Getting there: Refugees return home by plane, truck, on foot, by donkey or by bus – in small groups or in massive human waves. From left to right: Bangladesh 1972; Mali 1997; Rwanda 1996; Ethiopia 1998; Afghanistan 2002.

In humanitarian folklore it is known as the 'Miracle of Mozambique' and Maria Recartade was an honorary member. For 30 years Mozambique, a long sliver of mountains and scrub on Africa's eastern flank, had torn itself apart – first in a colonial struggle against the Portuguese and then in a savage civil war.

Tens of thousands of civilians were killed, including Maria's husband, brother and several relatives. Around six million people abandoned their homes, including the young peasant girl.

"I took to the bush with my four children and hid there many nights," she recalled, fearful of both government troops and guerrillas, until she fled to neighbouring Zimbabwe. "If I had stayed, I would have been killed," she said.

Instead, she became a longtime refugee and like tens of millions of people violently uprooted from their homes both before and since those events, the thought of one day 'going home' sustained her through years of hardship and a cycle of psychological despair.

"There were weeks and months when I could only think of my dead husband and my home," she said. "My memories were the only thing I had left," but though the thought of home kept her going, there were several unexpected twists in Maria's tale before she could realize her dream.

She remarried and after a peace agreement was signed in 1992, the 'big moment' came to return. There was immediate euphoria ... followed instantly by doubt and apprehension.

"I was happier than I had ever been when I first heard the news the war was over," Maria said. "And then I was afraid. I was safe in the refugee camp. My children had food. Why should I risk everything again? Perhaps the fighting would restart and my new family would be killed again."

"But Mozambique was my home. I must go back."

Overcoming that initial fear, another surprise awaited her when she got back. "A refugee bus dropped us off," she said. "Officials gave us food, some sheeting and tools. But there was nothing else. Nothing. There were no houses, no schools, no wells, no crops. Maybe no future here."

She persevered and, by local standards, prospered, building a neat pilhota (hut) of mud brick and branches with a cleanly swept courtyard of baked mud and a small plot to grow vegetables and raise goats and chickens.

During a 30-month period in the early 1990s, 1.7 million refugees like Maria caught trains, planes, cars and buses or simply walked back to their homes. Another four million civilians who had been hiding near their villages emerged from the surrounding bush in one of the most successful repatriations in modern history.

THE 'ONLY' SOLUTION

How best to help refugees restart their lives has enjoyed a chequered history.

In the middle of the last century, as international structures were first put into place to help uprooted peoples, the emphasis either on 'going home' or resettling people in new locations fluctuated, depending on the particular crisis and the political profile of the refugees.

During the chaos and aftermath of World War II, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) helped an estimated seven million people to repatriate.

A successor organization, the International Refugee Organization (IRO), was created in 1946, but took a different direction and resettled more than one million people in host countries around the world.

In the early decades of UNHCR's existence, western governments continued to open their doors to Hungarian and East European refugees during the Cold War, and to Indochinese civilians in the wake of conflict in Southeast Asia.

But as the global political climate changed and the number of people cared for by UNHCR swelled from around one million when the agency began work in 1951, to more than 27 million in the mid- 1990s, the welcome mat was largely withdrawn. What is now officially called 'voluntary repatriation' became the only practical solution for the majority of them.

And in the last two or three years there were encouraging signs that many more civilians, especially those who had been displaced longest in so-called protracted crises, were headed back to their ancestral farms and towns.

At the start of the new millennium, the agency helped an estimated 500,000 people to return. In 2002, that figure soared to nearly 2.5 million, principally because of the huge numbers of Afghans going back. Last year, though the pace slackened somewhat, unofficial tallies indicated the rate of official returns was still strong. Additionally, at least two million people in such countries as Angola probably went back unannounced and without any official help.


The reality: Life can often be harsh as refugees find their homes destroyed or have to rebuild totally from scratch. Left to right: Sri Lanka 2002; Afghanistan 2003; Kosovo 1999; Eritrea 2001; Kabul 2003.

COMPLEX PROBLEMS

In theory at least, since refugees, humanitarian agencies such as UNHCR and major governments all agree on the overall solution, the process of 'going home' should be relatively straightforward. Instead, it is always a complex equation embracing extreme emotion and practical considerations – euphoria, fear, dreams, nightmares, nostalgia, hostility – which must be addressed.

Why abandon the relative safety of a refugee camp, no matter how desperate the conditions, for a leap into the unknown? Will there be any homes, schools or clinics to return home to? What about land and crops? Will there be jobs and education? What about physical dangers such as land mines? Can people who have been away, sometimes for years, socially reintegrate with the civilian population which stayed at home during the war?

Both sides have often changed ... their families grown larger, some people even changing their religion. Can civilians, especially the young, who have tasted city or urban life during exile, even within the confines of a crowded refugee camp, return to isolated and often primitive hamlets and farms?

Refugees sometimes face the perplexing prospect of deciding whether to go back to a country where there is peace in one region, but fighting in another. That has happened in Afghanistan, the Congo basin and is currently the situation in the Sudan where hundreds of thousands of refugees may return to the south of the country this year, while similar numbers have been displaced by ongoing fighting in the west, some of them fleeing to neighbouring Chad.

