Refugees Magazine Issue 131: (Africa) – Cover Story: Africa on the Edge

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The human toll has been appalling, but is the light at the end of the tunnel a little brighter?

by Ray Wilkinson

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In an era of short wars, 'controlled' numbers of casualties and sanitized images such as those emerging from Iraq, events in Africa seem almost incomprehensible.

Deep in the heart of the Congo basin, some three million people, perhaps many more, perished during an ongoing war described as the deadliest documented conflict in Africa's history. And even as American marines mopped up last pockets of resistance in Baghdad in the full glare of thousands of television cameras, hundreds of people were being slaughtered almost unnoticed in the latest atrocity in one remote corner of the Congo region.

During the course of the conflict which began in 1998 and which at times involved six armies from surrounding countries, countless militias and homegrown gangs of thugs, 2.5 million people were ripped from their homes and forced to seek shelter in steaming rain forests and neighbouring states.

Angola suffered a similar fate. In a civil war lasting almost three decades, an estimated one million people were killed, and anywhere from three to five million were again uprooted from their ancestral villages and towns. They trudged across a destroyed landscape from one temporary sanctuary to another, often forced to eat berries and roots to survive and in constant danger of being killed or maimed, not only by the combatants, but also from millions of mines which made one of the continent's richest countries a vast and deadly booby trap.

Far to the north, Sudan has been destabilized by civil conflict virtually from independence in 1956, and once more the human toll was one of biblical proportions rather than the quick and limited conflicts the public in industrialized countries now expect. Two million people died, four million roam the northern desert wastes and southern savannah grasslands of the continent's largest country, and a half million refugees were forced to flee even further afield.

Those, of course, were only the largest and longest of a series of upheavals which wracked and then wrecked large swathes of Africa: Burundi, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Western Sahara, Liberia, Congo-Brazzaville and most recently Côte d'Ivoire and the Central African Republic.

Then there was Rwanda: as many as one million people were slaughtered in the mid-1990s in the world's latest genocide. And again, images of endless flood tides of refugees shuffling along in billowing clouds of dust, buffeted mercilessly by the latest chaos.

A SCAR

These images are familiar to a global audience. So much so that British Prime Minister Tony Blair insisted in one keynote address that the anarchy could not continue and "The state of Africa is a scar on the conscience of the world, but if the world focused on it, we could heal it."

So, two years after that clarion call, how is Africa doing?

Donor countries, aid agencies, national governments do provide large amounts of assistance to the continent. UNHCR's current annual budget for Africa, for instance, is nearly $400 million.

And there is other good news. In 1995, UNHCR assisted seven million refugees. Today, that figure is less than half (though the refugee agency does now also help some other classes of distressed civilians, including victims of war and persecution living in their own countries. The overall number of uprooted people throughout Africa is still a staggering 15 million).

The West African nation of Sierra Leone suffered through a decade of civil war in the 1990s where the severing of the arms and limbs of civilian victims became a loathsome signature of that brutal conflict. Today, the country is enjoying a fragile peace.

Anywhere between one million and 1.5 million internally displaced Angolans and another 100,000 refugees from one of the world's longest wars have returned home 'spontaneously' following a peace accord signed last year. Hundreds of thousands will follow suit this year if the guns remain silent.

In a vast swirl of peoples constantly on the move across the length and breadth of the continent, around 440,000 longtime refugees returned to their former homes in the Horn of Africa in the last couple of years. Nearly two million refugees from Burundi, Sudan, Somalia and the Congo region are pinning their own hopes of seeing their homes again in the near future on various peace negotiations currently underway.

Countries such as the United States which traditionally offer to resettle particularly vulnerable refugees, are paying increasing attention to Africa (though Washington's overall resettlement programme has still to recover from the after-effects of the terrorist attacks there in September, 2001).

A project called the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) which aims to promote continental peace and stability through sustainable development has received an enthusiastic global response. In any new era of calm, a majority of displaced persons would also be able to restart their lives.

A CROSSROADS

But Africa undoubtedly remains on a knife-edge.

High Commissioner Ruud Lubbers said: "Africa is again at a crossroads." While "millions of civilians have literally been killed in the flames of war, there is hope too ... in places like Sierra Leone, Angola and in the Horn of Africa."

David Lambo, the head of UNHCR's Africa Bureau, insists that on purely humanitarian issues, "We are a little further down the road than six months ago. The light is getting a little brighter at the end of the tunnel. But it is equally true that the continent is at a new divide."

