generalspeaking

The World's War- and Misery-Afflicted

"Kenya is not suddenly going to become less xenophobic. The UN is not suddenly going to get less politically intimidated. The regional strategy in the Horn of Africa is not going to change from being oriented by counterterrorism priorities. None of that is going to shift."
"There are ways of making life in the camp easier. And there are ways of opening pathways for people to come out as well, through education and through private sponsorships."
"They're in a terribly difficult situation [the aid workers]. They're trying to work within [the system] to try to do good things. And they're trying to retain their sense of self and sanity."
"It was the soccer leagues. It was the primary school. It was the market."
"It's this very strange parallel universe which I just found completely fascinating. It's in the world but it's not of the world. It's not connected."
Ben Rawlence, former British Human Rights Watch researcher

The camp grew quickly as Somalia’s crisis worsened. Although the refugees remain connected to the outside world through cellphones and spotty Internet service, they are trapped, forbidden from travelling anywhere except back home. Here, a woman talks on a cellphone at a distribution centre, where refugees come every 15 days to get food rations. Photo: Michelle Shephard

Mr. Rawlence started out as a political aide, a researcher for Human Rights Watch as someone who would go into the Dadaab refugee camp, acknowledged to be the world's largest and located in northeast Kenya, to interview victims of war crimes. He soon parted ways with Human Rights Watch to become an independent researcher at the camp. He eventually wrote a book, City of Thorns, focusing on the lives of a handful of people living in Dadaab.

He noted the misery, the violence, the rape endemic in the camp. But he was also struck by the attempts at normalcy where children were sent to school in the camp, despite overwhelming dysfunction, and the desperate efforts to find employment to keep body and soul together. The camp is located in Kenya, but refugees are forbidden by law to take employment in the country. Not even in the camp they inhabit. And the camp is huge and sprawling, stretching over 78 square kilometres where a half-million people lived at 2015's closing.

While Somalia has recently become more stable, there are regions that remain under the control of Al Shabab or are struggling to rebuild after two decades of war — making even Dadaab’s inhospitable climate a more attractive home. Photo: Michelle Shephard

Many end up working for the aid agencies that deliver humanitarian assistance to the inmates. Far greater numbers are employed in the thriving black market in the camp. Dadaab was first put together in 1991 as a place for 80,000 refugees from the Somali civil war to be temporarily housed. But the conflict went on while the original residents of the camp had children, and then new refugees from Somalia, Sudan Congo, Ethiopia, Uganda and Rwanda joined them. Dadaab became "a giant cosmopolitan city made of mud tents and thorns." 
 

Part of the eastern sector of the IFO-2 camp in the sprawling Dadaab refugee camp  Photo: AFP

Africa and the Middle East must surely out-qualify every other geography for violent dysfunction based on tribalism, religious sectarianism, territorial ambitions and a marked inability to rise beyond primitive aggression. Both Africa and the Middle East are home to refugee camps; some of recent vintage, others of far more historical dimensions. Usually the fate of refugees is to languish at least temporarily in these displaced persons camps. Until they are eventually absorbed by surrounding countries to become future citizens.

Arguably, the most famous 'refugees' or 'displaced' groups are represented by those calling themselves Palestinians. That designation of Palestinians is a purloined one; in a much earlier era and beyond, the original Palestinians were Jews living traditionally in the area. Arabs who gravitated to the geography co-opted the descriptive of themselves as Palestinians for the singular purpose of using the name to denote their vision of themselves as being of the original geography.

When the State of Israel was born, the state of Palestinian refugees became a political reality. One that the United Nations responded to by forming an arm of their humanitarian refugee program, to focus solely on providing for the newly-minted Palestinian refugees all the material support they would require to survive. Public works and employment are provided for hundreds of thousands of Arab Palestinians through the auspices of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for the Palestinian Refugees.

That UN refugee-supporting arm is specific to the Palestinians and has been instrumental, along with the fact that no other Middle East Muslim country aside from Jordan has ever been interested in offering permanent haven through citizenship to the Palestinians. The plan being that they would return whence they came once the State of Israel was destroyed. Coincidentally, the Arab Jews who had lived for thousands of years in the Muslim Middle East were disenfranchised and exiled, their properties appropriated.

None of them, their numbers exceeding those of the Palestinians as refugees, ever remained without haven, since the one Middle East country that is not Muslim absorbed them all. Even the millions of refugees that resulted from World War Two who thronged European refugee camps were eventually absorbed. But not the Palestinians. And now, in the Middle East, there are millions of refugees from failed countries like Lebanon, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and of course Afghanistan. The Syrian refugees in their millions crowd camps in Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan, thanks to internecine and sectarian conflict.

Europe is now taking the brunt of all of these refugees as they flood through to find a place for themselves. Camps are financially supported by the international community for the most part, through the United Nations; they are costly to operate, but their presence save lives. At the very same time the quality of life is degraded, people live in abject poverty and in fear, violence is rife, security absent, and hope dwindling. In Dadaab people have lived there for so long they have given up hope of being placed in another country or given permanent status in Kenya.

Still, people endure as they must, for the alternative is even more bleak. Of course the solution to their plight is to manage, somehow, to convince nations not to commit aggression against one another, either internally or externally. But the reality is stark and obvious in its  historical fact; the social primitivism of many places in the world, most particularly those which have never risen above patriarchy, tribalism, religious fascism and the rule of tyrants equals disinterest in human rights.

Labels: Africa, Middle East, Refugees

posted by Pieface @ Friday, January 15, 2016