The forced uprooting, migration and settlement of people are issues of global political, economic and humanitarian concern. Too frequently they are confined within domestic political debate and subjected to media coverage that focuses on only a small part of the whole. But in order to understand and address problems of forced displacement, we need to find connections between different types of uprooting, their consequences, and the legal and policy frameworks in which they occur.
Displacement does not just happen; it is also willed. Any study of displacement throughout history, in state-making, and in creating national identities makes clear that the ability to control a citizenry through selective uprooting, removal, resettlement and containment is pivotal in maintaining state power. If anything, the recourse to forced displacement is tending to become more rather than less commonplace in the contemporary world: as competition for resources intensifies and demand increases, as states feel both threatened and powerful, and as new development and security agendas encourage states to control population movement.
The threads of unsettlement
Four kinds of displacement and resettlement are becoming more common: political, economic, environmental, and war-related.
- Governments take political decisions deliberately to uproot their peoples settlement patterns. Historical examples of such displacement include forced resettlement in Soviet Russia, transmigrasi in Indonesia, rural resettlement in Ethiopia and Tanzania, urban clearances for national development in China, and (most recently) Robert Mugabes Operation Murambatsvina.
- Governments often justify such forced displacements with a veneer of developmentalist rhetoric, but they are in fact crude attempts to control populations and rearrange the ethnic or social composition of the country for security and political gain.
- States transform citizens lives and habitats by implementing economic and planning strategies that, for example, turn economies from small-scale subsistence agriculture to an export-based market in ways that require the amalgamation of farms and evacuation of rural areas. Decisions to build new roads, dams, and ports have a similar effect: a vast development-created displacement. Each year, the construction of dams and roads alone leads to 9-10 million people being moved against their will in poorer countries.
- Current high-profile displacements include the 1.3 million people uprooted by the Three Gorges Dam in China, and the Nam Theun 2 Dam in Laos which will affect vulnerable minorities in a country where minorities are rarely protected. A fractured mosaic of displacement in urban areas throughout the developing world affects millions more.
- Natural disasters create development opportunities for governments. As in Indonesia and Sri Lanka after the December 2004 tsunami, environmental displacement becomes political when governments take decisions about aid distribution, relocation and the right to return home (or its denial). Sri Lanka, for example, may impose shoreline regulations that would ban fishing communities from rebuilding villages and livelihoods in favour, perhaps, of creating new tourist projects.
- States and combatants use civil conflicts and small wars to impose control over population settlement and movement, involving tactics of terror and displacement, encampment and return. In 2004, according to the internally displaced persons (IDP) global survey, 3 million people were displaced within the borders of their countries in around thirty different conflicts (thats 8,000 people a day).
These conflicts, most of them taking place in Africa or Asia, are different. Many of them are fought with small weapons like machetes and with automatic guns mounted on the back of Toyota jeeps. Their costs, according to Michael Clarke, are psychological, moral and spiritual as well as physical. These conflicts are about the inability of the worlds political systems, the United Nations and the development machine to manage the situations that drive countries and communities to conflict.
Since 9/11, there is renewed faith in warfare and a belief that invasion and occupation can solve global security problems. The invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq has resulted in more than 3 million refugees returning home since 2002. Such conflict is at the same time displacing and scattering people, and returning them to their countries of origin.
The power to disperse
In examining these varieties of displacement four striking similarities emerge:
- The common experience is one of multiple displacements. In Cambodia for example, families are being uprooted from their roadside homes as a result of the upgrading of the countrys major highways. Many had set up home there after a lifetime of removal, roaming, repatriation and resettlement. Some had been forcibly ruralised by the Pol Pot regime, then fled as refugees across the Thailand border, only to return home under a UN-sponsored scheme to discover that their previous land was occupied and the meagre repatriation rations insufficient to build a new life.
- The returned refugees (now categorised as IDPs) were forced again to seek land, and found the solution in squatting on unoccupied land along the highways. Now, again, they are in the way and are to be removed, and often vilified for illegally occupying state lands. This illustrates how the experience of displacement is for many only one part of a series of events and experiences that interlink different political and economic processes that they are powerless to control.
- The types of people who become displaced are significant. Displacement disproportionately affects the poor, those who are distanced from the centres of power, who often live outside the formal economic system, are members of minority populations speaking a different language to the dominant national language, and who generally do not fit a metropolitan national identity.
- Sometimes bad luck or an accident of geography may help explain why such people are targeted; but relative powerlessness and vulnerability makes this possible. An astonishing statistic from India is that 40% of the 25 million displaced in India by dams since the 1950s are minority tribal people who together constitute just 8% of the population. The axe of displacement falls unequally.
- The outcomes of displacement are similar. As a result of their displacement and resettlement, poor and marginal people become more so. The World Bank slowly started to admit at the end of the 1990s that large dams and similar projects displacing people in the name of national development actually have an anti-development outcome. Involuntary resettlement makes people poorer, and creates pernicious new kinds of poverty and dependency. The effects are also long-term: research in Zambia on the Kariba Dam found that forced displacement impacts on morbidity and mortality into the next generation.
- Governments and the international community respond variably to the different types of displacement, but the effectiveness of their response to forced migration emergencies and displacement more generally leaves much to be desired. A comprehensive legal and institutional framework covers conflict refugees; those who cross borders have (in theory) a panoply of statutes to define, regulate and protect their status the 1951 refugee convention, the OAU and the Cartagena conventions, the UNHCR, international humanitarian and refugee law, and international guarantees of asylum.
This extensive framework, however, leaves internally-displaced people as the concern of (and often to the mercy of) states. The worlds nation-state based system with its central concern to protect sovereignty makes IDPs vulnerable; the Deng Principles represent a potential framework of protection of IDPs, but it will take years for these to be embodied in law, if they ever are.
There are signs of progress. Emergency responses have improved since Rwanda. Agencies coordinate better, money is channelled more quickly, individuals and governments are quite generous in responding to UN appeals, and international NGOs have introduced minimum standards that have seen better provision of health care, clean water and shelter.
But in many cases most recently in Burundi, Afghanistan, East Timor, Georgia and especially Darfur the response is too little and too late, lacks political will, is short term in focus, and is unable to provide the conditions for reestablishing livelihoods in the post-conflict period.
A displaced world
Most governments in the developing world do not have a body of domestic law that provides protection, and specifies and guarantees the rights of displaced people. Some governments are discussing new legislation, and there are attempts to internalise human-rights provisions (one legacy of 19th-century colonial rule is that laws of eminent domain give states the right to seize land in the national interest).
At present, the balance of power in the world but especially in the global south distinctly favours the state over the individual. States and combat groups that engage in conflict and pursue forced displacement for political gain are generally free to act without the threat of international penalties. In the headlong rush for modernisation, for power and clean water, and in the chaos of conflict, uprooting and impoverishment are not accidental but intrinsic.
Further Links:
Information Centre about Asylum and Refugees
http://www.icar.org.uk
Internally Displaced Persons
http://www.idpproject.org/
UNHCR - UN refugee agency
http://www.unhcr.ch/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/home
