Abstract
The bulk of the world's refugees remain in the developing world. And the industrialized states, more worried after September 11, are taking new steps to keep them away.
June 6, 1999: Kosovar Albanian refugees take shelter in a bunker in Villahan, an Albanian border town, during a Serbian artillery assault.
The issues of human security and the security of states are intimately linked. For example, a greater respect for human rights, more equitable development, and the spread of democracy in war-torn places like Afghanistan, Kosovo, and the Democratic Republic of Congo would not only prevent and/or resolve the problems of refugee movements, they would also help establish a more stable and secure international order.
As a general rule, individuals and communities do not abandon their homes unless they are confronted with serious threats to their lives or liberty. Flight from one's country is the ultimate survival strategy, the one employed when all other coping mechanisms have been exhausted. Refugees serve both as an index of internal disorder and instability and as prima facie evidence of the violation of human rights and humanitarian standards. Perhaps no other issue provides such a clear and unassailable link between humanitarian concerns and legitimate international security issues.
Whether refugees find safe haven in the countries to which they flee depends in part on regional stability. This reality was brought home to me in recent months when I visited Turkey, Syria, and Kenya–countries that serve both as host states to refugees in their respective regions and as transit countries for those seeking to migrate to Europe and North America. All three countries are located in extremely unstable regions from which some of the world's major refugee flows originate. The bulk of the refugees in these regions–Somalis, Sudanese, Iraqis, and Iranians–come from countries where conflict and persecution have persisted for years, making it unlikely that they will be able to return home any time soon.
The refugees I interviewed complained that their greatest concern was the poor security in these countries of first asylum. The human rights records of these countries are poor. Physical harassment, detention, and deportation to other countries where refugees risk greater persecution are commonplace. Police and security forces arbitrarily harass, detain, and arrest refugees. Corruption is rampant, especially among poorly paid border guards and police. Many refugees fear being attacked by agents from their home countries, often with the connivance of the authorities in the countries in which they have sought refuge.
June 1, 1999: Kurdish refugees from Iraq, at a camp on the Turkish-Iranian border.
This fear was given real meaning in Kenya, the host country for relatively large numbers of refugees from the Great Lakes region of Africa. In April, an assailant broke into a so-called secure residence established in Nairobi for refugees at particular risk. The assailant murdered two Rwandan refugee children, aged nine and 10, by slitting their throats. Their mother, a close relative of a former Rwandan president, was also seriously injured with multiple stab wounds. She and the children had been waiting in Kenya for 11 months for their resettlement application to be processed.
Refugees also face severe economic and social insecurity in these countries of first asylum; their freedom of movement is severely restricted; they cannot integrate with local populations; they are given inadequate or no assistance; they are refused permission to work. They live in limbo.
Refugees and local, national, and regional security
Refugees who flee persecution or violence may experience threats to their security on a daily basis, but when the connection between security and migration is highlighted by the media or politicians, it is rarely with reference to threats faced by refugees. Rather, the refugees themselves are usually characterized as posing a security threat to the receiving states and their citizens. This viewpoint is as likely to be expressed in the developing world as it is in the industrialized democracies. Most governments today perceive migration and refugee movements as a threat to their national interests.
For developing countries, displaced populations are both a consequence of conflict and a cause of continuing conflict and instability. Forced displacement can obstruct peace processes, undermine attempts at economic development, and exacerbate intercommunal tensions. Refugee flows also can be a source of regional conflict, causing instability in neighboring countries, triggering external intervention, and sometimes providing armed refugee groups with base camps from which to conduct insurgency, armed resistance, and terrorist activities.
In recent years, both new and long-established refugee populations have come to be viewed by local host governments as a threat to the internal order of the state, as well as a threat to regional, or even global, security. States perceive refugee groups as posing both direct and indirect security threats.
The direct security threat posed by the spillover of conflict and armed exiles is by far the strongest link between forced migration and state security. In many regions, such as the Balkans or the Great Lakes region of Africa, refugee exoduses have been deliberately provoked or engineered by one or more parties to the conflict with the specific objective of furthering their own political, military, or strategic objectives.
The use of refugee camps by combatants draws refugee communities directly into cross-border conflicts and accelerates conflicts and tensions within host countries. In recent years, many refugee camps in Africa, Asia, and Central America have housed not only those fleeing persecution and armed conflict, but also combatants and guerrilla forces who use the relative safety of the camps to launch violent campaigns of destabilization against their countries of origin.
In many host countries, governments prefer refugees to remain in camps and settlement areas close to the border of their home countries. Not only are the physical security and material safety of refugees not guaranteed in these remote areas, but the proximity of camps to countries of refugee origin also makes it easy for combatants to cross borders to engage in guerrilla warfare.
