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Refugees Magazine Issue 130: (Sri Lanka) – The Young: Growing Pains
Young people should be preparing for adulthood; instead, they are trapped in the limbo of exile
Golden childhood memories have crumbled into nightmare. If prompted, 24-year-old Arami remembers her family's "lovely villa, and as a young girl playing with my friends in the small beautiful garden" in Somalia. Her recent memories, however, are dominated by thoughts of "my father being killed in a massacre" during the country's civil war and her subsequent flight into exile. "We had to run away in our pyjamas. We couldn't think of taking anything with us."
Teenagers Bolleh and Emmanuel recall singing and dancing with their friends on the beaches around Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, selling jeans in a downtown shop and just 'hanging out' as youngsters do. Until they were kidnapped by one of the country's rebel groups as child soldiers, brainwashed that "Death is better than life" and forced to both fight and sometimes execute opposing guerrillas in cold blood.
Layla was happiest visiting "a little mosque where I could speak with God alone and in peace. It had beautiful, gold-framed windows through which I could see the mountains and the running water." The 13-year-old had been born in exile in Iran after her family fled neighbouring Afghanistan as that country collapsed. But there would be no happy homecoming for this youngster and her family. Fearing they might be forcibly deported back to Afghanistan from their adopted homeland, they moved instead to the west and eventually ended up in Greece where they sought asylum.
Fate has played a particularly cruel trick on Arami, Bolleh, Emmanuel and Layla and millions of others like them around the world.
At a critical time of 'growing up' when they should be honing their social, educational and sexual personas ready for an adult future, young people find themselves caught instead in a terrible limbo of exile where they can be alternately ignored, exploited or condemned to a life without hope.
GLOBALLY DISPLACED
There are more than 40 million uprooted persons around the world – refugees, asylum seekers, civilians internally displaced within their own countries and other groups.
More than half of this global total – around 20 million people – are children and what is loosely termed 'young people', though the exact number of this latter group is difficult to accurately assess. The very concept of 'youth' varies according to national cultures and different organizations set arbitrary age limits to delineate the boundaries between children, youths and adults.
In general, UNHCR considers anyone between the ages of 13 and 25 to be young refugees. To highlight not only their special problems, but also their exceptional promise, the agency dedicated this year's World Refugee Day on June 20, to refugee youth and a series of special concerts, cultural festivals, public debates and religious services around the world were planned.
All uprooted peoples are in need of assistance. But as their numbers grew inexorably in the decades following World War II, it became increasingly clear to agencies like UNHCR that particular groups such as women, children or the elderly, needed different types of help within a general humanitarian framework. Special programmes and international conventions were established to meet those needs.
There were no such particular accords for youth who, instead, were covered by more general programmes and treaties such as the 1951 Refugee Convention, its 1967 Protocol, the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child and various optional protocols and UNHCR's own Policy on Refugee Children.
Despite this patchwork protection, it has become increasingly clear that these young people also faced particular pressures – physical, educational, economic and sexual – which needed to be specifically addressed.
CHILDREN OF WAR
One of the worst fates befalling disenfranchised young people is their forcible recruitment as child soldiers. The U.N. estimated that more than 300,000 underage youths, most of them between 15 and 17, currently are fighting in some of the world's most brutal wars, undergoing indescribable experiences. In Sierra Leone's recent civil war teenage soldiers were sometimes forced to kill their own parents and neighbours as part of gruesome indoctrination ceremonies or to deliberately mutilate other victims. Young females were reduced to the role of sex slaves, servicing dozens of partners.
These youngsters became little more than highly dangerous zombies who, even if they survived and then escaped the war, were in need of months or years of specialized care.
In addition to international political pressure on warring factions, regular armies and rebels alike, to eliminate underage recruitment, agencies throughout the humanitarian spectrum also began psychological, family reunion, educational and vocational programmes to try to salvage damaged victims like 15-year-old Jonathan in Sierra Leone.
"They gave me guerrilla training. They gave me a gun," the still traumatized youth explained in a monotone during his rehabilitation programme. Did he take drugs? "Yes." Did he kill people? "Lots." Was that wrong? "It was just war, what I did then. I only took orders." And what does he want to do now? Chillingly his response was, "Join the military. I know what to do there."
