Rescue: Refugees and the Political Crisis of Our Time (TED Books) - Hardcover

David Miliband is President and CEO of the International Rescue Committee (IRC). From 2007 to 2010, Miliband was Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs of the United Kingdom, driving advancements in human rights and representing the UK throughout the world. Miliband graduated from Oxford University in 1987 with a first class honors degree in philosophy, politics, and economics and received a master’s degree in political science in 1989 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which he attended as a Kennedy Scholar. President Bill Clinton’s called him, “one of the ablest, most creative public servants of our time.” Rescue is his first book.

Rescue 1 The Crisis

Before I took up my post as IRC president in September 2013, I wanted to get a sense of the conditions facing refugees and displaced people around the world and the work of the organization to address their needs. I had read about tens of millions of people displaced by war and persecution, but what were their lives really like? It turned out that there was a jarring mismatch between some of the assumptions that I brought into the job and the realities of the situation on the ground.

I went to Jordan in May 2013 and Kenya in July of that year. Each country was hosting around 600,000 registered refugees, and in Jordan the government said there were an equal number unregistered. I had in my mind the iconic image of a refugee: someone in a refugee camp, standing behind wire.

In Jordan I was taken to the Za’atari refugee camp, then home to 120,000 people. At the time it was in a state of some chaos. The camp management was worried about building plans gone awry, criminal networks running amok, and lack of coordination in health care and education services. But the real eye-opener was not in the camp; it was in the town of Mafraq, 20 kilometers (13 miles) away from Za’atari.

In 2011, Mafraq had had 120,000 residents. With the arrival of Syrian refugees, the population had doubled in the space of a few months. Everything was overflowing with people, from streets to schools to shops.

My first visit to the back room of the IRC health center in Mafraq is etched on my memory. It was next door to a room used for child care. The corridors of the center were dominated by the hubbub of patients waiting to see doctors. The majority of people, most of them sitting on chairs, were mothers with children. Above their heads were notices explaining the importance of hand washing and some posters from the US and UK governments, which were funding the center.

In the back, the atmosphere was different. There were thirty women and girls in a bare room, sitting on the floor with their backs to the walls. There were a couple of tables with water and tissues. By word of mouth they had found out that this was a space where women could come together safely and talk, cry, plan, and even dream. All present wore head scarves, usually solid colors, often bright pink, orange, or blue but sometimes black. It was hot, and I noticed that some women, despite the heat, were wearing thick robes, almost drapery-weight material, which presumably had come with them from Syria.

Some averted their eyes from me. Others were intrigued. The only time they smiled was when I asked if they thought they would ever go home to Syria. “Inshallah” (God willing), they said in unison. They talked about how there were school places for some of the girls, but they would not let them go because they were scared that they would not be safe on the route. They said they were running down their savings to pay the rent. They explained that their husbands and sons worked in the informal economy, dodging the Jordanian authorities. They talked about the houses, relatives, and lives they had left behind.

Those were urban refugees. Far from being the exception, they are the majority, not just in Jordan but around the world. Of the 25 million people (refugees and asylum seekers) who have fled across borders from war and persecution, only around 4 million are in organized refugee camps, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa.1 The biggest camps are cities in themselves—in the case of Za’atari, at the time it was the fourth-biggest city in Jordan. But 60 percent of all refugees live in urban areas, not camps.2

This matters because the needs of people in urban areas are different from those in camps. Shelter is not given to them. Food is not distributed to them. Education, health care, and other systems of support need to be designed to fit in with the local community.

Long-term Displacement

The assumption that the majority of refugees live in camps as opposed to urban areas is not the only mismatch between perception and reality. When I began my work at the IRC, I had assumed that most refugees and displaced people were homeless for a few years and then went home. Then I started talking to refugees.

When I went to what was then the world’s largest refugee camp, Dadaab, in eastern Kenya, I got a lesson in what long-term displacement means. The clue was in the name: dadaab, in the local dialect, means “rocky hard place.”

The camp was built in 1992–3 as a temporary shelter for Somalis seeking safety in the face of the terrible civil war ravaging their country. More than twenty years later, I met Silo, a young woman living in the camp.

