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While every refugee’s story is different and their anguish personal, they all share a common thread of uncommon courage – the courage to not only survive, but to persevere and rebuild their shattered lives.
Antonio Guterrez, former United Nations high commissioner for refugees and current UN secretary general[1]
Maryum and Mohammad owned a small business in Aleppo, Syria, when the war started.[2] In the beginning the war did not affect them; they could only hear the bombs and guns in the distance. But slowly it started coming closer. One day a bomb exploded outside their house, almost destroying it and killing some people they knew in their neighbourhood. Mohammad says, “By the grace of God none of us were injured.” With so much of the city around them destroyed, they realized that they could not continue living there, so they decided to leave. It was a very difficult decision as they had many family members in the city.
To avoid the militias and the army, Maryum and Mohammad left at night with their two little children and walked along trails, away from the main roads. It took them two weeks to reach Lebanon. They had some money and hardly any food. They finally found some other people from their neighbourhood in Aleppo who allowed them to share their tent and food till they could set up their own tent. They constructed their crude accommodation out of some plastic sheeting that they bought and other materials they found in the garbage.
Mohammad is unable to find any work because there are so many refugees in Lebanon. They get some food from the UN through one organization. It is not enough, but they manage by eating one meal a day. In winter they struggle because it is so cold and they have only one stove. Sometimes they don’t have enough fuel and have to borrow from friends. What money they brought with them is almost gone. Maryum says, “It is hard to see the children growing without enough food. They are not able to attend school either. We don’t know what the future will bring.”
The world seems to have crossed an unseen threshold. In their 2015 annual report, the United Nation’s agency responsible for refugees (UNHCR) reported that the number of people forcibly displaced has reached 65.3 million.[3] This is the highest global amount since World War II. It amounts to one in every 113 persons in the world today, with nearly 34,000 persons being forced to flee from their homes every single day.[4]
Of the 65.3 million displaced, 21.3 million (32.6 percent) are refugees who have fled from their countries because of conflict, violence, or persecution. Ten million of the 65.3 million are stateless, meaning they have been deprived nationality and claim no membership to any nation-state. They lack many basics such as education, healthcare, employment, and freedom of movement. Three countries – Somalia (1.1 million), Afghanistan (2.7 million), and Syria (4.9 million) – produce large numbers of refugees.[5]
These numbers are no doubt staggering, but like so many statistics their meaning is limited because they are rarely connected to people we know or care about. We are often unable to relate to the trauma and agony faced by the people numbered here. Statistics alone fail to tell the story of the terrified families who suddenly become destitute, of children who have lost their parents, of young widows trying to raise their families on their own with no source of income, and of the elderly and disabled – all of whom somehow no longer belong anywhere. Numbers do not communicate the nightmare that occurs when an individual who has been firmly rooted in his or her home for a lifetime suddenly becomes a non-citizen of the world. The scale of displacement and the number of people suffering is no secret, yet the world falls short time and time again in finding real solutions to solvable problems.
The displacement crisis engulfing the world right now is by no means a new phenomenon. The past century has witnessed numerous waves of refugees fleeing conflict, persecution, destruction of homes and livelihoods, and death. Some of the larger displacements in recent history have already largely escaped our collective memory. These include the following:[6]
| 1940–45 | 40 million people were displaced during World War II. |
| 1945–50 | Post-World War II, 1 million Belarusians, Ukrainians, and Russians were displaced, and 13 million Germans were expelled from Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union. |
| 1947 | 14 million Indians and Pakistanis were displaced during partition of the Indian subcontinent during the time of independence. |
| 1948–50 | 750,000 Palestinians were displaced from what became the State of Israel. |
| 1954–56 | 1 million (mainly Roman Catholics) were displaced from North Vietnam to South Vietnam during the communist repressions in North Vietnam. |
| 1960 | 1.2 million Algerians were displaced internally and to Morocco and Tunisia during the Algerian War of Independence. |
| 1967 | The Biafra conflict in Nigeria displaced 2 million, mostly internally. |
| 1971 | Bangladesh war displaced 10 million refugees. |
| 1979 | Soviet invasion of Afghanistan displaced 6.3 million refugees. |
| 1976–1992 | Mozambique war displaced 5.7 million. |
| 1989 | Civil wars in Central America (Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala) displaced 2 million. |
| 1994 | Rwandan genocide resulted in 3.5 million internally displaced and refugees. |
| 1994–95 | Balkans conflict displaced 2.5 million. |
| 2012–15 | 891,000 Burmese (mainly Rohingyas) were persecuted, internally displaced, denied citizenship, or made refugees. |
| 2011–2016 | 12.6 million Syrians were internally displaced and made refugees by civil war. |
| 1964–2015 | The long running civil conflict in Colombia has resulted in 5.8 million internally displaced. |
It would seem from the media headlines that the flows of refugees into Europe, North America, and Australia have reached crisis proportions. Yet the reality is that non-Western countries are bearing the brunt of hosting the majority of refugees. Of the total number of displaced persons, North America only hosts 12 percent and Europe 6 percent. The Middle East and North Africa host 39 percent of the total number of displaced, with sub-Saharan Africa carrying the burden for 29 percent and Asia 14 percent. While some Western countries may complain about being flooded by refugees and migrants, 82 percent of all refugees globally are being hosted by non-Western countries. The countries hosting the greatest numbers of displaced people are Turkey (2.5 million), Pakistan (1.6 million), Lebanon (1.1 million), Iran (979,400), Ethiopia (736,100), and Jordan (664,100).[7] These are mostly poor to middle income countries whose resources to respond to the humanitarian needs have been stretched to the limit.
