Yemen Times, Yemen
Jan 29 2007

Millions caught in limbo, with no solutions in sight

Yemen Times Staff
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Refugees from Mynamar living in Bangladesh on the tidal mudflats of
the Teknaf River which borders the two countries.

`Ten Stories the World Should Hear More About’

In 2004, the United Nations Department of Public Information (DPI)
launched an initiative called `Ten Stories the World Should Hear More
About’ to draw attention to important international developments and
issues that fall outside the media spotlight. The list includes
stories on an array of issues and from several geographical regions.
Some of the stories on the list focus on troubling humanitarian
emergencies and conflict situations, but they also highlight such
vital areas as human rights, health and development. Every issue, we
will bring a new story to you, hoping that our little effort to
advocate for human rights all over the world would make a difference,
some how, some way…The editor

While news of major refugee emergencies often dominate headlines, the
plight of millions of people who have languished in exile for years
— and sometimes decades — remains a low-profile high-risk situation
with serious humanitarian and security implications.

The Story

While worldwide refugee numbers have fallen to their lowest level in
25 years, a larger percentage of asylum-seekers are spending a longer
time in exile in an often-overlooked plight of subsistence living in
a virtual state of limbo. "The majority of today’s refugees have
lived in exile for far too long, restricted to camps or eking out a
meagre existence in urban centres throughout the developing world,"
says the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in its 2006 report
on the state of the world’s refugees.

Today, there are at least 33 so-called "protracted refugee
situations" involving groups of 25,000 people or more who have been
in exile for over five years. According to UNHCR data, altogether
they account for 5.7 million of the world’s 9.2 million refugees.
Those figures do not include the world’s oldest and largest
protracted refugee situation, Palestinian refugees, who fall under
the mandate of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees
in the Near East (UNRWA).

The vast majority of these exiles are to be found in the world’s
poorest and most unstable regions, often the result of neglect by
regional and international actors amid declining donor support.
Trapped in these forgotten situations, the refugees cannot return
home because of continuing violence or persecution, while facing
significant restrictions on their rights in the places of asylum. At
the same time, UNHCR warns, their presence raises political and
security concerns among host governments and other states in the
region. As such, protracted refugee situations represent a
significant challenge both to human rights and security.

The Context

– Since the early 1990s, the international community has focused
largely on refugee emergencies in high-profile areas such as the
Balkans, the Great Lakes region of Africa and, more recently, Darfur
(Sudan) and Chad . Yet more than 60 per cent of today’s refugees are
trapped in situations far from the international spotlight.

– The root causes of long-standing refugee populations stem from the
very states whose instability engenders chronic regional insecurity.
Most of the refugees in these regions – be they Somalis, Sudanese,
Burundians or Burmese – come from countries where conflict has
persisted for years.

– East and West Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, the Caucasus,
Central Asia and the Middle East are all plagued by protracted
refugee situations. Sub-Saharan Africa has the largest number, 17,
involving 1.9 million refugees. The countries hosting the biggest
groups are Guinea, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia.

– In Asia (China, Thailand, India and Nepal) there are five
protracted situations and some 676,000 refugees. Europe has three
major cases involving 510,000 refugees, primarily in the Balkans and
Armenia.

– Although the measure of at least 25,000 refugees in exile for five
years is traditionally used to define such situations, UNHCR argues
that other groups should not be excluded. For example, of the
Rohingya who fled from Myanmar to Bangladesh 12 years ago, 20,000
still remain. Similarly, there are 19,000 Burundians in the
Democratic Republic of Congo, 16,000 Somalis in Ethiopia, 15,000
Ethiopians in Sudan and 19,000 Rwandans in Uganda.

– While today there are fewer refugees in protracted situations, the
number of such situations has greatly increased. According to UNHCR,
they are also spending longer periods in exile. It is estimated that
in 2003 major refugee situations, protracted or not, averaged 17
years — nearly twice as long as in 1993.