If individual refugees face such dilemmas, agencies, including UNHCR, must factor into their planning from the very moment an emergency begins the prospect of how and when refugees will eventually go home.

There are obvious and immediate logistical considerations: how long are the incoming refugees expected to stay and how much shelter, food and medicine will they need?

But there are more subtle concerns, too, which will eventually influence the 'going home' process. If civilians stay for an extended period, when should schools be established? What curriculum should be followed – that of the host country or the region from which they have come? In the case of refugees from Mozambique, should children have been taught in the lingua franca of that country – Portuguese – or in English as spoken in surrounding host states? What language eventually will be more useful?

What kind of skills should be taught in the camps which would be appropriate if and when refugees return home? How involved should humanitarian agencies become in addressing obvious social and cultural inequities in a refugee community?

The empowerment of women has been a major theme in refugee work for many years, but what impact will that have when families do return to their traditional villages and resume their former lifestyles? Should girls continue to go to school? (There is already a backlash against this in some parts of Afghanistan). Who actually will make the decisions in the household and who will go to work?

How can the infamous 'gap' between emergency aid – food, shelter and medicine doled out in refugee camps – and longer-term development aid – the rebuilding of clinics and other infrastructure in returnee villages – which has plagued refugee situations for decades, be eliminated?

And however many refugees do return to their 'old homes', how best to help others who, for various reasons cannot return, find 'new homes' in other countries?

CONFUSING

If the pull of 'home' remains strong among adult refugees, the situation is more confused among younger people who may have been exposed for the first time to radically different social environments during their most impressionable years including music, fashion, alcohol, electricity and running water.

Many of these youngsters were born in exile and have never seen their 'home' or even their native country. Though exact numbers are difficult to assess, perhaps as many as 50-60 percent of today's refugees fall into this category.

Liyakath Aikhan Mohammed Aslam was very young when his family fled during Sri Lanka's quarter century of conflict in which an estimated 65,000 people were killed and some one million uprooted. Following a 2002 cease-fire between the government and Tamil Tiger rebels, more than 300,000 civilians went home and the youngster, now 21-years-old, was in no doubt about his future either.

"I was seven when I fled," he recalled. "I can't even remember anything about my own village. But I will be so proud when I return there. I simply cannot wait."

A half world away, 24-year-old James Badradin did go back recently to Sudan's Nuba mountains, but his homecoming was one of cultural confusion (see separate article). After spending his refugee years in the streets of Kenya's bustling capital, Nairobi, he found little to attract him in his home village where there were no jobs, no electricity, he was unable to date girls as he had done in Kenya and even his cool jeans and hip-hop cassette tapes were glaringly out of place.

Young people who had taken refuge in the besieged Bosnian capital of Sarajevo during the 1990s wars in the Balkans, or ventured further afield to Europe and North America, often worried in interviews about returning to the narrow confines of rural life in homes without electricity or running water and little social activity.

Even older returnees find that they and people who stayed behind have changed irrevocably. Thirty-five-year old Anthor Omar fled his village in 1989 to escape Sudan's civil war, but during his forced exile in the capital, Khartoum, he converted to Islam. When he returned home with a young family, they not only had to try to 'ruralize' themselves to farming, but also to heal the deep schism with Omar's Christian father. The animosity between the mainly Muslim north and Christian-Animist south has been the driving force of much of the country's troubles. Here it was again, in miniature, with a single family at war with itself.

BITTERSWEET DEPARTURE

Refugees head for home in a variety of ways – spontaneously, in small groups, on foot or conversely, in carefully organized repatriations and sometimes in their tens of thousands per day. In 2002, more than two million Afghans returned within months of the installation of an interim government. In the same period, as many as 1.5 million persons internally displaced in Angola and 100,000 refugees did not wait for any official help, but just simply went back.

Surprisingly perhaps, there is not only concern among refugees about their uncertain future as expressed by Maria Recartade on her return to Mozambique, but also genuine tears in leaving a camp, a familiar environment and the many friends people had made, especially if they have been in exile for many years.

"Mzilal Kidane Maasho hugged and kissed her neighbours as grandchildren wailed around her and tears ran down her cheeks," Refugees magazine recently reported in describing the departure of Eritrean refugees from Sudan. "Her husband, Kidane Maasho also sobbed uncontrollably as he defiantly insisted 'I have waited for this day for 20 years and I am not afraid of returning home. It is sad that I am leaving my friends behind, but I am going back to the land that God gave us.'"

This family, like so many others, was fortified not only by the powerful and all encompassing dream of their ancestral hut, but also by thoughts of the small and individual pleasures they most missed in exile and looked forward to upon their return.

"Before I came to the Sudan [a strictly Islamic country where alcohol is forbidden], I used to drink beer and for the past 20 years I have not had a single one," Maasho reminisced. He and his wife enjoyed a warm and gentle return, being greeted by extended family who had flown to Eritrea themselves from a new home in the United States and over a particularly satisfying iced drink, Kidane Maasho chortled: "I've finally had that beer – it is cold and delicious."

