Refugee

Article Outline

Introduction; Who Becomes a Refugee?; History; Recent Refugee Problems; International Aid; Outlook

Introduction

Refugee, person who is forced to leave the country in which he or she lives because of a well-founded fear of persecution. Such persecution may stem from race, religion, nationality, political opinions, or membership in a social group. An international agreement, adopted by the United Nations (UN) in 1951, established this definition in international law. The definition of a refugee is sometimes extended to people who flee their countries because of wars, human rights violations, and other disturbances. In popular usage the term refugee is applied more generally to any individual who has been forced to flee from his or her home.

People who flee their homes seek asylum (safety and protection) in another country. According to the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, “Everyone has the right to seek and enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.” However, not all countries wish to host refugees. Some countries fear that refugees may compete with inhabitants for scare resources, or that their presence may worsen racial, ethnic, religious, or economic conflict. In addition, the host country may not want to upset relations with the country of origin by accepting its refugees.

Refugees need assistance, such as food, shelter, and healthcare, when they seek asylum in another country. International and local organizations provide this assistance. These organizations house the refugees in refugee camps until it is safe to return to their home country. If return appears unlikely, they seek to resettle the refugees in the host country or another country. However, some refugees remain in camps for years. For many refugees, the flight to safety is not the end of the ordeal but only its beginning.

Who Becomes a Refugee?

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People leave their home countries for many reasons. Sometimes they are fleeing poverty, or they hope to find a better life in another place. People who migrate for economic reasons, however, are not considered refugees. Yet economic migrants may also have political reasons for leaving their homeland. Many countries with weak economies also have oppressive governments. People who seek asylum because the political situation endangers their lives usually qualify as refugees.

History

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The UN definition of a refugee was developed following World War II. During that war millions of people were displaced by the fighting and by the Holocaust. But the concept of a refugee dates back much earlier. Throughout recorded history, oppression and disaster have caused people to flee their homelands. In biblical times, the enslaved Israelites fled Egypt. Millennia later, in the 15th century, the Moors and Jews, hounded by the Inquisition, were expelled from Spain. In the 17th century the Puritans, seeking religious freedom, settled in what became the United States; in the 18th century the nobility fled France during the French Revolution; and political exiles left central and southern Europe during the upheavals of the mid-19th century. After World War I, people were displaced en masse from Asia Minor, the Russian Empire, and the Balkans. During the 1930s, many fled from China because of the Japanese invasion and from Spain because of the Fascist victory in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). During World War II, an estimated 7 million Jews and others threatened by the Nazis fled their homelands.

Following the resettlement of millions of displaced persons after World War II, the United States and other countries established programs to admit refugees from the Communist countries of Eastern Europe. During this same period, refugees fled the Communist takeovers of Tibet and mainland China; Dutch nationals left Indonesia during the struggles for Indonesian independence; and Arabs in Palestine were displaced as a result of the Arab-Israeli War of 1948 and 1949. The pattern continued: Cubans fled their country’s Communist revolution in 1959 (see Cuban Revolution), and other peoples fled revolutions in the following decades.

After the fall of Saigon ended the Vietnam War in 1975, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese fled by boat, often enduring starvation and piracy before being rescued or landing in a nearby country. Many of these “boat people” eventually settled in the United States, France, Australia, and Canada. Elsewhere in Asia, revolution and war caused many people to flee their countries. During the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan (1979-1989), more than 5 million Afghans left their homeland; most settled in Pakistan and Iran. As of 2007 Afghans made up the world’s largest refugee group.

Recent Refugee Problems

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Of the world’s nearly 14 million refugees and asylum seekers at the beginning of 2007, 5.9 million were living in North Africa and the Middle East; 2.9 million in Africa south of the Sahara; 2.9 million in South and Central Asia; 950,000 in East Asia and the Pacific; 650,000 in the Americas and Caribbean; and 600,000 in Europe. Many of the refugees were from Afghanistan and Iraq. Today, Pakistan and Iran host more refugees than any other countries. Most of the world’s refugees are hosted by countries in the developing world.

Africa, with more than 40 nations and 600 ethnic groups, has about one-fourth of the world’s refugees, people uprooted by famine or by liberation struggles and escaping racial and ethnic oppression and economic hardship. Caught in the turmoil that characterizes developing nations, some African nations have had both an inflow and outflow of refugees, and in time their former exiles are often repatriated. After political and ethnic fighting broke out in Rwanda in 1994, an estimated one-quarter of the country’s population died or fled the country, primarily into the neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo (then called Zaire). Many of the refugees returned to Rwanda after a new government was established later that year. Many Angolan refugees also returned to Angola after a ceasefire was signed in 2002, ending that country’s long-running civil war. In Sudan hundreds of thousands fled the Darfur region to escape ethnic violence in the early 2000s.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Chileans, Soviet exiles, and East Germans resettled in western Germany, which also gave temporary asylum to Turks and Pakistanis. The United Kingdom accepted Asians expelled from Uganda—Cypriots and Lebanese, among others. About one-third of the limited number of Jews permitted to leave the USSR went to Israel; most of the rest went to the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The number of people forced to flee their homes following the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1991 and 1992 was estimated at about 4 million by 1994. Some returned after the ethnic cleansing efforts to eliminate people of other ethnic groups stopped. Many did not. More than 200,000 ethnic Albanians fled the Serbian province of Kosovo after the government of Serbia began a violent crackdown on a Kosovo independence movement.

In Asia, fighting in Afghanistan from 1979 into the early 2000s uprooted millions who fled primarily into neighboring Iran and Pakistan. After 2003 the Afghan refugee crisis began to lessen somewhat, and some refugees returned home. Even so, Afghans continued to constitute the largest refugee population in the world, with nearly 2 million refugees at the beginning of 2006. A new crisis arose as Iraqis fled the ethnic violence and persecution unleashed by the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 (see U.S.-Iraq War). Most of the Iraqi refugees went to neighboring Jordan and Syria.

In Latin America, refugees fled Chile and Argentina after military juntas seized power in the 1970s, and they fled war-torn Nicaragua in the 1980s. These refugees resettled mostly in neighboring states. Cuba, which had received refugees from Chile, Uruguay, and other nations, permitted its nationals to leave in the early 1980s. During the same period, internal upheavals in El Salvador led to an outflow of refugees. Because of the influx of Cubans, Haitians, and Indochinese, the United States became, for a time, a country of mass asylum. In the early 2000s violence and upheaval in Colombia, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic led many to seek asylum elsewhere.

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Introduction

Who Becomes a Refugee?

History

Recent Refugee Problems