Rumble: Refugees for Life

My friend E. commented in one of my previous posts: "Some groups have been refugees for so long (for example, the Palestinians in Lebanon have been displaced for almost 40 years) that people (including yourself) have already 'forgotten' their plight. Did we all become immune or saturated already?"

And she is right. Read this article: "Protracted refugee situations: Millions caught in limbo, with no solutions in sight".
While worldwide refugee numbers have fallen to their lowest level in 25 years, a larger percentage of asylum-seekers are spending a longer time in exile in an often-overlooked plight of subsistence living in a virtual state of limbo. Excluding the Palestinians, they account for 5.7 million of the world's 9.2 million refugees.

The root causes of long-standing refugee populations stem from the very states whose instability engenders chronic regional insecurity. Most of the refugees in these regions - be they Somalis, Sudanese, Burundians or Burmese - come from countries where conflict has persisted for years.

East and West Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, the Caucasus, Central Asia and the Middle East are all plagued by protracted refugee situations. Sub-Saharan Africa has the largest number, 17, involving 1.9 million refugees. The countries hosting the biggest groups are Guinea, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia.

In Asia (China, Thailand, India and Nepal) there are five protracted situations and some 676,000 refugees. Europe has three major cases involving 510,000 refugees, primarily in the Balkans and Armenia.

Although the measure of at least 25,000 refugees in exile for five years is traditionally used to define such situations, UNHCR argues that other groups should not be excluded. For example, of the Rohingya who fled from Myanmar to Bangladesh 12 years ago, 20,000 still remain. Similarly, there are 19,000 Burundians in the Democratic Republic of Congo, 16,000 Somalis in Ethiopia, 15,000 Ethiopians in Sudan and 19,000 Rwandans in Uganda.

Picture courtesy UNHCR.