social and Economic
Rights in West Africa
Read
more, including the conference papers, on the Stanley Foundation website
International Refugee Policy Asylum in the U.S.
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Refugee Protection
in Africa
How to Ensure Security and Development
for Refugees and Local Hosts
Major International Conference Takes Place in
Entebbe, Uganda
Refugee Protection in Africa: the Conference
From November 11 - 14, 2002, the Lawyers Committee co-hosted
a conference on refugee protection in Uganda. Entitled “Refugee
Protection in Africa: How to Ensure Security and Development for
Refugees and Hosts,” the conference was developed in partnership
with the Stanley Foundation.
The conference examined two themes, representing the most pressing
challenges to refugee protection in Africa today:
- Ensuring security for refugees and their hosts.
- Ensuring economic development for refugees and
their hosts.
In the massive and chaotic movements that have
come to characterize Africa’s refugee flows—most dramatically
in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide—and their growing
economic marginalization, host governments, international donors
and the United Nations are struggling to find adequate and appropriate
responses.
Participants traveled from the six African countries with the greatest
experience in hosting large refugee populations: Guinea, Ivory Coast,
Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia. From each country, officials
from defense and interior ministries, military, internal security
officers, academic specialists, refugees, and representatives of
local service agencies attended. Other participants included officials
from the UNHCR and the U.S. government, as well as non-governmental
experts on refugee protection.
In order to provide participants from such diverse backgrounds with
a shared frame of reference for the consideration of each theme,
two discussion papers were presented. Professor Barbara Harrell-Bond
presented “Towards the Economic and Social ‘Integration’
of Refugees,” while Professor Monica Kathina Juma’s
paper, “Migration, Security and Refugee Protection: A Reflection,”
provided the frame of reference for the security discussion. An
analysis of policy developments on the global and regional level
provided the broader context for development of policy recommendations;
these included the development of NEPAD (New Partnership for Africa’s
Development), the African Union and geopolitical shifts in the wake
of the September 11th attacks on the United States.
The discussions that followed focused on exchanging information
from participants who had faced the challenges posed by the two
themes with view to identifying best practices.
Lessons Learned
- Humanitarian missions
are put in jeopardy when armed elements attempt to exploit the
assistance offered to refugees. This is often done when armed
elements move alongside refugee populations and try to divert
aid to assist the war effort.
- Similarly, when criminals
are allowed to operate with impunity in refugee camps, the visible
presence of these elements can taint all of the refugees with
criminality in the minds of the host population.
- The failure to approach
the economic and social needs of both refugee and host populations
in an integrated manner can also create tensions.
- The international aid
attracted to a region by the presence of refugees can have considerable
positive social and economic impact if managed correctly.
- Where
the refugee response is one isolated from the host community economy,
however, both refugees and the host community can be faced with
considerable challenges in meeting their basic needs, especially
as the amount of assistance withers in protracted refugee situations.
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