Why, when an increasingly smaller world can lavish such attention and assistance – at least short-term – on places like Afghanistan and latterly Iraq, does Africa still seem so desperate and so ignored?

The continent continues to produce its own despots and misguided policies, but the malaise goes deeper than that. Africa is still viewed as far away, humanitarian crises are 'over there', both donor capitals and refugee hosting countries suffer from 'refugee fatigue', what help is provided simply is not enough and the continent is apparently no longer strategically important.

Only a few years ago, such places as Zaire and Angola were prized for their oil and minerals. But Cuban and white South African troops – proxies for the big powers – have long since departed Angola. This outside involvement was a catalyst for many of the continent's problems, but when the foreigners walked away, Africa was left to suffer largely in silence and without the help necessary to clean up the mess.

Economies, which could be self-sustaining, are short-circuited by rules made in distant capitals. African farmers could help feed the world, but agricultural subsidies granted to producers in the world's industrialized countries undercut one of the few viable options the continent has to break out of its cycle of deprivation and poverty which in turn help to fuel wars and refugee flight.

Wealthy donors and international institutions have spent millions of dollars on short-term humanitarian relief, especially when thousands of people were dying in front of the television cameras as happened in Rwanda, but they have little appetite to help underwrite long-term development.

Health, education and social services crumble. HIV/AIDS has reached epidemic proportions in many African countries and more than two million people died from the disease there in 2001 alone. Another eight million succumbed to other easily treated ailments such as malaria, measles and diarrhea. At that rate of mortality, the population of a modestly sized European country such as Britain or France would be totally wiped out in less than a decade.

But some of the above assumptions may be wrong. Africa is no longer 'far away.' Tens of thousands of Africans trudge thousands of miles each year to the northern shores of the continent where they embark on leaky boats to try to gate-crash Europe. Warns David Lambo: "There is a sense of total desperation among many Africans and these kind of people will literally fight their way" into Europe and other prosperous regions.

Africa may also turn out to be the soft underbelly in the industrialized world's fight against global terrorism. Refugee camps and the chaos of such places as Somalia provide not only effective shelter for existing terrorists such as Al Qaida, but are breeding grounds for future gunmen. East Africa has already been scarred by lethal attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and against Israeli tourists in Kenya.

THE DOUBLE STANDARD

And then there is the reputed double standard: uprooted Africans simply do not get as much comparable aid as refugees in other parts of the world, a problem highlighted by the Iraq crisis.

As that war loomed, Afghan President Hamid Karzai pleaded with Washington: "Don't forget us if Iraq happens."

His country had seen a Soviet invasion and a subsequent big power struggle, virtual abandonment for years by a disinterested global community, another foreign intervention and, finally, renewed pledges that the past would not be repeated and the industrialized world this time would stand by Kabul.

Realpolitik being what it is, Karzai was not convinced.

For critics of the current global humanitarian setup too, the Iraq conflict has been a litmus test. For them, it vividly underlined the so-called double standard: the willingness to commit massive military, economic and financial resources in the Middle East in support of goals which could equally apply in Africa – supporting freedom and democracy, providing humanitarian assistance to a desperate population, uprooting terrorism.

The United Nations system launched its biggest ever appeal for $2.2 billion in humanitarian assistance in Iraq, a target which undoubtedly would have been met had the conflict been a prolonged one.

In the same period, fund raisers trying to find cash for Africa uniformly reported that early in the year traditional donors 'sat on their hands', refusing to commit to other goals until it was clear which way the war in Iraq would go. One European delegation pointedly remarked that "Angola is a country rich enough to fund its own repatriation" this year to which a desperate aid official asked aloud if the same rules would be applied to Iraqi refugees.

African commentators pointed to the huge but empty tent cities on the desert fringes of Iraq waiting for refugees who never arrived and compared that to the low level of interest and media coverage as tens of thousands of people fled the West African state of Côte d'Ivoire.

High Commissioner Lubbers insisted: "I am concerned that the interest being shown in Iraq has diminished the interest in Africa. Whenever money is needed for Africa, the funding is going down, not up." Projections suggest that the refugee agency's Africa budget this year will fall at least 15 percent short, an amount Lubbers called "less than the cost of an hour's war in Iraq" – but which nevertheless will necessitate painful cuts in education, self-sufficiency and other basic programmes.