The terminology used to describe people who face displacement can often be confusing. There may be questions as to whether a particular displaced person is a migrant or a refugee or in another category. While these terms and categories are critical to our understanding of displacement, especially for those who are providing assistance, the bigger picture is that all displaced persons (either voluntarily or forcibly displaced) are people who suffer because they find themselves in a place where they do not belong. They are non-citizens in the countries where they live. The United Nations describes non-citizens in these terms:
A non-citizen is a person who has not been recognized as having effective links to the country where he or she is located. There are different groups of non-citizens, including permanent residents, migrants, refugees, asylum seekers, victims of trafficking, foreign students, temporary visitors, other kinds of non-immigrants and stateless people. While each of these groups may have rights based on separate legal regimes, the problems faced by most, if not all, non-citizens are very similar. These common concerns affect approximately 175 million individuals worldwide – or 3 percent of the world’s population.[8]
It is important to understand the technical terms for displacement and their implications. Why people are forced out of their homes and how they were displaced determines the legal category to which they belong. These categories define their status under international law and also determine whether they are entitled to protection and assistance.
Not everyone who is forced to leave their home is legally considered a refugee. According to international law, three criteria are used to judge whether a person is a refugee or not.[9] Refugees are people who (1) have a well-founded fear of persecution because of their race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion; (2) are outside their country of origin; and (3) are unable or unwilling to avail themselves of the protection of that country, or return there, because of their fear of persecution.
Once people have crossed an international border, they can then apply to the appropriate authorities for protection and assistance as refugees under international law.[10] Most refugees are registered and legally protected. Others, because of fear or other reasons, may choose not to register. As a result, they do not have access to legal protection, nor can they access humanitarian help to which they would be entitled if they were registered.
A term that is often heard is asylum seekers. These are people who have left their country and are seeking protection (asylum) in another country because they feel they are under threat in their home country. If their application for refugee status is granted, they then cease to be an asylum seeker and become a legal refugee and have access to all entitled benefits and protections. If their request is not granted, they will either be returned (voluntarily or forcibly) to their home country, or they risk becoming stateless and disappearing into the world of undocumented illegal migrants in the country.
People who are forcibly displaced from their homes but do not cross an international border and, for whatever reason, remain within their country are considered internally displaced persons (IDPs). While there is no international law that protects them, the United Nations has drafted guiding principles that it uses to monitor and hold national governments accountable to protect the internally displaced. This sometimes proves to be a challenge, especially if the national government is responsible for persecuting and displacing people in the first place.
The definition of an IDP as provided by the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement is the following:
Internally displaced persons are persons or groups of persons who have been forced or obliged to flee or to leave their homes or places of habitual residence, in particular as a result of or in order to avoid the effects of armed conflict, situations of generalized violence, violations of human rights or natural or human-made disasters, and who have not crossed an internationally recognized State border.[11]
Statelessness is a particular kind of displacement that leaves its victims without any place of official belonging in this world. Nationality is a basic human right that most take for granted.[12] However, there are estimated to be more than ten million individuals living in this world who do not have any formal membership to a nation-state and who are among the world’s most vulnerable.[13] The working definition of statelessness comes from the “Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons” of 1954 which defines a stateless person as someone “who is not considered as a national by any State under the operation of its law.”[14] In other words, the stateless are individuals who, for whatever reason, have no official membership to a nation-state and therefore do not experience the rights, privileges, and protections of citizenship.