She lived in a relatively peaceful area of the camp. Her home was fenced in by strips of thorny wood. (A book about Dadaab by Ben Rawlence is entitled City of Thorns because of the prevalence of the brush.) Silo’s dwelling was a round structure only a few meters in diameter. It was made of wood, tenting, rags, cardboard. The tin door appeared to have been made from reused food containers. She had two children, one of whom wore a much-used red T-shirt with OBAMA printed on it in black letters.

The real surprise came when I asked her whether she thought she would ever go home to Somalia. “What do you mean, go home?” she replied. “I was born here.” When I followed up with the camp management, they told me that of the 330,000 Somalis then living in the camp, 100,000 had been born there.

I shouldn’t have been shocked. When I visited a Burmese refugee camp in the Mae Sot district of Thailand, I met the camp committee, Burmese refugees who helped represent the residents to management. The secretary was a very articulate man in his early thirties. He was smartly turned out, educated, efficient. When I asked whether he could conceive of ever going back to Burma (Myanmar), he patiently explained that he had never lived in the country because his parents had fled to the camp in Thailand before he was born.

The global figures are complicated, but the basic point is clear: displacement as a result of conflict or persecution is long term, not short term. Recent data show that the average refugee displacement (not just in camps) is ten years and that after a person has been a refugee for five years, the average duration of displacement is twenty-one years.3

One reason is that wars within states tend to last longer than wars between them. David Armitage shows in his book Civil Wars: A History in Ideas that these wars tended to last three times longer in the second half of the twentieth century than in the first half—and are much more prone to recur than any others. Armitage reminds us of Paul Collier’s insight: “The most likely legacy of a civil war is further civil war.”4

The Lebanese civil war lasted fifteen years, from 1975 to 1990, but in the end the warring parties agreed to share power rather than fight over it. The wars in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and East Timor have ended, in some cases with extensive outside intervention. But the evidence is that the bloodletting of war poisons the prospects for and stability of peace. If you look at Afghanistan, where civil war has dominated for most of the last forty years, you can see the danger. Somalia and DRC have also seen civil wars stretch across generations.

This matters because if people are displaced from their homes for ten years rather than just ten weeks or ten months, their needs change. Their kids will be desperate for education. They themselves will need work. The countries supporting them will need more help.

Hosts and Sources

You might guess from the Western media—British coverage of the so-called jungle refugee settlement in Calais, France, or American reporting of the debate about Syrian refugee entry into the United States—that most refugees are in Western countries. That is wrong. Badly wrong. Another assumption comes face-to-face with reality.

Together the top ten refugee-hosting countries account for only 2.5 percent of global income.5 They are poor or at best middle-income countries. Turkey has 2.9 million registered refugees; Pakistan, 1.4 million; Lebanon, 1 million; Iran and Uganda, around 1 million apiece; Ethiopia, 0.8 million; and so on.6 In Lebanon one in four people is a refugee from Syria, Palestine, or Iraq.7

This is the reality of the global refugee crisis today: it is concentrated in the poorer parts of the world. Europe, accounting for more than 20 percent of global income, has 11 percent of the world’s refugees. The United States, with 25 percent of global income, has 1 percent of the world’s refugees.8

When you stop and think, it stands to reason that most refugees are not in the West. The large majority of them stop in a country neighboring the one from which they fled. In addition to more than 5 million Palestinians, around 13.5 million refugees (nearly 80 percent) come from ten countries far from the Western world: Syria, Afghanistan, South Sudan, Somalia, Sudan, DRC, Central African Republic, Myanmar, Eritrea, and Burundi.

There are also 40 million internally displaced people (IDPs) as a result of conflict or persecution. Last year one new IDP was created every second.9 Nicholas Burns, formerly undersecretary in the US State Department, calls those people “On the Runs,” to try to get away from the bureaucratese of terms such as IDP. These people remain within their home country but have fled from their homes because of conflict or persecution. The vast majority, like refugees, are nowhere near rich countries.

Since so many displaced people are homeless for a long time, live in urban areas, not camps, and are concentrated in countries that are poor or middle income, there is a fourth challenge to the prevailing assumptions. Though it is traditional to see the drive against poverty, so-called development, as separate from the humanitarian work of responding to crisis, the reality is that today’s refugees and displaced people are the new global poor.

