Refugee Problems
Refugee Recent Refugee Problems
Introduction to Refugee Problems
Of the world’s nearly 14 million refugees and asylum seekers at the beginning of 2007, 5.9 million were living in North Africa and the Middle East; 2.9 million in Africa south of the Sahara; 2.9 million in South and Central Asia; 950,000 in East Asia and the Pacific; 650,000 in the Americas and Caribbean; and 600,000 in Europe. Many of the refugees were from Afghanistan and Iraq. Today, Pakistan and Iran host more refugees than any other countries. Most of the world’s refugees are hosted by countries in the developing world.
Africa, with more than 40 nations and 600 ethnic groups, has about one-fourth of the world’s refugees, people uprooted by famine or by liberation struggles and escaping racial and ethnic oppression and economic hardship. Caught in the turmoil that characterizes developing nations, some African nations have had both an inflow and outflow of refugees, and in time their former exiles are often repatriated. After political and ethnic fighting broke out in Rwanda in 1994, an estimated one-quarter of the country’s population died or fled the country, primarily into the neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo (then called Zaire). Many of the refugees returned to Rwanda after a new government was established later that year. Many Angolan refugees also returned to Angola after a ceasefire was signed in 2002, ending that country’s long-running civil war. In Sudan hundreds of thousands fled the Darfur region to escape ethnic violence in the early 2000s.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Chileans, Soviet exiles, and East Germans resettled in western Germany, which also gave temporary asylum to Turks and Pakistanis. The United Kingdom accepted Asians expelled from Uganda-Cypriots and Lebanese, among others. About one-third of the limited number of Jews permitted to leave the USSR went to Israel; most of the rest went to the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The number of people forced to flee their homes following the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1991 and 1992 was estimated at about 4 million by 1994. Some returned after the ethnic cleansing efforts to eliminate people of other ethnic groups stopped. Many did not. More than 200,000 ethnic Albanians fled the Serbian province of Kosovo after the government of Serbia began a violent crackdown on a Kosovo independence movement.
In Asia, fighting in Afghanistan from 1979 into the early 2000s uprooted millions who fled primarily into neighboring Iran and Pakistan. After 2003 the Afghan refugee crisis began to lessen somewhat, and some refugees returned home. Even so, Afghans continued to constitute the largest refugee population in the world, with nearly 2 million refugees at the beginning of 2006. A new crisis arose as Iraqis fled the ethnic violence and persecution unleashed by the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 (see U.S.-Iraq War). Most of the Iraqi refugees went to neighboring Jordan and Syria.
In Latin America, refugees fled Chile and Argentina after military juntas seized power in the 1970s, and they fled war-torn Nicaragua in the 1980s. These refugees resettled mostly in neighboring states. Cuba, which had received refugees from Chile, Uruguay, and other nations, permitted its nationals to leave in the early 1980s. During the same period, internal upheavals in El Salvador led to an outflow of refugees. Because of the influx of Cubans, Haitians, and Indochinese, the United States became, for a time, a country of mass asylum. In the early 2000s violence and upheaval in Colombia, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic led many to seek asylum elsewhere. ” (1)
Resources
Notes and References
- Information about Refugee Problems in the Encarta Online Encyclopedia
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