There are now some 50 million people around the world who are victims of forced displacement. Around 16 million of them are refugees who have fled their own country in order to find asylum in another. The other 34 million are internally displaced persons (IDPs) who have sought safety in another part of their own country.
In the past decade five million asylum applications have been lodged in Europe, America and Canada. On average, 20% of asylum-seekers are recognised as refugees or granted leave to remain on a humanitarian basis. The other 80% are refused. The 750,000 Liberians who fled the war in Liberia to Cote d’Ivoire and Guinea were all recognised as prima facie refugees. Of the 20,347 Liberians who made it to Europe, however, only 214 were recognised as refugees.
In the early 1990s Western governments and their camp-followers in the human rights industry argued for a new almost-closed-door policy, rationalised by an assessment of the end of the Cold War. The totalitarian states of Eastern Europe would be replaced by stable democratic regimes, putting an end to the flow of asylum seekers from the East. The “peace dividend” delivered by the end of the Cold War would allow for increased development aid for the “Third World”, cutting back the flow of asylum-seekers from the South. The end of the Cold War would allow resources and armed force to secure “safe havens” for refugees in their own countries, and speedy repatriation programmes for refugee communities in exile, further cutting back the flow of asylum-seekers to the West. And then why, ran the argument, would genuine asylum seekers need to come to Europe, when so much assistance would be available in their own backyard?
This “new thinking” has already proved to be utterly inaccurate in its predictions, and disastrous in its consequences for refugees and IDPs.
The post-Stalinist regimes in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe are anything but stable democracies. Continuing political repression, institutionalised corruption, an explosion of poverty, and a series of large- scale ethnic conflicts, have triggered successive waves of refugees and IDPs there.
Political parties there have competed for popular support amidst resurgent nationalism by outbidding each other in their scapegoating of foreigners in general and refugees in particular.
Meanwhile, in the poorest regions of the globe, 89 countries have lower per capita incomes now than a decade ago. 19 of them are poorer today than they were in 1960. The difference in income between the richest and poorest fifths of the world’s population now stands at 78:1. It was 30:1 three decades ago.
As for the three major attempts to create “safe havens” — in Iraqi Kurdistan, Bosnia and Rwanda — they may have protected Western countries from an influx of asylum-seekers, but they did not protect those trapped inside the “havens”.
The “haven” established in Iraqi Kurdistan in 1991 faced an economic blockade by Iraq from the outset. It quickly became a battleground for competing Kurdish factions and their foreign backers. Repeated military incursions by Turkish, Iranian, and, less frequently, Iraqi forces added to the overall insecurity of life in the “safe haven”.
In the six Bosnian “havens” the effectively imprisoned populations found themselves under siege from Serb forces, subject to periodic shellings, and dependent on international aid for their survival. By the end of the war two of the “safe havens” had been overrun by Serb forces, with a new wave of massacres and “ethnic cleansing’’.
The short-lived “haven’ in South-West Rwanda was motivated mainly by France’s concern to prevent the unrest in Rwanda from spilling over into Zaire, with which France maintained close ties. It existed for the safety of the Zairean dictatorship rather than of the Hutus.
Yet a vast array of mechanisms has been put in place to prevent asylum- seekers from reaching West European countries, and to make life as unpleasant as possible for those who do manage to get here.
Visa requirements are imposed on refugee-generating countries. Airlines who carry asylum-seekers using false documentation are fined. The detention of asylum-seekers is increasingly common. Asylum-seekers are denied the right to claim welfare benefits, and rejected asylum-seekers get no adequate rights of appeal. The “New World Order” means not only economic crisis in the world’s advanced economies, but also a worsening of the social and political tensions in developing countries, unleashing new waves of refugees, whilst simultaneously slashing the assistance available for the victims.
Stan Crooke