The stateless fall into two primary categories: de jure (in law) and de facto (in fact). De jure statelessness occurs when someone does not qualify for nationality under any government’s laws and therefore has no possible claim to citizenship.[15] They do not have a legal pathway to obtain nationality to any nation-state. These people can include groups who were excluded from nationality when new states were formed (such as numerous Kurdish, Bedouin, and Gypsy groups in the Middle East) or those who endure blatant discrimination from governments (such as the Rohingya in Burma or Bidoon in Kuwait). De facto statelessness results when people have a claim to formal nationality but do not enjoy access to it, thus leaving them “unable to rely on their country of nationality for protection.”[16] Such individuals cannot “obtain proof of their nationality, residency or other means of qualifying for citizenship and may be excluded from the formal state.”[17] This can result when a child’s birth is never registered, which is a major issue for babies born to refugees. It is also important to note that statelessness can result when nation-states inflict gender discrimination in nationality laws and deny women the right of passing citizenship to their children, as is the case in Lebanon and Syria.
Statelessness is an acute form of displacement that can result from a variety of circumstances, many of which do not involve forced migration. While refugees face a heightened threat of statelessness, refugees are usually not stateless, and stateless individuals are usually not refugees. The majority of stateless individuals have never left their country of residence, but, without official nationality, they are unable to claim fundamental rights or enjoy the most basic of human opportunities. They are technically foreigners everywhere in this world and essentially do not belong anywhere. Stateless people struggle to enjoy the most basic of life experiences such as gaining employment, attending school, registering marriages and children, accessing healthcare, travelling, and many others. Without the protection of citizenship, they are effectively without rights and vulnerable to a host of human rights abuses and psychological distress.
Terms like migrants and refugees are used quite loosely, and unfortunately at times are used interchangeably. However, the United Nations has created a very specific distinguishing definition. A migrant worker is a “person who is to be engaged, is engaged or has been engaged in a remunerated activity in a State of which he or she is not a national.” Their broader definition of migrants is the following: “The term ‘migrant’ in article 1.1 (a) should be understood as covering all cases where the decision to migrate is taken freely by the individual concerned, for reasons of ‘personal convenience’ and without intervention of an external compelling factor.”[18] The basic difference between migrants and refugees is that migrants have chosen by their own free will to leave their home to seek opportunities or a better life in a country other than their own. Refugees, on the other hand, are those who have been forced to leave their home for another country because of violence or persecution.
There are legal migrants and illegal migrants. Legal migrants are protected by the laws of the country where they live and work, while illegal migrants have no such protection and often live like stateless persons, at the mercy of unscrupulous employers and criminal gangs, unable to find proper accommodation, without access to healthcare, and always under the threat of discovery and deportation.
While these may seem to be fairly straightforward definitions and distinctions, the reasons people “freely” leave their home are complex. It is often hard to distinguish between migrants who left their countries because of economic problems or environmental degradation and others who left because of political persecution or conflicts. Often the various reasons are interlinked, and it may be hard to distinguish between a refugee and a migrant. People leave because they feel that being able to survive and maintain their well-being is no longer possible in their home country. For example, conflict may destroy the environment, thus forcing people to move. In another context, war may have destroyed the economy of the country, and people are no longer able to earn their living and sustain their families. They then leave the country in order to survive. In both cases, it would be hard to distinguish between migrants and refugees. In either case, people have been “forced” to leave their home and country.
Regardless of which category described in this section that foreigners belong to, the UNHCR report The Rights of Non-Citizens identifies the challenges foreigners face.
For non-citizens, there is, nevertheless, a large gap between the rights that international human rights law guarantees to them and the realities that they face. In many countries, there are institutional and pervasive problems confronting non-citizens. Nearly all categories of non-citizens face official and non-official discrimination. While in some countries there may be legal guarantees of equal treatment and recognition of the importance of non-citizens in achieving economic prosperity, non-citizens face hostile social and practical realities. They experience xenophobia, racism and sexism; language barriers and unfamiliar customs; lack of political representation; difficulty realizing their economic, social and cultural rights – particularly the right to work, the right to education and the right to health care; difficulty obtaining identity documents; and lack of means to challenge violations of their human rights effectively or to have them remedied. Some non-citizens are subjected to arbitrary and often indefinite detention. They may have been traumatized by experiences of persecution or abuse in their countries of origin, but are detained side by side with criminals in prisons, which are frequently overcrowded, unhygienic and dangerous. In addition, detained non-citizens may be denied contact with their families, access to legal assistance and the opportunity to challenge their detention. Official hostility – often expressed in national legislation – has been especially flagrant during periods of war, racial animosity and high unemployment.[19]
The twentieth century witnessed significant steps in addressing the phenomenon of displacement within legal and global frameworks. As a result of the two world wars and subsequent conflicts that resulted in massive human tolls of the numbers killed, wounded, and displaced, the international community developed laws and legal conventions to protect non-combatants who are affected by conflict and displaced, either forcibly or voluntarily.