The World Food Programme estimated 40 million Africans faced starvation and James Morris, WFP's Executive Director recently told the U.N. Security Council: "As much as I don't like it, I cannot escape the thought that we have a double standard. How is it we routinely accept a level of suffering and hopelessness in Africa we would never accept in any other part of the world? We simply cannot let this stand."

Noting that at the start of the Iraq war each family there had one month's supply of food, Morris said the Africans facing hunger "most of them women and children, would find it an immeasurable blessing to have a month's worth of food."


Saharan refugees in Algeria. © UNHCR/A.Hollmann

SHORTCHANGED

So are Africans being shortchanged? Comparing how much money is spent on each refugee in different parts of the world can be a slippery business and may not necessarily reflect the 'effective' amount of help each person receives. The cost of building shelters in the Balkans, for instance, may be higher than in Africa and would undoubtedly distort any direct dollar-per-refugee comparison.

But UNHCR has approved a minimum standard of assistance every refugee should receive and even these basic benchmarks covering such necessities as food, water and shelter are regularly breached in Africa because of lack of adequate financial and manpower resources.

The World Food Programme reduced already borderline rations to some refugee camps by half. Displaced persons in the Horn of Africa, one of the most inhospitable places on earth in the sweltering summer months, should receive a minimum 20 litres of water per day, but in the 1990s emergency some were forced to survive on less than three litres. Similar shortages are common today. In some camps only around 30 percent of children receive any type of education.

Jeff Crisp, the head of UNHCR's evaluation unit, said that desperate conditions in some camps deteriorated the longer they remained in existence, reflecting general 'fatigue' with protracted crises and the diversion of scarce resources to other projects.

The agency has now begun to compile a comprehensive 'gap analysis' between the minimum established targets and the reality on the ground.

Continent wide, conditions vary and the survey covered only refugees in established camps or transit centres and not those living in local communities.

And the shortfalls are hardly the stuff of international headlines, but do underscore the point made by WFP's James Morris that the daily living conditions of many uprooted peoples are unacceptable by any international norm.

Kenya's Kakuma and Dadaab camps are among the largest in Africa, sheltering between them 180,000 people. The survey showed even such mundane items as blankets, jerry cans and kitchen utensils were last distributed on a large scale seven years ago and those items have probably long since perished. The report warned: "The non-renewal of [such items] will aggravate the already precarious situation in camps. This will result in the outbreak of a number of diseases associated with cold, lack of hygienic facilities, etc."

In Dadaab, where summer temperatures can reach above 40 degrees Celsius, refugees currently receive 17 litres of water per day, but they are also expected to feed their livestock from this amount. There is only one toilet available for every 275 students at school compared with a target of one for every 20; there are 144 children for every classroom and one teacher for every 60 children. Because of funding constraints, the gap will not be bridged in the near term and the report said the agency "will not have fulfilled its duty of addressing the basic rights of the child to primary education."

Seventy-five percent of pregnant women are anaemic. The space available to each refugee is less than three square metres – minimum standard is 3.5 square metres – and "shelters are in pathetic conditions." The report added that "failure to upgrade living conditions of the refugees ... would hinder their protection from respiratory and other associated diseases, privacy and emotional security."

FIGHTING FOR FUNDS

Except for high profile emergencies such as Iraq, money for any of the nearly 22 million people UNHCR helps is increasingly difficult to obtain from traditional donors in the industrialized world.

Some critics charge humanitarian agencies themselves have contributed to Africa's funding problems by anticipating what donors are prepared to offer rather than realistically assessing actual needs on the ground – effectively self-censoring requirements.

That may be a good, level-headed business approach. A massive and 'unreasonable' increase in demand for 'regular' African funding from levels the lenders have come to expect, might have the opposite effect and could conceivably trigger a backlash affecting other global programmes.

But three years ago, Julia Taft, then the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State, Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration, effectively America's top refugee official, told Refugees Magazine: "The dichotomy of how refugees were treated in say, Guinea, versus how those from Kosovo were treated, was totally unacceptable for all of us; unacceptable to spend less than $20 million on 500,000 refugees from Sierra Leone and then ask for $240 million for an equivalent number of refugees in Kosovo. It is not fair and it is not right."

Taft then outlined an approach Washington has urged ever since in funding discussions on Africa: "If necessary, the donors should be the bad guys – UNHCR ought to tell us what is really needed and force the donors to say 'We can't afford that' rather than settling on the standard to what you think donors will be willing to give."

