A crisis in the dark: the forgotten refugees.

GLOBALLY, 5.7 MILLION PEOPLE live in a prolonged state of hunger and insecurity. These are the refugees who are hopelessly confined to makeshift shelters and urban slums, abandoned and left to perish in the shadows of high-profile wars and international indifference.

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The forgotten refugees in the deserts of Africa, in the rice lands of Asia and on the mountains of Europe are caught in a state of limbo, with diminishing hope of returning to their native lands and a slim possibility of being granted asylum in a third country. For them, there is no solution in sight. Regardless of persecution, armed conflict and even genocide that have forced them to flee, the world remains unengaged.

When 25,000 or more refugees live in exile for over five years, their situation is considered protracted. There are at least 33 protracted refugee situations today, not including the 16,000 Somali refugees in Ethiopia or the 15,000 Ethiopians in Sudan. Nearly 60 per cent of the world's 9.2 million refugees are living under these conditions either in refugee camps or urban slums. In Africa alone, some 3 million are victims of this crisis situation that remains in the dark. Even more surprising is that refugees are spending longer periods in exile, averaging 17 years in 2003--nearly twice longer than in 1993.

Refugees are spending more of their lives in exile. Children are the most heavily impacted group in this tragic situation. Camps are the only home known to them--a home and a school offering only primary education under one roof--where they receive a life lesson on the human consequences of inaction. "We call them people refugees, but, of course, a very high proportion of these people are actually children who have been born in refugee camps and never lived elsewhere and don't really know what a normal life is", Jeff Crisp, author of No solutions in sight: The problem of protracted refugee situations in Africa, a working paper for the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), told the UN Chronicle.

But the grim reality is that the three resolutions to the refugee situations--repatriation, integration and resettlement--are not viable options. For many, repatriation or returning to their homeland would often be synonymous with walking into a death trap, because oftentimes the persecutors from whom refugees once fled still roam freely. Also, both host and third countries, where refugees could potentially seek asylum, prohibit successful resettlement and integration due to fears that refugees will create instability and economic burden for these countries. In reality, if afforded the opportunities to stay in a certain community, refugees can often enrich the economy of a host country. An article in the UNHCR Refugees magazine mentioned that in Kenya, ironically, there were demonstrations protesting the closing of a refugee camp due to concerns that the economy would crumble without the refugees' economic contribution.

In addition to the many hardships that refugees endure, an overwhelming majority is in low-profile situations, where donor support is dwindling, because such situations do not spark political or strategic interest for industrialized nations. For instance, even in all its urgency, sub-Saharan Africa remains low-profile--the region hosts 1.9 million refugees in protracted situations in war-torn and impoverished developing countries, such as the United Republic of Tanzania and Uganda.

The State of the World's Refugees--Human Displacement in the New Millennium, a report published by UNHCR in 2006, found that protracted refugee situations are burgeoning in poor and unstable areas because regional and international actors are not engaged in what they consider low-profile regions. Based on strategic and economic interests, developed nations prioritize which international conflicts are deserving of intervention. As a result, they decide the fate of millions of people. For instance, the armed conflicts in Kosovo and southeastern Europe were resolved by the United States and other nations with strategic interests in the Balkans, resulting in over 500,000 refugees returning home just three weeks after the war ended, which prevented a protracted situation.

Comparably, the road home has not been cleared for Somali refugees exiled in Djibouti, Ethiopia and Kenya, as well as in other African countries and throughout Europe, who have not been able to return home since the early 1990s. Industrialized nations often reconcile their selective humanitarian intervention by asserting that meagre economic incentives do not merit the security threats posed by brutal dictators, gorilla fighters and militias. For example, on the Rwandan refugee crisis, where 160,000 Tutsis fled to neighbouring countries, many have attributed the absence of a long-term resolution to the genocide of 1 million Tutsi and moderate Hutu Rwandans in the 1990s. "The failure to address the problems of the Rwandan refugees in the 1960s contributed substantially to the cataclysmic violence of the 1990s", Mr. Crisp said in his UNHCR working paper.