But indirect security threats posed by protracted refugee situations also impose important burdens on receiving states. Developing countries shoulder the social and economic strains of the world's vast majority of refugees and displaced persons. The long-term presence of refugees can exacerbate existing tensions and heighten intercom-munal conflict, particularly when a state has ethnic rifts of its own, a vulnerable economic or social infrastructure, or hostile neighbors.
Generally, both the governments and the citizens of host countries view refugees negatively, associating them with problems of security, violence, and crime, and as a threat to social cohesion and employment. They are sometimes seen as posing a threat of insurgency or terrorism. In many regions, these negative perceptions have begun to generate a backlash against refugees–and especially, lately, against Islamic groups. Given the re-gionalization of conflict and the domestic instability caused by both new and protracted refugee situations, the indirect security threats posed by refugee flows, if left unaddressed, are likely to have serious consequences for regional and global security.
Western government responses
Western governments have failed to recognize these regional refugee situations and have not devoted sufficient resources, either financial or diplomatic, to long-standing refugee problems; long-term refugee needs induce “donor fatigue.” For example, the refugees I recently visited have been adversely affected by recent cutbacks in donor funding to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). This means that vital assistance programs in Turkey have been ended, and it also means that UNHCR has not been able to deploy the number of protection officers it needs at the dangerous and insecure refugee camps in Kenya. The deprivations and frustration endured by people living in insecure and precarious camps for long periods of time can generate various kinds of violence and instability. This is particularly the case in the Kenyan camps, where sexual abuse and violence against women and girls are common. In addition, banditry and armed robbery occur regularly within the camps.
March 6, 2001: Refugees from Sierra Leone wait in line for food at a camp in Guinea. The camp was destroyed by Sierra Leonean rebels who targeted refugee sites during cross-border attacks.
May 20, 2002: A Somali mother and children seek shelter at a Kenyan border town after fleeing fighting between Ethiopian-backed Somali militia and government-aligned forces.
Western governments have not developed effective policies to address the often deplorable conditions in regional host countries. The European Union, for example, administers development programs inside Somalia, but spends nearly nothing to secure better protection or improve the environment for the more than 250,000 Somalian refugees in neighboring Kenya. The involvement of the European Community Humanitarian Office in these regions is limited exclusively to projects in countries of origin and to non-refugee emergency projects in countries of first asylum.
International attention and assistance are in large part a reflection of politics, geo-strategic interests, and fickle international donor and media priorities. The U.S. and European governments have not fully examined the impact of their foreign and economic policies on refugee-producing regions. For example, more than a decade of economic and political isolation and sanctions against Iraq have made life so miserable and untenable for large sectors of the Iraqi population that hundreds of thousands have fled their homes to neighboring countries. Western governments have not developed a comprehensive policy to deal with these and other migration and refugee problems.
Ultimately, this is self-defeating. If refugees lack security in one country, they will try to move on to another, safer place. For example, most Iraqi refugees are unable to find either physical protection or material security in their host countries. Thus, insecurity, coupled with a lack of resettlement opportunities, has led large numbers of asylum seekers and migrants to move on to Western countries and to risk their lives by using illegal means of entry, including smuggling and trafficking organizations. Not surprisingly, Iraqi refugees now constitute the largest national group of asylum seekers in Europe.
The “securitization” of refugees
Although the bulk of the world's refugees remain in the developing world, the industrialized states feel increasingly threatened by an influx of refugees. Asylum-seekers are no longer limited to neighboring states; “jet age” refugees appear at the doorstep of distant nations. This comes, of course, on top of a steep rise in the number of undocumented immigrants to the West from the developing world and from Eastern Europe.
January 9, 2001: French riot police clash with undocumented immigrants during a demonstration in Paris. The immigrants were demanding to be legalized.
Throughout most of North America and Western Europe huge backlogs of asylum applications have built up, exposing the inability of the advanced industrialized states to establish administrative and judicial systems that can cope with the growing numbers of asylum applicants. In 1999, Britain, for example, had a backlog of some 100,000 unprocessed asylum applications.
Many governments find it virtually impossible to apprehend and deport those whose claims to refugee status have been rejected. At a time when governments are seeking to reduce public expenditure, they are simultaneously spending large sums on processing asylum applications and providing social welfare benefits to asylum seekers. There is a widespread belief that Western states have lost control of their borders and that refugees and immigrants pose a threat to national identities and economies of host societies.
Not surprisingly, Western worries about asylum seekers influence electoral politics. Across Western Europe, politicians allege that asylum seekers take away jobs, housing, and school places, dilute national homogeneity and culture, and exacerbate racial and ethnic tensions in local communities. As a result, political parties that invoke a popular xenophobia, campaigning on explicitly anti-refugee and anti-immigrant platforms, are now enjoying success in traditionally liberal democratic states like Denmark, the Netherlands, and France.
More recently, asylum seekers and refugees have come to be seen as direct threats to national security. Some communities of exiles are alleged to support terrorist activities and to be engaged in supporting armed conflicts in their countries of origin. In fact, the vast majority of immigrants are grateful for being given asylum and live by the rules.