Not every homecoming is as pleasant as the Maashos. When Osman Hysenlekaj returned to Kosovo from his brief exile in neighbouring Albania, he found his home destroyed and his 40 sheep and 10 cows long since killed off. Worse was to follow at the farmhouse at the foot of the appropriately named Mountain of the Damned. Searching the property, Osman found the body of his 83-year-old father who had refused to flee a Serb advance, stuffed into a nearby well.

Osman cleaned out a barn to shelter his wife and children and erected a UNHCR-supplied tent under a nearby tree to make the blistering summer heat a little more bearable. "All I know is that I have to get on with my life," he said at the time, displaying a stoicism which has been the bedrock allowing millions of hapless civilians to survive 'the refugee experience.'

Twenty-three-year-old Mohan Raj Sumathi also decided to go home with her daughter and husband to Sri Lanka from India, but their return was almost cut brutally short when the tiny fishing vessel they were traveling in capsized at night, tossing 20 passengers into the pitch-black water. No one was able to swim, but two fellow passengers grabbed her three-year-old daughter, Rana, and held her above the waves while the others were able to stay afloat in the shallows. They eventually righted the craft and reached land.

"We lost everything except our lives, but many people kissed the land when we reached it," she said. "It feels good, very good to be back. I have no regrets."


Rebuilding: Refugees are resourceful in rebuilding their homes, their countries and in recognizing the importance of education. From left to right: Bosnia 1998; Cambodia 1980; Angola; Afghanistan 2003; Sierra Leone 2003.

LEARNING PROCESS

'Going Home' operations have also been a steep learning curve for humanitarian agencies. With most of their attention focused on the 'front end' of emergencies – the flight of refugees and legal and logistical help for them in camps – repatriations in the past often received only fleeting attention and resources.

One field officer remembers helping Namibians return to their homes in 1990. "We would pile refugees into a land cruiser and head out into the bush. One time, we arrived outside a little hut of thorns and sticks after nightfall to reunite some returnees with their family. The family came out of the hut, woken by the headlights and engine noise and everything dazzled them. They stood there bemused," he said. "They didn't even know we were coming. It was a surprise to everyone. We just dropped the refugees off and left them there. I wonder what happened next."

Operations have improved considerably since then. Refugees returning under UNHCR auspices generally receive not only assistance with transport, but also basic items ranging from blankets to seed, several months supply of food and shelter materials to rebuild at least part of their homes.

Although little research has been conducted, it is also quite clear that the refugees themselves are canny operators in deciding when and how to go back. Often a family will send one or two members – generally elderly people who most want to return – to reconnoitre the situation. They might re-establish themselves and begin rebuilding or report back on the difficulties.

In the Balkans some of these returnees became known as 'day trippers' because of their shuttle visits. The rest of the family, meanwhile, would continue to receive international assistance and shelter.

The U.N. refugee agency also recognized years ago the importance of including local communities as well as returnees in all economic, social and cultural projects. So-called QIPs, quick impact projects such as rehabilitating roads and clinics were launched to benefit entire villages, though according to some critics there has not been enough sustained follow through to determine the long-term viability of many of these programmes.

High Commissioner Ruud Lubbers has re-emphasized the importance of trying to bridge the gap between emergency aid in the initial phases of any refugee crisis and longer-term development assistance once refugees go home.

And for those who cannot return under any circumstances, the agency continues to encourage countries hosting refugee communities to integrate them into their own populations, and for other governments further afield to offer more uprooted persons the chance to permanently resettle there and begin new lives.

Jeff Crisp, head of UNHCR's Evaluation Unit, said there must be both more research and more flexibility in trying to shape refugee return.

In teaching civilians basic skills, for instance, "Are the predictable projects such as sewing for women and carpentry for men" necessarily the correct programmes? And just because a man was a farmer and lived in a small village before he became a refugee, should he continue in the same job in the same place when conditions may have altered dramatically on the ground?

STRONG TIES

Despite all of the difficulties, the pull of home for most refugees is stronger than any obstacle. Nearly one million ethnic Albanians fled Kosovo in 1999. They were often forced out at gunpoint. They saw family members butchered by Serb forces, their homes destroyed and their identification papers deliberately torn up.

Yet within three months, in a dramatic reversal of fortune and under the protection of NATO forces, most of those who had fled returned home to their shattered province. Perhaps never before had so many people left and then returned in such a short time.

Abdul Hameed Badurdeen was given two hours to leave, without any possessions, from his home in Jaffna, in Sri Lanka. "We were told we might be back in two days," he remembered. "Thirteen years later, and we are still not home."

But he added, "However long it takes, we will go back eventually."

And in Eritrea, the old couple Mzilal Kidane Maasho and her husband said, "We thank God to have kept us this long to see this way. We are old and weak, but we have finally made it home."

Source: Refugees Magazine Issue 134: "Dreams, Fears and Euphoria: The Long Road Home" (March 2004). Download the complete issue in pdf format: low-resolution (880Kb) here or high-resolution (1.9Mb) here