| Movement beyond border? | Displaced by force or by choice? | Protected by international law? | Able or willing to live in home country? | Claim official nationality? Recognized citizens of a nation-state? | Global number estimates | |
| Refugee | Yes | Force | Yes | No | Yes | 44 million |
| IDP | No | Force | No | Yes | Yes | 21.3 million |
| Stateless | Primarily No | Force | No | Yes | No | 10 million |
| Migrant | Yes | Choice | Yes and No | Yes and No | Yes | 244 million |
The Geneva Conventions are four treaties and three additional protocols that are international laws created to ensure the protection of civilians during armed conflict. The original treaty was adopted in 1864, and the fourth version became part of international law in 1949. Three other treaties together with the latest version of the 1864 treaty became known as the Geneva Conventions. Three additional protocols to the conventions were added in 1977 and 2005. The first treaty of 1864 led to the establishment of the Red Cross in Geneva.
The Geneva Conventions are meant to protect those who are not part of an armed conflict. Besides civilians and humanitarian aid workers, they also protect wounded soldiers and prisoners of war.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 10 December 1948. Because of the atrocities of World War II, people felt the need for legal instruments that would protect the rights of individuals. The UDHR consists of thirty articles, which have since been elaborated in subsequent international treaties. It protects individuals from discrimination, slavery, and torture, while ensuring that everyone has the rights to maintain their well-being via access to healthcare, food, and social services. The UDHR also ensures the right to a nationality, asylum, freedom of movement, and protection from arbitrary detention.
Though they have proven to be tremendous steps forward in protecting life and advancing human dignity, international human rights agreements have not provided a durable solution to the world’s enduring problems. Harvard University anthropologist and physician Paul Farmer and the author of Pathologies of Power provides a caution on the applicability of the UDHR. He writes, “Rights declarations are . . . exhortatory and largely unenforceable. And the bad news is that very few enjoy these rights.” He further states that the struggles for social and economic rights are the “neglected step children of the human rights movement.” Nigerian lawyer and human rights activist Chidi Anselm Odinkalu writes that the needs are so serious and overwhelming that the existence and awareness of laws on human rights are not enough. “In Africa, the realization of human rights is a very serious business indeed. In many cases it is a life or death matter. . . . Knowledge of the contents of the Universal Declaration will hardly advance their condition.”
The UDHR provides an important legal framework by defining what it means for an individual to live with dignity and in freedom. However, refugees, the stateless, and migrants are among the most vulnerable, poor, and marginalized in many communities. Because of this, they are unable to experience the freedom and dignity that the UDHR outlines for them. It is increasingly recognized that poverty is not due merely to the lack of access to services, but is due to the lack of human rights – more specifically, society not acknowledging the human rights of the poor, the refugees, the stateless, and the migrants. This lack of social and political justice is considered one of the key underlying causes of poverty. Jacob Kirkeman Boesen and Tomas Martin at the Danish Institute for Human Rights write, “[A Rights Based Approach (RBA) to addressing poverty] is able to recognize poverty as injustice and include marginalization, discrimination, and exploitation as central causes of poverty.” In a rights-based approach, instead of being viewed as victims dependent on handouts and charity, people are viewed as having the right to meet their basic needs.
“The Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees,” also known as the 1951 Refugee Convention, builds on article 14 of the UDHR to ensure protection of individuals fleeing from persecution or violence targeted at them in their home country. It clearly defines who is a refugee and who is not, though there is some room for interpretation. A critical part of the convention and the protection of individuals under threat is the principle of non-refoulement.
No Contracting State shall expel or return (‘refouler’) a refugee in any manner whatsoever to the frontiers of territories where his life or freedom would be threatened on account of his race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.” (Article 33:1)
Once granted refugee status, individuals cannot be returned to their home country where they faced threat.
In 1993 Francis Deng, representative of the UN secretary general at the Commission on Human Rights, prepared the first study of international standards relevant to IDPs. This study was then presented in 1998 to the Commission on Human Rights of the United Nations as the “Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement.” Like the 1951 Refugee Convention, it outlines protections for those who have been forcibly displaced from their home but have not crossed an international border and remain in their own country.
“The International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families” was signed in 1990 and came into effect in 2003 when at least twenty countries had ratified it. In 2015, there were 244 million international migrants, an increase of 41 percent of the number in 2000. These migrants make up 3.3 percent of the global population.
