By Elizabeth Gibson*
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| Deputy High Commissioner T. Alexander Aleinikoff |
The United Nations’ refugee
agency knows how to set up refugee camps, but finding long-term solutions to
get refugees out of those camps is not easy.
The Deputy High Commissioner of
UNHCR, T. Alexander Aleinikoff,**
presented the 34th
Annual Thomas F. Ryan Lecture at the Georgetown University Law Center yesterday, and he emphasized that the international community needs to rethink
its response to refugee situations.
“Non-solutions
have become the norm and literally hundreds of thousands of refugees have
become forgotten people,” he said. “We have to move away from the paradigm of
dependence that currently defines the refugee regime.”
Protecting
the rights of refugees and providing for their basic needs is the bread and
butter of UNHCR’s work—and it’s crucial, lifesaving work. However, no matter
how much of a success you might consider Thai camps that provide shelter, food,
medical attention, and education for families fleeing persecution in Myanmar,
it is worrisome that the camp is 35 years old and still relying on food aid, Prof. Aleinikoff said.
As another example, the Dadaab camp for Somali refugees is
now the fourth largest city in Kenya, with a population of 387,870
registered refugees, according to UNHCR. There are some 10,000 children who
have been born in Dadaab to parents who themselves were born in Dadaab after their own parents fled Somalia. That is three generations of refugees, and the Deputy High Commissioner said that this is a statistic the
world should find extremely saddening.
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| Aerial image of Dadaab by Oxfam International | Flickr |
The
international community has gotten very good at responding to crises and
providing aid, but then people get stuck. The traditional solutions for
refugees are return home, local integration, or resettlement. However, home
countries can remain in a state of unrest for decades. Receiving countries may
generously open their borders, but often hesitate to let refugees mingle will the local population. Meanwhile, even the largest third-country resettlement programs are barely making a dent in the problem.
All the while, people sit in limbo, and aid agencies carry on as if driven by inertia. Prof. Aleinikoff
said that this situation is like deciding that the solution for domestic violence is putting
survivors in shelters for battered women and then just leaving them in those shelters for
decades. He said well-meaning
organizations are perpetuating an “industry of dependency” and the world needs
to start coming up with creative solutions.
Organizations
need to focus more on empowering refugees to become self-sufficient. For example, with a grant from the IKEA Foundation, UNHCR has worked to provide livelihoods training for young refugees in Ethiopia. UNHCR also has paired Somali refugees with landowners of
undeveloped property in Ethiopia so that the refugees can farm the land and
split the profits with the property owners.
There
needs to be a paradigm shift so that refugees are given the opportunity to be
drivers of development rather than stuck in limbo with their potential left to idle. Prof. Aleinikoff pointed out that Albert Einstein was a refugee, after all.
Making
this change requires new ideas, staff with new kinds of expertise, and, as with
any international endeavor, political will. But the Deputy High Commissioner
was optimistic and said that change is already underway.
"Over
the past nearly four years I have seen more injustice than justice,” he said. “But
more hope than despair."
* Elizabeth
Gibson is the Senior Online Content Editor of The Summit and interned for
Deputy High Commissioner Aleinikoff during the summer of 2013.
** Deputy High Commissioner Aleinikoff also
is a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center and served as the dean of
the law center from 2004 to 2010. He has taken a leave of absence to serve as
the Deputy High Commissioner. (View
his academic profile.)
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