As stated in The State of the World's Refugees, ultimately it must be recognized that the most efficient, effective and humane approach to the refugee situations is prevention. There is a lack of vital peacekeeping forces and conflict mediation in low-profile regions, as well as a disparity of aid funds allocated to them compared to high-profile areas. In 2002, 3.5 million refugees in Kosovo and southeastern Europe were receiving 59 cents per day per person, which was incomparable to a mere 13 cents for 12 million African refugees. "The level of assistance to refugees in long-term situations in Africa has fallen to below an unacceptable standard", affirmed Mr. Crisp. "To be very honest, if you were to give refugees in Africa a high level of assistance, you would find that they might be living in better conditions than the local people around them, which would in itself create all kinds of problems between the two groups." Some of these problems include xenophobia and raging tensions that flare up with host community members, who have anger towards aid recipient refugees because they feel their country is deprived of sustainable development.

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African refugees receive less aid and suffer more, as their countries have not been developed economically. In addition, at a time when malnutrition is rampant in refugee camps, the World Food Programme had to regrettably decrease food rations due to insufficient funding. Despite the devastating reality of the protracted refugee crisis, there are those who believe that camps are comfortable havens for people content to be dependent on foreign aid. But, much to the contrary, many camps are unsafe, crowded and enclosed like prisons, often plagued by rape, murder and human trafficking. "When you put 100,000 people together, it is not possible to be crime-free", Mr. Crisp said. There were a number of situations reported, where perpetrators of human atrocities were alarmingly living among their victims.

Since violence erupted in Somalia in the early 1990s, as many as 135,000 Somali refugees in the Kenyan Dadaab camp still face adversities, such as murder, rape and armed robbery, even though crime rate gradually falls each year, according to UNHCR. "Refugees have limited freedom of movement, difficulty getting permission to work, no access to land for agricultural production, and no access to credit or saving sector. Essentially the refugees are confined to the camp areas." Nevertheless, in spite of these harsh circumstances, many refugees struggle to find peace in all of the chaos. They are eager to be productive, farm land and even provide cheap labour just to earn a living and eventually regain normal lives, if only given the opportunity. Their willingness to make the most of their strife "is a testament to the indomitable courage of the refugees, who in the face of overwhelming odds somehow find the will to survive and rebuild their lives", stated Secretary-General Kofi Annan in the preface to The State of the World's Refugees report.

As one of the UN Department of Public Information's "Ten Stories the World Should Hear More About", the protracted refugee situation is identified as a crisis in the dark. It is evident that the world has yet to fully recognize and take action to end their plight. If these tragedies could gain as much media attention as emergency relief situations, such as the December 2004 tsunami in southern Asia, industrialized nations would be more willing and generous with their donor support towards refugees living in a state of limbo. In effect, there is a chain reaction between media attention, donor support and refugee livelihood-that is, one leads to the other. "Media glare counts. International attention counts", UNHCR spokesman Ron Redmond emphasized.

UNHCR is also pushing for a more organized and integrated approach that ventures beyond humanitarian aid to these protracted refugee situations. The instability that caused these situations is, for the most part, still there--the violence, the poverty and the fighting are just as prolonged as the years and decades the refugees have not been able to return home. For instance, the Palestinians for over fifty years have endured the longest protracted refugee situation of the twentieth century. Since the deep-rooted conflict and instability in the Middle East have never actually been resolved, the years of conflict have ceaselessly continued to take a tremendous human toll.

Both high-profile and low-profile refugee camps and urban slums, humanitarian organizations must cooperate with peacekeeping and development agencies in order to bring an integrated, durable solution to protracted refugee situations. Two of the UNHCR integrated efforts already in motion are the "Afghanistan Plus"--a project that attempts to manage population movements in order to resolve key policy issues for the Afghans, such as repatriation and reintegration--and the Somalia Comprehensive Plan of Action, which hopes to help Somalis successfully settle in host countries. It is also important to assure the impoverished countries that funds will not be diverted from other projects, but that additional aid will be given to fund programmes for development, including for peace and security. Mr. Redmond stated: "The refugees' basic rights and essential needs remain unfulfilled for years and even decades. They become reliant on aid. It's wasted lives that we are seeing--they are wasted lives, squandered resources."