An African Union convention breaks new ground, but
challenges lie ahead:
Africa’s displaced people: out of the shadows:
Andre-Michel Essoungou
It was a departure they never had time to prepare for. Seeking to
escape death - sometimes amidst fighting between the Senegalese army and
rebels in the southern region of Casamance - thousands fled their homes
and abandoned livestock and property. Over the past two decades many
have resettled in successive waves in Ziguinchor, a major city in
Casamance.
Since then returning home has been an elusive dream. “We want to, but
we fear we might get killed,” Gabriel Tandar, an elder who fled after
his village was attacked in 1991, told a Radio France Internationale
reporter in December. Up to now their lives have gotten no better, he
complained. “We have no jobs, nothing to do and we rely on others for
our basic needs. We cannot even go out there to look for firewood. We
are afraid.”
Victims of conflict
Mr Tandar and thousands of others forced out of their homes while
remaining in their countries are known as internally displaced persons (IDPs).
They are the forgotten victims of a protracted low-intensity conflict.
Fear, loss, need and a dispiriting feeling of being in exile in their
own land have been their lot for nearly two decades.
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Internally
displaced persons in Africa |
But these people are hardly the only ones living through such an
ordeal. Across Africa nearly 12 million persons (almost half the world’s
IDP population) share the same plight, according to estimates by the
United Nations and the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC),
the leading independent body on the issue, which works closely with the
UN.*
There are fundamental differences between IDPs, whose displacement
takes place within the borders of their country, and refugees, who seek
shelter in another country. Africa is home to around three million
refugees protected under international laws by the 1951 UN Geneva
Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and the 1969 Convention
Governing the Specific Aspects of Refugee Problems in Africa. Under the
Geneva Convention the international community is obliged to protect and
assist refugees, including with shelter, food and medical help. The UN
has a central institution dedicated to carrying out that comprehensive
mandate, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
Primary responsibility
Unlike refugees, IDPs do not enjoy the same support, be it legal or
institutional. Instead a highly influential but not-legally-binding set
of principles (known as the guiding principles) serves as the main
international instrument for their protection. Although these principles
specify the standards (largely similar to those for refugees) for the
best response to the needs of displaced people, no institution is
required to implement them.
The primary responsibility for the protection of IDPs falls to their
own government.
However, many states lack the capacity or resources, and sometimes
the political will, to assist IDPs adequately. As IDPs struggle with
difficult living conditions, they are often inefficiently supported by
an array of agencies and actors. Some remain unassisted for extended
periods and are marginalised and vulnerable to human rights violations.
Their suffering is precisely what drove 17 African countries to sign
the African Union (AU) Convention on IDPs - also known as the Kampala
Convention, after the capital of Uganda where the treaty was signed on
23 October 2009. If ratified, the convention will fill this void in
international humanitarian law for Africa’s IDPs.
The Kampala Convention is a “historic agreement aimed at protecting
and assisting our brothers and sisters, the internally displaced,”
President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda told the press on signature day.
‘A beacon of hope’
By agreeing to the first legally binding continental treaty on IDPs,
African leaders have taken a bold step in dealing with what former UN
Secretary-General Kofi Annan once described as “one of the great
tragedies of our time”.
Potentially, the document has far-reaching political implications.
Governments that sign it agree to shoulder primary responsibility for
preventing forced displacement, among other things by threatening
prosecution of those responsible, including non-state actors such as
insurgent and rebel groups, private military contractors and
multinational corporations. It also obliges governments to assist IDPs
and facilitate their resettlement after they have been forced to move.
Under the convention, both governments and armed groups are required
to protect and assist IDPs without any discrimination in areas under
their effective control, to assist local communities that host IDPs and
to facilitate humanitarian organisations’ access to the displaced and
delivery of relief supplies.
Additionally, the treaty obliges governments to provide compensation
for the harm suffered by persons as a result of their displacement. It
calls for cooperation among governments, international organisations,
humanitarian agencies and civil society organisations to protect IDPs.
According to Julia Joiner, the AU commissioner for political affairs,
“This instrument clearly demonstrates that African leaders are conscious
of the difficulties that displaced persons experience and are poised to
do as much as possible to put an end to their suffering.”
Walter Kälin, the UN Secretary-General’s representative on IDPs,
likened the Kampala Convention to “a beacon of hope for 12 million
Africans”. In an interview with Africa Renewal, Mr Kälin underlines the
fact that compared to the UN-supported guiding principles on IDPs, the
AU treaty clarifies the responsibilities of governments and other
actors. Mr Kälin notes, however, that “we still have a long way to go
until it has an impact on the ground.”
‘Tragic crisis’
As a result of protracted conflicts, massive human rights violations
and natural disasters, internal displacement has reached daunting
proportions in Africa. “Between 1969 and 1994 … the number of internally
displaced persons soared, to between 10 million and 15 million,” writes
Francis Deng, the first representative of the UN Secretary-General on
IDPs, in a widely praised book co-authored with Roberta Cohen, a former
scholar at the Brookings Institute in Washington, DC.
African Unity
Such an alarming increase, the authors add, prompted the Organisation
of African Unity, which was superseded by the African Union in 2002, to
affirm in 1994 that internal displacement is “one of the most tragic
humanitarian and human rights crises in Africa today”.
Since the mid-1990s the many wars in the Great Lakes region (Burundi,
Rwanda, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda), West Africa (Liberia,
Sierra Leone, Côte d’Ivoire) and the Horn of Africa (Ethiopia, Eritrea,
Somalia) have forced millions of people to flee their homes, pushing
some abroad but also displacing many within their own borders.
In recent years, as the number of conflicts has declined, more IDPs
have returned home. In Uganda, more than half of the 1.8 million IDPs
recorded in 2005 had gone home by December 2009. In Burundi the number
went from 800,000 in 1999 to 100,000 at the end of 2009. According to
the IDMC, the number of IDPs currently recorded in Africa is the lowest
in a decade.
Yet over the past two years, three out of five of the world’s largest
internal displacement situations have still been in Africa. With 4.9
million displaced, Sudan has the largest reported IDP population,
victims of the conflict in the Darfur region and the instability in
Southern Sudan. An estimated two million people are IDPs in the
Democratic Republic of the Congo and some 1.3 million have been forced
to flee their homes in Somalia. In total, 19 African countries confront
problems of forced displacement resulting from conflict, generalised
violence and human rights abuses.
Violence
“Internally displaced communities in African countries faced myriad
risks, due to immediate threats to their safety in some cases, and
long-term neglect in others,” notes the IDMC report. Rape and sexual
violence against women and girls, and the forced recruitment of children
into armed groups, are particularly insidious and widespread, adds the
centre.
Both the international community and African governments have
generally been slow in devising solutions. Until the end of the Cold
War, action in favour of IDPs was very limited. In 1992 the UN
Secretary-General appointed Mr Deng, a former Sudanese foreign minister,
as his first representative on IDPs. As the only senior UN official
solely devoted to IDPs, he was instrumental in developing and
publicising legal mechanisms for their protection, including the guiding
principles. African responses to the needs of IDPs have come a long way,
from an initial reluctance to a progressively stronger stand in recent
years.
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