Prompted in part by the perceived threat to security, for two decades Western countries have been initiating a wide range of measures to curb the entry, admission, and entitlements of people claiming refugee status. Restrictive measures include extending border controls through stringent visa requirements, imposing sanctions against airlines and other carriers for transporting undocumented individuals, stationing immigration officials abroad, detaining asylum seekers before they reach national borders, negotiating agreements to send home those refused asylum, and threatening to withdraw financial and development aid if regional host countries will not take back those asylum seekers rejected in the West.
This trend has been exacerbated by the war against terrorism. In an effort to toughen immigration laws to prevent terrorists from entering their countries, North American and European governments have rushed through measures that may threaten the concept of the right of asylum. These include measures that allow for the indefinite detention of non-citizens suspected of terrorism, including asylum seekers and recognized refugees, without adequate rights of appeal. Since September 11, some governments have resorted to detention as a matter of first course, in some cases denying individuals their fundamental right to seek asylum and detaining them indefinitely until a deportation order can be executed. Such measures run foul of the U.N. Refugee Convention and accepted human rights standards.
June 9, 2002: Officials from the South Korean embassy in Beijing struggle with Chinese police trying to drag away a North Korean asylum seeker.
In Europe, the gulf between the cultural background of contemporary refugee groups and that of Europeans causes special concern. Refugee groups may resist assimilation, and Western publics may be unwilling to tolerate aliens in their midst. These feelings, reinforced by racial and religious prejudices, pose difficult social and political problems for European governments. Xenophobic and racist attitudes are increasingly obvious among some segments of the population, and racist attacks have increased in every country that hosts immigrant minorities. Islamic groups in particular have been targeted, especially since September 11, 2001. The anti-immigrant, anti-refugee backlash is being exploited not only by the extreme right wing, but also by mainstream political parties throughout Europe. As a consequence, ethnic profiling and detention of members of Islamic groups and other minorities, including immigrants and asylum seekers, have increased dramatically.
Greater abuse?
The war on terrorism has given policymakers and law enforcement agencies a ready pretext to abuse the rights of refugees and other immigrants. Newly enacted measures to enhance internal law enforcement mechanisms to protect the state against terrorist threats can lead to an even greater deterioration of the rights of all citizens–and particularly the rights of refugees–leading to their increased vulnerability and exclusion. Indefinite detention, governmental restrictions on disclosure of evidence, the establishment of military tribunals with defined jurisdiction over non-citizens, and an array of possible new interior controls to deter potential terrorist abuse of the asylum systems have resulted in a tightening of visa systems around the world, making it even more difficult for refugees to escape persecution.
In many countries around the world, governments have seized on the rhetoric of anti-terrorism to steamroll domestic opposition. In this highly charged environment, politicians and the media are targeting refugees and immigrants as scapegoats for their countries' economic and social problems.
Politicians often exaggerate the various domestic threats associated with refugees in order to win short-term electoral gain. For example, in the run-up to the upcoming general elections in Kenya, President Daniel Arap-Moi and members of Kenya's parliament have stepped up the rhetoric, blaming refugees for depleting the nation's resources, degrading the environment, and endangering national security.
The way ahead
While the security threat associated with refugees is often exaggerated, history demonstrates that refugee movements are not only a humanitarian problem. They have a strong political and security dimension that can adversely affect domestic and international order. The management of migration, and particularly of refugees and displaced people, is not a side effect of political and economic instability and conflict, but an integral part of regional and international insecurity, and an integral part of conflict settlement and peace building within communities.
Forced displacement is a major factor in national and regional instability. Establishing effective responses to refugee needs should be a vital part of any broad model of security. The real challenges for policy-makers, practitioners, and researchers lie not so much within the humanitarian system itself, but in the wider policy-making world, including security, post-conflict development, the enforcement of human rights, and the development of civil societies.
Reacting to terrorist threats by placing unduly harsh restrictions on the free movement of people will simply lead to greater isolation and deprivation. An angry, excluded world outside the West will inevitably turn to forms of extremism that will pose new security threats. A failure by both the industrialized and developing countries to take action to stem the tide of poverty, violence, persecution, and the other conditions that create refugee flows will be costly in security terms.
In the realms of forced migration and state security, international and regional stability and justice coincide. Policy-makers need to build on this coincidence of factors to achieve the political will necessary to address both these issues more effectively and even-handedly. It is in the self-interest of states and coincides with their search for long-term global stability.
The international upheavals reverberating around the terrorist attacks of September 11 underline the important connections between refugee movements and international security. It is now impossible to overlook the strategic importance of the global refugee problem, and both national governments and international organizations need to make greater efforts at finding solutions to it. Western governments must recognize that the most obvious and logical solution lies in improving conditions in countries that produce refugees as well as in local host or transit countries in the regions of refugee origin. •