Displacement and Poverty

Laurence Chandy and his research colleagues at the Brookings Institution have catalogued the extraordinary reductions in extreme poverty over the past twenty-five years. According to the World Bank, extreme poverty is now defined as an income of less than $1.90 a day.10 The proportion of people in extreme poverty was reduced from 55 percent in 1950 to one in ten in 2013 (the most recent year with good data).11 That is still over 750 million people—a scar in a world more than fifty times as rich as in the 1950s.12 But rapid progress nonetheless.

The composition of this poverty, however, has shifted significantly toward countries affected by conflict. Economic growth, albeit unequally distributed, is reducing poverty in states where there is peace. Think of China and India, where hundreds of millions of people have been taken out of extreme poverty in the last thirty years and a middle class, also of hundreds of millions, has been built.

But in countries where there is conflict, development is set back and poverty is the result. So although the global extreme poverty rate fell from 37 percent to 16 percent from 1990 to 2010, conflict sends the process into reverse. Chandy and his colleagues cite the example of Ivory Coast: the poverty rate has gone from 10 percent in the late 1980s to 35 percent as a result of unrest, military coups, and civil wars.13 Their summary of the global situation is worth quoting: “It should come as no surprise that conflict is a dominant feature among the countries that are losing the battle against extreme poverty. . . . Global poverty is becoming more concentrated in these countries: in 1990, one in five poor people in the world lived in a fragile state; two in five do so today.” Predictions for 2030 suggest that the figure could reach two-thirds.14

Of the thirty-one countries in the World Bank classification of low income, twenty-seven are fragile states suffering from political, security, or environmental weakness.15 It is a vicious cycle: war and poverty go together with refugee flows, which produce more fragility and more refugees, who themselves are increasingly poor as the duration of their displacement lengthens. A recent World Bank–UNHCR study of Syrian refugees, among the better-off refugees in the world, found poverty rates of 60 to 70 percent.16 The study noted that “Syrian refugees living in Jordan and Lebanon have experienced shock after shock, pushing them into destitution.”

So the “refugee crisis” has the following components: record numbers of people are fleeing violence; they are displaced for longer than ever before; they are concentrated in a small number of countries outside the wealthy parts of the world; and they make up a growing proportion of the world’s poor. There is one additional factor: climate change is not just a looming danger; it is part of today’s equation.

Climate Refugees?

In 2006, I was called to see the prime minister. He was reshuffling his government and wanted to promote me. So far, so good. I went to his small study next to the Cabinet Room. We sat in armchairs, and one star of the Downing Street staff, an Irish woman named Vera who had seen it all and was not shy about offering advice, brought in cups of tea. As usual Tony Blair was friendly and purposeful: “I want you to be Secretary of State for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs.” That hadn’t been part of my plan. “But I don’t know one end of a cow from another!” is all I can remember saying. He thought I could learn. More important, there was a responsibility to turn our words on climate change into policy. On that he was right.

Four months later, we published in draft form the world’s first long-term, legally binding emission reduction requirements. They required the United Kingdom to achieve 60 percent cuts in carbon and other emissions by 2050—later amended to 80 percent—and set into place the institutional machinery to monitor and enforce the requirement. It is the piece of legislation of which I am most proud.

I am not a scientist, but I know that if 97 percent of doctors told me I was at risk of a heart attack, I would go into hospital for a bypass. That is what I feel about climate change. The vast majority of scientists have agreed and explained, over and over again, why and how the burning of carbon is contributing to man-made change in the climate and demonstrated the data to show this is happening. The second-round effects, such as ocean acidification, only add to the dangers. The reckless, feckless, ignorant irresponsibility of those who deny the facts or don’t care about them is grotesque.

In legal terms, the definition of refugees in international law does not cover people who cross borders because of climate change. Also, displacement experts such as Elizabeth Ferris make the point that climate is likely to be one factor among several contributing to decisions to move.17 Yet when I talk to some of the people displaced in Africa, they tell me that climate change is happening and that it is affecting their lives now.

Abdullahi Mohammed is the Ethiopian farmer who told me that the IRC’s water project had given him and his community life. I met him on the bare, hot land in the east of the country. Dressed in a T-shirt, checked shirt, and multicolored robe, he carried a walking stick and had a limp. At forty-nine, younger ...