Veranstaltungsberichte
Of the 65.6 million, 40.3 million were people displaced within their
own country (internally displaced persons), according to the UNHCR’s
and the 2016 Global Trends report.
Refugees who fled to another
country made up the next biggest
group, at 22.5 million people, the
highest number ever recorded. The
rest, at 2.8 million people, were
asylum seekers, refugees who had
fled their own countries and were
seeking protection elsewhere.
The Arab Syria Republic generated the
highest number of refugees, with 5.5
million Syrian having fled the country
because of the civil war. However, over
the course of 2016, South Sudan became
a major new source of refugees after the
breakdown of peace in the country. By
2018, the civil war in Syria, in its eighth
year and with no sign that it would end
soon, had both internally and externally
displaced people numbering a whopping
12 million.
Worryingly, the number of people
being displaced continues to grow.
Of the total refugee count in 2016,
10.3 million became refugees that
year. Currently, Uganda is the biggest
refugee host country in Africa. As at
January 2018, the country had become
host to 1,411,794 refugees.
Reasons why people become refugees
The most common reason why people
become refugees is wars and conflicts.
The largest group of refugees in the
world are fleeing civil conflict in
Syria, South Sudan, Somalia and the
Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
People also flee from persecution,
which takes religious, social, racial or
political forms. Religious refugees, for
example, include Muslims persecuted
in Myanmar, Christians in the Central
African Republic (CAF) and Hindus in
Pakistan.
In Uganda, displacement of people,
other than that caused by the twodecade
LRA war in northern Uganda
which ended in the mid-2000s, has
largely been due to natural hazards
like landslides and consequences like
hunger, which can also be attributed
to climate change. Though officially
climate change is not yet a valid reason
for an asylum claim, it is increasingly
becoming a cause of displacement of
people. It is estimated that in the next
83 years, a stunning 13 million coastal
dwellers could be displaced because of
climate change.
In Uganda, according to the Internal
Displacement Monitoring Centre
(IDMC), 61 disasters brought on by
natural hazards were reported between
1980 and 2010 and almost 5 million
people were affected by incidences
including floods, earthquakes,
landslides, drought, epidemics and
livestock diseases.
Challenges of hosting refugees
Hosting of refugees comes with
challenges such as environmental
degradation during the process
of setting up camps and/or
settlements where trees are felled
and ecosystems disrupted. There
are also risks of insecurity spillovers
from the conflict in the
country of origin. The government
of Rwanda, for example, has
always feared that the conflict
in the DRC might spill over into
Rwanda, which partly explains the
restrictions on access to Rwanda
for refugees from the DRC.
Refugees put pressure on public
social services such as education,
water and health, which often
cause conflicts with host
communities. Recently, conflicts
developed between refugees in
Kyangwali Refugee Settlement in
Hoima district (Western Uganda)
and the host communities over
water point sources.
There are huge economic
challenges in hosting refugees. A
UN study in Jordan, one of the
biggest refugee host countries in
the Middle East, estimated the
cost of hosting Syrian refugees in
2013 and 2014 at USD 5.3 billion.
The Jordanian government and the
UN had estimated that the cost of
hosting refugees in 2014 would
amount to only USD 2.1 billion.
In 2017, Uganda and UNHCR hosted
the Uganda Solidarity Summit on
Refugees, hoping to raise USD 2
billion for humanitarian assistance
for the over 1.4 million refugees
in the country. The majority of the
refugees from South Sudan and
the DRC, two of Africa’s biggest
refugee source countries, are
hosted in Uganda. By December 2017, Uganda was host to 986,626 and 236,406 South Sudanese and DRC refugees respectively. This definitely puts a strain on the national economy.
“Do we really have the potential to host refugees?” poses journalist George Katongole. “I would not mind the resources that Uganda spends on refugees in refugee settlements,” argues Katongole, “but we also have people in this country who are in worse situations than those refugees. There are people – even in Kampala – who cannot afford to feed themselves.”
The influx of refugees often impacts on the politics and governance of host countries. In 2017, in Holland, after the elections that produced no decisive winner, splits over refugee policy among political parties that needed to form a coalition government left the country with no government for three months. In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s open-door policy towards refugees in Germany was highly criticised by her political opponents. This was a risk to her party, the Christian Democratic Union, which almost lost the 2017 elections.
The issue of refugees has also been one of contention with in the European Union (EU), with some member countries divided over the matter. Countries like Hungary, for example, refused to take in their quarter share of refugees entering Europe, arguing that it would strain her economy. The number of people seeking asylum in Europe reached a record high of 1.3 million in 2016. Most of the refugees came from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq. The EU was forced to sign a refugee pact with Turkey. In the highly criticised deal, Turkey agreed to take back migrants who entered Greece, and send legal refugees to the EU. In exchange, the EU agreed to give Turkey 6 billion euros, and to allow visa-free travel for Turkish citizens by the end of June 2016.
“At the onset of a massive refugee crisis, a refugee influx into a country can cause a significant overload on a country’s resources, social services and infrastructure,” notes David Kigozi, programme manager, Sudan, at the International Refugee Rights Initiative. Kigozi however says this happens if the refugee management system is totally based on “care-and-maintenance” programmes which pay no attention to the empowerment of refugees to take responsibility for their own livelihoods, at least partially, if they wish to do so. “In protracted situations, however,” Kigozi argues, “where the planned response focuses on the development of both refugees and hosts in an environment that is supportive of refugee rights, it would be far-fetched to consider refugees as a burden.”
There is evidence of the positive impact that refugees make. They supply needed skills, as the case is in Germany, or create employment, as the case is in Kampala, with some Somali refugees operating restaurants and fuel petrol stations, among others. The refugee crisis, therefore, is perhaps a challenge that has no explicit conclusion but one that ought to be handled on a case-by-case basis basing on when it occurs.
Top 10 source countries of refugees
1. Syria
2. Afghanistan
3. South Sudan
4. Somalia
5. Sudan
6. DRC
7. CAF
8. Myanmar
9. Eritrea
10. Burundi
BRIAN MUTEBI