This convention aims to protect the rights of all migrants (international and domestic) and their families by guaranteeing them equality of treatment and same working conditions as nationals. While legal migrants have more rights, illegal migrants also have fundamental human rights like all human beings.
The twentieth century produced two conventions that serve as primary guides in efforts to protect stateless individuals and eliminate statelessness: the “Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons” of 1954 and the “Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness” of 1961. The former treaty addresses the treatment of stateless persons by emphasizing the “immediate need to improve the legal status and secure the . . . basic rights for the existing stateless populations around the globe.” The latter presents the principles for the “reduction and indeed eradication of statelessness itself.” More than a half century on, these conventions remain the most comprehensive and current global frameworks for addressing statelessness and marginalization of the stateless. However, the conventions have a regrettably low number of signatory states; only sixty-seven countries have ratified the 1961 convention while the 1954 convention has a slightly more respectable eighty-nine countries.
Problems related to refugees, migrants, and statelessness are not localized nor limited to specific regions of the world but are rapidly growing crises in an increasingly globalized world. The plight of refugees and migrants does not simply lead to a neighbouring country. The availability of modern travel means individuals can move to any country on any continent that provides hope for starting a new life. Some of the emerging challenges in ministering to those who have been displaced and suffer non-belonging include the following:
• The sheer number of displaced in the world today is putting severe financial strains on governments and organizations that are trying to provide assistance. The shortage of funds limits how many can be helped and the type of assistance that can be administered. This means that large numbers of the displaced live in poverty on the margins of society. They are viewed with suspicion and are often considered as parasites to society and the national and international welfare systems.
• The fear of terrorism and the influx of refugees are now intertwined. Refugees are widely viewed with hostility as many suspect that some refugees might in fact be terrorists. This hostility is compounded by the fact that many refugees are culturally, ethnically, and religiously different than their host countries, which causes many in the host nations to experience discomfort and suspicion. This phenomenon is not new nor connected only with Muslim refugees and migrants. Historically, Jewish, Irish, Italian, German, Japanese, and Chinese migrants and refugees have been discriminated against in North America. More recently, Eastern European and North African migrants often face discrimination in Western Europe.
• Over the past thirty years or so, humanitarian assistance has primarily been provided by secular organizations such as the United Nations, the Red Cross, and secular NGOs. However, more and more Christian organizations and churches (as well as Islamic NGOs) are becoming involved in helping refugees. This raises a new set of challenges as the humanitarian aid community wonders about the motives of the Christian organizations and institutions involved.
• The aid community has not always viewed faith and religion with suspicion. In the post-World War II years, according to a 1953 study, 90 percent of all post-war relief was provided by religiously affiliated agencies. However in the decades that followed, the religious motivations for providing humanitarian aid were replaced by a secular worldview, as religion has come to be seen as a hindrance to progress. The suspicion (sometimes overtly stated) is that local religious institutions are not able to adhere to the humanitarian principles of impartiality and non-conditionality.
• The first five principles of “The Code of Conduct for the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement and NGOs in Disaster Relief” articulate the fundamental assumptions that humanitarian assistance be non-political and impartial in terms of religion, creed, race, and nationality. The emphasis is that aid be given unconditionally and be based only on need. The only motivation for the assistance should be the humanitarian imperative. Yet this assistance needs to be balanced with a respect for local culture and customs, which invariably include religion, religious values and worldviews, and religious institutions in society.
• Some churches and mission agencies see refugees as the “new” mission field that needs to be evangelized.
• Growing religious dimensions to why people flee their homes can make the engagement of faith communities with the displaced rather delicate. These dimensions impact the assistance and protection provided to the displaced as well as the policies and social attitudes that confront them in their host countries. In the past few years (as at other times in history), many people have been driven from their homes because of their religion. While religious wars and persecution are not new phenomenon, how we respond in the light of international standards such as the Red Cross code of conduct may need to be changed to ensure that the religious dimensions of the context do not hinder providing aid.
1. How many of the foreigners in your community are migrants, refugees, or stateless? From what you have learned in this chapter, are you able to distinguish the different categories they fit into?
2. Identify one foreigner you know (or find someone, if you don’t know any) and ask him or her to tell you their story. You might ask why did they leave their home? When did they move from their country? What was their journey like getting to their new country? What have they liked about their new country, and what have they found difficult or challenging about their new country? What do they miss about their home and their life in their old country?
3. What organizations in your community are helping migrants, refugees, and the stateless? What kind of services do they provide?