The Contemporary Refugee Problem

The world refugee problem has remained acute. When the Indian subcontinent was partitioned in 1947, millions of people were forced to migrate. Steady streams of refugees left China and East Germany, especially in the 1950s. The Korean War produced some 9 million refugees. Other major refugee-creating events of the 1950s include the Hungarian Revolution (1956) and the uprising in Tibet (1958–59). Sub-Saharan Africa's massive refugee problem is rooted in the continent's colonial past. Before colonization, Africans had moved freely within their own tribal areas. However, the boundaries fixed by 19th-century colonial powers often cut across tribal areas, resulting, particularly after independence, in mass movements of refugees across national borders. By the early 1990s there were close to 7 million refugees in Africa, including 4.5 million displaced Sudanese. The Arab-Israeli War of 1967 expanded an already swollen refugee population in the Middle East (now estimated at 4.3 million), and hundreds of thousands Lebanese also fled (largely to other parts of Lebanon) when Israel invaded in 1982 and 2007. The Vietnam War and Cambodian civil war created large numbers of Southeast Asian refugees; the India-Pakistan War of 1971 produced about 10 million refugees, most repatriated to newly created Bangladesh.

In the 1980s and 90s fighting in Afghanistan created large Afghan refugee populations in Pakistan and Iran, and in the latter decade the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, especially in Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo displaced hundreds of thousands within Europe. Conflicts in Uganda, Burundi Rwanda, and Zaïre/Congo, which sometimes spilled from one nation to the other, as well as fighting in Sudan and Somalia disrupted the lives of millions in the late 20th cent. and early 21st cent.

At the beginning of 2007 the world's international refugee population was about 14.2 million, including the above-mentioned Palestinians. The largest displacements involved more than 2.1 million Afghans living in Pakistan, Iran, and other nations; more than 1.5 million Iraqis in Syria, Jordan, and other nations; more than 680,000 Sudanese in Chad, Uganda, Ethiopia, and other nations; about 460,000 Somalis in Kenya, Yemen, and other nations; and about 400,000 Burundians in Tanzania and other nations. In addition, there were an estimated 24.5 million “internally displaced persons,” individuals forced from their homes within the boundaries of their own countries. Sudan (5 million), Colombia (3 million), Iraq (1.8 million), Uganda (1.6 million), and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (1.1 million) all had enormous numbers of internal refugees.

In the face of these numbers, and the expense of administering aid, private relief agencies such as CARE and Oxfam fight overwhelming odds; support often rises and falls on media attention. While Southeast Asians, Cuban, and Soviet refugees found political support in the United States, far fewer refugees from Central America, Haiti, and Africa gained entry. Many governments refuse asylum to refugees; meanwhile, long-term refugees suffer various psychological hardships, and the root causes of the problem—war, famine, epidemics—remain unsolved.

The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2007, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.

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