Humanitarian Exchange articles tagged:Refugees

The Burmese refugee camps on the Thai–Burma border are characterised as a protracted refugee situation.[1] The nine camps spread across four provinces have been in existence since the mid-1980s, and have a collective population of approximately 135,000 people.[2] The ethnic conflict precipitating much of the forced migration continues unabated in Burma, with at least 3,000 people fleeing to Thailand in 2009.[3] Until 1998, there was no formal protection programming in the camps. UNHCR was barred from entering them, and NGOs were prohibited from implementing programmes focusing on refugee rights. Camp residents faced (and still face) an array of threats from…

The South-East Asian nation of Timor-Leste declared independence on 20 May 2002 after three years of UN administration following the end of the Indonesian occupation in 1999. Four years later, in 2006, serious civil conflict broke out when sections of the Timorese army (known as ‘Petitioners’) protested against alleged discrimination by officers from areas of eastern Timor-Leste. Subsequent clashes, which also included the police and wider society, resulted in the displacement of approximately 150,000 people. The Cluster System was officially introduced in Timor-Leste in March 2009 to better coordinate the response to the conflict and also to plan for potential…

In May 2009, the government of Pakistan launched an offensive against the Taliban in Swat, prompting the world’s fastest and largest displacement crisis in over a decade. Over 2.6 million people were uprooted in as little as three weeks. From the outset, it was clear that protection concerns would play a considerable role. Areas of conflict were inaccessible, most of those fleeing were women and children and the vast majority of the displaced stayed in informal camps or host community settings, rather than the purpose-built formal camps. Many IDPs, therefore, remained hidden, unable to access services, unaware of their rights…

People living in conflict-affected areas of Karen State in south-eastern Burma rely on courageous and ingenious, but also often harmful, self-protection strategies. Protection stemming from international norms and agents is largely absent for this population. The ‘Local to Global Protection’ (L2GP) project explores how people living in areas affected by natural disaster and armed conflict understand ‘protection’ – what they value, how they go about protecting themselves, their families and their communities and how they view the roles of other stakeholders. Since the Rwanda crisis in 1994, protection has increasingly been debated by aid agencies, which have sought to incorporate…

  In the span of a few months last spring, Pakistan witnessed one of the gravest internal displacement crises of the last two decades. Beginning in early May, each week hundreds of thousands of people streamed out of the districts of Swat, Buner and Dir into neighbouring lowland areas, driven from their homes by a sweeping military campaign against the Taliban. They joined over half a million already displaced in late 2008 by a similar campaign in the northern tribal agencies of Bajaur and Mohmand. At the height of the crisis, nearly three million people sought shelter in host communities…

In recent years, developing national capacity and building effective partnerships with national and local actors have moved up the humanitarian policy agenda. Yet the rhetoric around sustainability and local ownership rarely reflects operational practice on the ground, making it difficult to identify not only the obstacles to such initiatives, but also the factors that enable their progress. Protracted emergencies raise a particular set of issues about how best to support national and local priorities in the transition from international to national and local aid coordination structures. Drawing on HPG research carried out in Gulu and Pader districts in Northern Uganda…

At 45 years and counting, Colombia’s internal armed conflict is one of the longest in recent history. Its consequences are dire. Summary executions, threats, the forced recruitment of children, hostage-taking, sexual violence and the use of anti-personnel mines have all had serious humanitarian costs, especially during the past 20 or so years. The conflict has also produced one of the world’s largest populations of displaced civilians. According to government and civil society figures, between three and four million people have been forced to flee their homes due to threats, armed clashes and forced recruitment.  The ICRC and ‘humanitarian space’ The…

This edition of Humanitarian Exchange, commissioned in collaboration with the Humanitarian Studies Institute (Instituto de Estudios Humanitarios), focuses on the humanitarian situation in Colombia. Although the Colombian government has been keen to demonstrate progress in defeating and demobilising the country’s various armed groups, and to depict Colombia as having entered a post-conflict phase, pressing humanitarian concerns remain, related to mass internal displacement and continuing human rights violations. Although the government uses ‘post-conflict’ discourse, articles in this issue highlight continued obstacles to returning the internally displaced, delivering relief and providing protection to those in need. These challenges largely stem from ongoing…

One in every six people on the planet currently experiences the kind of living conditions depicted in the recent film Slumdog Millionaire, set in the sprawling slums of Mumbai. Forecasts by UN Habitat and others suggest that slum communities like those shown in the film will double in size to two billion people by 2025, accounting for one in four of the world’s population, making slums the fastest-growing form of human settlement and a key facet of global urbanisation. With urban centres projected to double in size to four billion people by 2025, the equivalent of a city of nearly…

Colombia is in the throes of one of the world’s largest crises of internal displacement. Since the mid-1990s, more than 3.2 million people have been displaced. On average, between 2000 and 2009 300,000 people a year fled in search of protection. In 2008, 294,000 left their places of residence. In late 2008, the government estimated that nearly 40,000 households (176,000 people) had returned to their places of origin with the accompaniment of the authorities.  The official Information System on the Displaced Population in Colombia is one of the most highly developed such systems in the world (www.accionsocial.gov.co). However, it does…