nobody's people: World Refugee Day 2010

by Tanuja Thurairajah

''There were 43.3 million forcibly displaced people worldwide at the end of 2009, the highest number since the mid-1990s. Of these, 15.2 million were refugees; 10.4 million who fell under UNHCR’s responsibility and 4.8 million Palestinian refugees under UNRWA’s mandate. The figure also includes 983,000 asylum seekers and 27.1 million internally displaced persons (IDPs)1.''

Today is World Refugee Day. A day to commemorate the reasons for continued cyles of displacement and loss of dignity. A day to remember that conflicts erase identities, constantly changing the social fabric of the world creating multi-cultural societies, identity politics and opening up fragmented and dispersed modes of conflict. The process of forced displacement or migration as a characteristic of human behaviour may have undergone changes in terms of patterns of displacement but it has been and always will be an excruciating and dehumanising process of vulnerability and rejection.

Statistics, theories and analyses of the phenomenon of displacement put aside, it is the human stories that seem to convulse the inner conscience of humanity. The story of Mehmet a young mother and her two daughters who survived an ardous and dangerous journey through land and sea from Eritrea leaving behind her husband in uncertain times, the story of Ravi from Sri Lanka who hid in a goods container crossing through Russia during the bitter cold winter or would it be the story of Mohammed and his teenage son who escaped from Afghanistan to establish a new life so that his wife could join him to saftey? But as these stories fade away and new stories emerge multiplying human suffering the degeneration of conflict becomes manifest and perhaps the continuous dissemination of such stories might be our last resort in appealing to the conscience of humanity.


1
2009 Global Trends: Refugees, Asylum-seekers, Returnees, Internally Displaced and Stateless Persons, UNHCR Report 2010

Photo courtesy: East Asia Forum