Despite that rejoinder, little has changed and overall funding levels have continued to shrink. Regional offices throughout the world are forced to fight and barter for every scarce dollar available in a bruising annual process. One recent arrival in West Africa, unused to this cut and thrust, came away from his first budget session literally shell-shocked. "The field office originally had targeted around $185 for every displaced person to be helped," he recalled. "This was cut down to $70. Eventually we settled on something in between. I felt I was in a bazaar in Istanbul bargaining for a carpet rather than trying to save people's lives."

HOPE AND DESPAIR

West Africa is a microcosm of both the hope and despair gripping the entire continent. It offers a warning that things in even the most seemingly stable of societies can quickly spin out of control or conversely, that with the right help, countries can be patched back together again.

In 1998 a village tailor and father of seven children called Alie K. was captured by rebels in Sierra Leone and in a gruesome ritual which became commonplace in a decade-long civil war, the guerrillas slashed off his left hand. "Three of them did it, one pointing a gun, the others cutting," Alie said. They also slashed his right hand and whipped him before he fled into the bush. Because of profuse bleeding, "I ripped away the rest of my left hand and threw it away because I could not hold it together while running," he said.

Such atrocities became commonplace, but today, in a remarkable turnabout, Sierra Leone is enjoying a fragile recovery after a 10-year-long civil war ended in 2002. A civilian government has been elected, the police and military are being rebuilt, some 14,000 United Nations troops help to keep the peace. UNHCR and other humanitarian agencies have assisted more than 220,000 refugees and hundreds of thousands of internally displaced persons return home in the last two years, including around 26,000 refugees thus far in 2003.

A so-called 4Rs pilot project was launched. High Commissioner Ruud Lubbers described the 4Rs initiative as an attempt to create a 'seamless' flow of assistance from governments, humanitarian and development agencies during the four major phases of a refugee return – repatriation, reintegration, rehabilitation and reconstruction. Some earlier refugee operations were blighted by breakdowns in the chain of aid, creating an infamous 'gap' in assistance and threatening to undermine the entire peace process and create new waves of refugees.

As UNHCR phases out its own participation in Sierra Leone by 2005, having spent between $80 and $100 million there, development agencies such as the World Bank will take over, accelerating long-term reconstruction of increasing numbers of schools, clinics and other infrastructure.

Sierra Leone recently opened a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, similar to the panel South Africa created to help that country overcome the trauma and crimes of the apartheid era. President Ahmed Tejan Kabbah said this commission would offer "a therapeutic contribution to the peace process, the healing of trauma and the removal of the emotional scars of the armed conflict."

The first witness, Tamba Finnoh, described how he had been abducted and had his right arm severed, but then added, "I have put everything behind me and I am ready to forgive."

ULTIMATE NIGHTMARE

In comparison, 26-year-old Abigail is continuing to live the ultimate refugee nightmare, a symbol of just how quickly things can go wrong in the most unlikely of places.

Since the age of 13, she has been constantly on the run, seeking a safe place to live. That refuge, however, has eluded her and she just keeps bumping into Africa's latest war.

As a teenager she fled Liberia in 1990 as that country plunged into its latest round of civil war. She trekked on foot along the disease-ridden coastline of the Guinea Gulf and eventually reached the capital of neighbouring Côte d'Ivoire. A decade ago, Abidjan was the epitome of the post-colonial African dream, a city of gleaming office towers, sophisticated French restaurants, dapper diplomats, thriving business and black Africa's only ice-skating rink overlooking ancient mangrove swamps.

Liberian refugees and hundreds of thousands of guest workers from neighbouring states fueled the economic expansion but lived in somewhat less salubrious circumstances, in a chain of Abidjan slums.

Abigail managed to complete her education and became a teacher in the town of Tabou, near the border of the two countries, but late last year the Ivorian dream, which had been slowly unravelling for several years, imploded into civil war between the government and military rebels.

The unthinkable happened. Panic-stricken Liberian refugees, Ivorian citizens and guest workers fled the country, nearly 100,000 of them to Liberia, itself still in the grip of that same conflict Abigail had fled 13 years earlier. The Liberian teacher was again among the civilian flood tide on the move, undertaking what the New York Times called a journey from "one bank of hell to another ... a darkly absurd and what may prove to be an ultimately futile voyage for safety."

And so it turned out for Abigail. A UNHCR protection unit spot-checking the border region recently came across her at a checkpoint inside Côte d'Ivoire.