Forcible recruitment and sexual slavery may be a young girl's worst nightmare, but even if they escape that fate the threat of other sexual violence is always present in a refugee climate where social and family structures have collapsed. Girls are seen as 'easy targets' in refugee camps, becoming victims of outright rape or coercion. Some are forced into prostitution or to bestow 'favors' on powerful men such as camp leaders or teachers, merely to survive.
WIDESPREAD HARASSMENT
"Forty to 60 percent of sexual assaults are against girls below the age of 16," says Linnie Kesselly, a community services officer in Uganda. "Girls and women are deceived and sexually used because they don't know their rights and because they can't sustain themselves financially."
Like 22-year-old Mariama who admitted to sleeping with a string of men after being ditched by her regular boyfriend, sometimes for one night, sometimes for a couple of weeks, for as little as five Liberian dollars (10 cents). "I never wanted that life," she said with resignation, " but there is no other way to survive."
When 18-year-old Musu from Sierra Leone applied for a school scholarship, a teacher on the interviewing committee asked her to be his girlfriend. "I told him I didn't want to be his friend," she remembers. "I never did get that scholarship."
In such a threatening and permissive environment lacking all normal social constraints, health problems proliferate. Sexually transmitted infections, including HIV/AIDS, have become commonplace among both sexes. Young women face early and unwanted pregnancies, unsafe abortions or high levels of maternal deaths and, in some parts of the world even in supervised camps, ongoing genital mutilation.
A variety of approaches has been adopted to try to combat sexual exploitation and the resultant health problems.
One common sense approach has been to improve basic security with better housing, lighting and more accessible public amenities in camps which may house tens or hundreds of thousands of people, reducing the opportunity for rape. Girls are educated about both the physical and health dangers as are key male figures such as camp leaders who may not appreciate or be willing to tackle the problems faced by their womenfolk. The more economically self-sufficient young women also become, having a skill or a trade, the less vulnerable and dependent they are to exploitation. `Youth clubs play an important role in promoting safety, education and community values. A group called Olympic Aid has sent qualified coaches to camps in eight countries to establish sports programmes which will further the drive to help young people lead both more productive and healthier lives and also help eliminate one of the major curses of camp life – crushing boredom.
In addition to regular health programmes including the construction of more clinics and educational projects, in East Africa UNHCR began an innovative HIV/AIDS prevention and response programme to meet that particular challenge.
EDUCATION KEY
Education is perhaps the single, key element in helping young people escape from the trap of exile and poverty. But in no other field is the dilemma facing this particular group of refugees so starkly highlighted.
Schooling is expensive, difficult and politically contentious. When refugees arrive in a particular location, how long are they going to stay? Since it is always hoped, at least initially, that they will return home quickly, when should efforts begin to educate their children?
Such questions can produce inertia over what, after all, is a basic human right. But agencies helping refugees have patched together a system in which many youngsters can now get at least a primary education. But there is little formal access to secondary or university courses for several million young people.
Twenty-two-year-old Ahmad's fondest childhood memories are of school. "I used to love going to school in Somalia," he said. "I was happy. We had good teachers." Now, all he knows is that in exile in Cairo "I don't go to school. I can't afford the school fees. I can barely make my living."
To mark the 50th anniversary of UNHCR, former High Commissioner Sadako Ogata in December 2000 established the Refugee Education Trust to provide secondary education for some of the 1.5 million teenage refugees in developing countries. Currently, only around three percent of them have access to post-primary courses.
It is a modest contribution to a generation of young people who should be preparing for leadership roles in tomorrow's generation, but risk becoming today's 'lost generation.'
UNHCR has also been running a Peace Education programme for several years in East and West Africa which gives young refugees, both in and out of school, the opportunity of learning skills to help prevent or minimize conflicts.
With help, they should be the key to tomorrow. They can play not only a vital role during their exile, helping to support the nuclear family or participating actively in refugee camp life, but also rebuilding local communities and nations when they return home.
"Young people should be at the forefront of global change and innovation," according to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan. "They can be key agents for development and peace." But, he warned, "If they are left on society's margins, all of us will be impoverished."
Too many youths are still languishing in that twilight world despite recent attempts to alleviate their plight.
Colombian youngsters uprooted from their homes learn to enjoy life again. © UNHCR/P.Smith
Source: Refugees Magazine Issue 130: "Sri Lanka – Emerging from the ruins" (April 2003). Download the complete issue in pdf format: low-resolution (880Kb) here or high-resolution (1.5Mb) here.
