Changing the Way We Think of Refugees

Was ever a ship more aptly named than the Bulk Challenge, the freighter brimming with Liberian refugees turned away by one West African government after another last year? What better metaphor for the world's uncaring attitude toward refugees?

The bulk challenge today is to the principle of asylum itself: Will countries receiving refugees provide them with an acceptable level of protection from violence and persecution? Will refugees be able to flee their countries at all?

A recently released World Refugee Survey says the worldwide total of refugees and asylum seekers is at the lowest level since 1988, estimated at 14.5 million people. Although some of the decrease is due to improvement in the human rights conditions that cause refugees to flee - and for this we are grateful - the decline in refugee numbers also indicates that the availability of asylum is becoming more restricted, and more refugees are being coerced to repatriate.

The group representing the largest reduction in the worldwide refugee total in 1996 was the 1.3 million Rwandans who returned home. Yet, most returned because their fears for their safety in the countries of purported asylum outweighed their fears of returning home.

The Rwandan refugee "endgame" cannot be understood in isolation. For three years, local officials and the international community failed to provide the quality of asylum required in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), Tanzania, and Burundi. They neglected to eradicate criminals from the camps, allowing refugees to be used as pawns. Now we must ask whether the basic terms for understanding the refugee experience need to be redefined.

Refugees - or hostages?

Did the word "refugee" even apply to most of the people in the Zairean camps? Would they more accurately have been called hostages? If they were not, in fact, refugees - if they were captives held in the refugee camps against their will and were in greater danger inside the camps than they would have been at home - did the traditional principles of refugee protection apply to them?

Perhaps the Rwandan refugee experience is sui generis, an anomaly that stands alone and teaches us nothing. It may, rather, be a portent of a future in which the lines distinguishing refugees and nonrefugees become increasingly blurred and in which both the character of asylum and the nature of repatriation become ever more difficult to fathom. We ignore its lessons at great peril.

The principal lesson is to distinguish real asylum from pseudo-asylum. If the vulnerable are held captive or otherwise brutalized, then the sine qua non of an international assistance and protection regime is to separate the captives from the captors. In the case of Rwandans in Zaire, the West in particular knew the evil that was being perpetrated in the name of humanitarianism, but it chose not to deal with it.

We cannot go through the motions of pretending that a situation is a case of asylum simply because groups of people have crossed a border and need assistance. The history and culture of the international refugee regime hold as sacrosanct the principle of "nonrefoulement" - that refugees cannot be returned to places where their lives or freedom would be threatened.

But in Zaire, right under the noses of the international humanitarians, these people's lives and freedom were being threatened - and worse. We have focused so much of our energy on stopping involuntary returns that we have failed to appreciate that abuses to life and freedom of the same or greater magnitude were occurring in supposed asylum, in the absence of return. In such cases, to concentrate our energies on opposing forced return is to miss the fundamental human right that is being violated.

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