"I knew the horror that I was returning to in Liberia," she said quietly sitting beside an ancient bus with 26 other passengers as nervous but belligerent Ivorian soldiers poked through their belongings and debated her immediate fate. "My father and most of my family were killed in the last few years," she said. "But the radio said things were quiet in Liberia, better than here" where all Liberians increasingly were being labelled as rebels or dope smugglers.

She walked for two days in Liberia to reach the village where her mother lived, but the war there was steadily engulfing eastern as well as western parts of the country. "There was no food. There was no law and order," she said. "Men with guns took anything they wanted. The whole country was in a panic."

For a second time she decided to do the unthinkable – escape from one war for the 'safety' of another, retracing her steps once again. Carrying one small nylon bag containing two sets of clothing and a few cosmetics, she again walked to the frontier, crossed and hitched the bus to her old 'home' in the coastal town of Tabou before the soldiers stopped her.

Having escaped possible death, she now faced the prospect of rape. One of the soldiers took away her refugee identity card and said he might return it the next morning – but only if she slept with him.

"I will do it," the woman, single, attractive and totally vulnerable to such coercion, told UNHCR protection officer Chiara Cardoletti. "What is one night of misery compared with a whole life of degradation?"

Negotiations, phone calls, threats and bluster. Abigail was eventually released unharmed. A small but important protection victory was achieved amid widespread misery and suffering.

CHANGING EXPECTATIONS

Panos Moumtzis, a veteran of earlier refugee emergencies including the aftermath of the first Gulf War, Somalia and Africa's Great Lakes crisis in the mid-1990s, had been looking forward to his transfer to Abidjan as something different in the refugee experience. "I had such a positive feeling. For once, amidst so much misery, this would be a happy project."

Along the coast in Tabou, the new head of that office, Anne Dolan, another old hand at 'normal' refugee emergencies, had that same hope.

"Surprise, surprise," Dolan said later.

At one point, Côte d'Ivoire hosted some 200,000 Liberian refugees. Many had been welcomed "as brothers and sisters in distress" by the country's founding father, President Felix Houphouet-Boigny and had integrated into local communities. There was only one small refugee camp called Nicla for around 3,000 people.

In such a seemingly benign atmosphere, Moumtzis and Dolan expected to concentrate on projects to promote integration, education and self-help "something really positive and more satisfying than seeing so much suffering and death all the time in other crises." In the capital, on the night of September 18-19 last year, Moumtzis woke to the rattle of gunfire – the start of a conflict which sent the once stable country into a tailspin and change the lives of not only the refugees sheltering there, but also many tens of thousands of locals and guest workers from surrounding countries.

"Virtually overnight, there was a 180-degree turn in UNHCR operations," Moumtzis said. "Building schools, clinics, infrastructure, helping refugees to continue to integrate was out. We moved into normal emergency mode – trying to provide people with a safe place to stay, getting them out of dangerous situations. Xenophobia and nationalism destroyed the brotherhood and good neighbourliness."

As Dolan helped a sad procession of people to cross into Liberia she recalled: "Everyone was faced with this awful dilemma. 'Should I stay here where I might well be killed, or should I go to Liberia where I might also be killed, but maybe less quickly?' It was so dreadful to watch."

In April, some of the civilians who fled to Liberia began to return. With virtually no aid officials present in eastern Liberia, UNHCR monitored the common border, providing assistance where it could, trying to help several thousand refugees move into several hastily established transit centres for their own safety, asking neighbouring countries to take some of the threatened Liberians. There were few offers.

"It is a sad reality that what might take decades to build up can be destroyed almost overnight," Moumtzis said.

ROGUE ELEPHANT

Long suffering Liberian refugees have become pariahs in neighbouring states, branded as trouble makers or worse – rebels, gun runners, drug dealers. Conditions inside the country, sandwiched between the hope of Sierra Leone and despair of Côte d'Ivoire, have continued to deteriorate.

On a recent visit High Commissioner Lubbers said flatly: "The picture is pretty clear: it's a disaster" and he went on to accuse the Liberian government of "killing your own people." One senior aid official described Liberia as the 'rogue elephant' of West Africa, a country at war with itself since 1989, but also exporting chaos and anarchy to its neighbours like a 'cancer.'

Much of the country is now off limits. Aid workers withdrew from eastern Liberia following the brutal murder of three officials from the American Adventist group ADRA earlier this year. In a general state of anarchy several weeks later, just across the border in Côte d'Ivoire, four local Red Cross workers were also deliberately killed.

The World Food Programme reduced food rations to recipients for April and May. By spring, wary donors had provided just two percent of the $42.6 million funding requested in a U.N. humanitarian appeal for this year.

