home > about cfr > leadership and staff > arthur c. helton > The World's Refugee Crisis
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January 18, 2003
The Boston Globe
Luanda, Angola - Over the past decade, the world has witnessed a distressing series of political catastrophes that have helped swell the number of refugees and internal exiles worldwide to more than 45 million. Much of this displacement has occurred in Africa. Angola accounts for 10 percent of the global crisis, with 500,00 refugees and 4.5 million internally displaced people. Overall, there are nearly 20 million refugees worldwide who have fled their home countries out of a well-founded fear of persecution. This is the classic definition of a refugee. Less visible, but just as desperate, are the estimated 25 million or more people displaced within their own countries because of armed conflict and serious human rights abuses. Although internally displaced persons share many characteristics with refugees who cross international borders, they are not protected under international refugee law because they remain inside their countries. Often they are actively persecuted by their governments and remain inaccessible to international monitors and providers of human itarian assistance.
Refugees matter. The grim plight of refugees increasingly commands attention by the international community. Refugees can be weapons or threats; they can be trophies or embarrassments of international politics. But they always pay for failures in governance and international relations with personal agony and despair.
Refugees evoke images of the world's losers, but they also frighten the world's winners. When they cross borders and present themselves in countries that are better off, some people become afraid. They fear losing jobs or privilege or, most fundamentally, their identity. Compassion and assistance is one response to refugees. But the arrival of uninvited people in need can also exacerbate fears of difference, cultural confrontation, and, most recently, perceptions of security, a point not lost on politicians in democratic countries.
For example, in the United States, resettlement of even accepted refugees has slowed down dramatically. Although President Bush set a disappointingly low 2002 admissions ceiling of 70,000 refugees (just half what the ceiling was a decade earlier), the number of refugees actually resettled in the United States during that period was even lower, at only about 28,000. Admissions for 2003 are likely to be low again.
Western indifference to the misery and corrosive instability caused by displacement can carry a terrible price. As the world has seen in Bosnia, Rwanda, the West Bank and elsewhere, refugees can become a dangerous, radicalized, and destabilizing force. Rather than turning away from refugees, we should confront the causes of displacement in their home countries and seek to solve their need for permanent homes, including through generous admissions policies.
In the new century, there will be greater human displacement - both internally and internationally - and greater demands for effective responses. If humanitarian action is to become more than the mere administration of misery, we will need coherent, proactive policy, rooted in international cooperation and human dignity. This will require more resources and better coordination between and among governments, UN agencies, and nongovernmental organizations.
The task for this century is to create enduring structures designed to make refugee policy more humane and comprehensive.
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