Protecting Refugees a High U.S. Priority

There are nearly 21 million refugees around the world, according to 2007 UNHCR estimates. That number includes people driven from their countries entirely and those living within their national borders but displaced from their homes and communities. Most are in Asia, with nearly 8 million people displaced; Africa ranks second with roughly 5 million.

In 2008, the United States, the world's largest single-nation donor to efforts to help refugees, marked the day with special events in both Washington and Chicago.

NEW CHALLENGES FACE REFUGEES

"The changing face of refugee crises means that new types of protection are required," says Samuel Witten, acting assistant secretary for the State Department's Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration.

In a speech delivered in Washington, Witten listed the usual types of protection refugees require: protection from the elements, from disease, from the people who forced them from their homelands and from recruitment by guerilla forces.

"Perhaps the easiest category to overlook, and the most painful, is that refugees sometimes need protection from each other," Witten said. "In the past 10 years, the issue of gender-based violence in refugee camps has finally surfaced," he said, and he praised the work of activists to make camps safer for women.

Legal protection for refugees also can be overlooked sometimes, Witten said. "In many countries refugees are not able to work or to own land that they can farm. Some countries forbid refugees from sending their children to local schools, and thus condemn the next generation to isolation," he said.

"A worrying new development," Witten said, is the need to protect humanitarian workers who provide relief to refugees.

Afghan refugees in Pakistan wait to return home.

"In the past year," Witten said, "officials from the UNHCR and the World Food Programme have been killed in the line of duty. No longer do terrorist groups or warring factions always see humanitarian workers as neutral parties."

NEW TENSIONS ARISE AS REFUGEES SETTLE IN CITIES

As the world becomes more urban, there will be more situations in which refugees gather not in remote camps but in cities of host countries, Witten said. He cited displaced Iraqis who now are congregating in neighborhoods in Damascus, Syria, Amman, Jordan, and other Middle Eastern cities.

Such arrangements ease the need to set up new water systems and infrastructure but they create other problems, he said.

"Refugees have more contact with the local population, who may resent what they see as migrants taking their jobs," Witten said. "We just saw some violent incidents of this type in South Africa, where poor Mozambiqans and Zimbabweans were attacked by poor South Africans who felt threatened.

"How will the international community work," Witten asked, "to mitigate this type of tension, which is aggravated by the fact that refugees become users of the same education system, utilities and health care providers as local people?"

U.S. ROLE IN AIDING REFUGEES

With an annual budget of roughly $1 billion for refugee assistance, the United States is the world's largest single-country donor to efforts to aid refugees and internally displaced persons. Most of that money goes to the UNHCR, which receives 22 percent of its funding from the United States, and other international organizations.

First lady Laura Bush, in hosting World Refugee Day events at the White House, said the president had approved $32.8 million in emergency funding for conflict victims around the world.

"In the past 30 years," the first lady said, "the United States has accepted some 2.7 million refugees. And this year, we'll take in as many as 70,000 displaced men, women and children."

Although the United States welcomes more refugees each year than any other nation, resettlement is not the ideal solution for many displaced people, nor is "reintegration," in which refugees are allowed to live and work in the countries to which they have fled.

According to Bill Fitzgerald, the deputy assistant secretary for the State Department's Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration, the U.S. philosophy for refugee programs is focused on finding "durable solutions."

"Assistance to refugees is not just smart politics," Fitzgerald said, "it is the right thing to do." The United States, he said, "has a major interest in a stable world. ... We cannot afford to have a patchwork of failed states spread across the world, providing succor to groups that would seek to harm us. We are all connected."