At a high-level strategy meeting in Geneva, humanitarian officials debated the possible options available to help Liberia's stricken civilian population: establish safe corridors for aid convoys; airdrops; physical safe havens; an international peace force; cross-border operations. Each was examined and put aside as unworkable without a political solution also being implemented.


UNHCR protection officers interview fleeing Liberian refugees. © UNHCR/R.Wilkinson

THE FIRST CONTACT

UNHCR began operations in 1951, principally to help refugees in Europe in the aftermath of World War II, but several years later, the agency began its long association with Africa. On 31 May 1957, the then Tunisian Prime Minister Habib Bourguiba asked UNHCR to "examine the way in which the High Commissioner will be able to help my government resolve the problem of Algerian refugees" who were fleeing to neighbouring states from that country's war of independence against France.

The agency responded and during the same crisis it became involved for the first time in socalled post-conflict situations – helping former refugees once they had returned home. "The fate of repatriated ex-refugees can no longer be disassociated from that of the Algerian population as a whole without seriously endangering the country's social stability," High Commissioner Felix Schnyder wrote at the time, establishing an important benchmark for UNHCR's future protection work.

In 1969, Africa made another important contribution towards overall refugee protection when the Organization of African Unity (OAU) adopted its own convention which, for the first time extended refugee recognition to people fleeing in large groups and escaping such things as external aggression, occupation or foreign domination. It included the now universally accepted principle of 'voluntary' repatriation.

During those early, post-colonial days, many civilians seeking safety in African countries simply moved into established communities – in official parlance they became locally integrated.

In succeeding decades, however, this pattern changed and more and more refugees were housed in sprawling camps – sparking lively and often acrimonious debate among governments and humanitarians about who was responsible for spreading this 'camp culture' and the advantages or disadvantages of the system.

Jeff Crisp of UNHCR's evaluation unit traced the beginning of a 'deteriorating climate' towards refugees and their increasing incarceration in camps to the mid-1980s. Western countries had, he said, begun to toughen their legislation towards asylum seekers, encouraging African countries to follow suit; refugee numbers increased dramatically at the same time as African economies deteriorated; and perversely the spread of democracy allowed an increasing number of politicians to use refugee issues as political footballs.

Today, an estimated 2.4 million people live in 267 camps worldwide, 170 of these sites being in Africa.

Images of tents and huts sprawling seemingly forever across the African landscape have become synonymous with the plight of refugees and video footage has dramatically captured the often squalid conditions of tens or hundreds of thousands of people packed tightly together, spawning disease and crime, damaging the local environment and becoming natural recruiting centres or hiding places for bands of armed militias.

Increasingly, however, African governments who are ultimately responsible for deciding where refugees should be located, decided that for security reasons, to protect the interest of local communities threatened by a large influx and to more easily 'show case' large concentrations of refugees to visiting journalists and politicians in a search for international funding, camps were the preferred option despite their obvious drawbacks.

According to Jeff Crisp these camps can have other useful purposes. Some refugees may prefer to integrate locally if their new neighbours are from the same ethnic background. But they may cling to camps for safety reasons if they find themselves in a different ethnic environment. Too, the compounds may serve as the safety net component of a larger survival strategy – younger and stronger refugees venture further afield to seek work while women and children remain in a camp where they are assured a degree of safety and at least minimum humanitarian supplies.

To try to balance conflicting interests, humanitarian groups such as UNHCR developed a range of more flexible programmes. Increasing attention has been paid to assisting both refugee and local communities in the construction of schools, clinics or roads.

While camps will always be necessary in some circumstances, the refugee agency has encouraged expanded local integration whenever possible. In Zambia, for instance, one recently launched project will assist some of the 247,000 refugees in that country to establish themselves in nearby villages and towns, find jobs and, hopefully, become productive members of Zambian society.

Iraq, and Afghanistan before it, suggested that the international community focuses on one major crisis at a time. Africa, however, remains in permanent crisis and UNHCR's David Lambo worried that "We are fighting for space on the world stage. But we cannot give up on Africa."

For his part, High Commissioner Ruud Lubbers insisted he would continue to "raise the issue with developed countries that they must focus more on African refugees" whatever the situation in other parts of the world.

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Source: Refugees Magazine Issue 131: "Africa At A Crossroads" (June 2003). Download the complete issue in pdf format: low-resolution (730Kb) here or high-resolution (1.8Mb) here

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