As Conflict Rages Across the Globe, People are Not Protected in Their Own Country

By Francis M. Deng, MIT Center for International Studies. Posted June 4, 2007.

The general assumption of the international system is that those who have been forced to flee from their countries of origin due to conflict, human rights abuse and persecution, and have crossed international borders and become refugees, have lost the protection of their own governments and are therefore the legitimate concern of the international community. In contrast, those who have been uprooted from their homes or areas of normal residence by the same causes as refugees, but have remained within their state borders are supposed to be under the protection and assistance of their own governments and are outside the purview of the international community. In countries that are acutely divided by racial, ethnic and religious cleavages and torn apart further by violent conflict, the assumption of national protection and assistance is largely a myth.

In reality, the internally displaced, or "internal refugees," and other civilian victims of internal conflicts are a dispossessed population in a vacuum of state responsibility. Far from being protected and assisted by their governments, they are often identified with the enemy and persecuted for that reason. Under these circumstances, citizenship becomes only of paper value, without the enjoyment of the rights normally associated with the dignity of being a citizen. Marginalization becomes tantamount to statelessness. To whom can they turn for protection and assistance, but to the international community? But when they do, the same governments that displace, neglect and persecute them invoke national sovereignty, narrowly conceived as a barricade against international involvement. What is the way out of this predicament?

The internally displaced and their plight

The United Nations' Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement describe internally displaced populations (IDPs) as "persons or groups of persons who have been forced or obliged to flee or to leave their homes or places of habitual residence, in particular as a result of or in order to avoid the effects of armed conflict, situations of generalized violence, violations of human rights or natural or manmade disasters, and who have not crossed an internationally recognized state border." Some 25 million persons in around 50 countries are included in this definition. While the crisis is global, some regions of the world are more affected than others. By far the worst hit is Africa, with more than half the world's internally displaced.

As a consequence, those affected are deprived of such essentials as shelter, food, medicine, education, community and a resource base for a self-sustaining livelihood. Worse, they remain within the borders of a country at war with itself, and even when they move to safer areas, they are viewed as strangers, discriminated against and often harassed. Those who are uprooted from their homes have been shown to be especially vulnerable to physical attack, sexual assault, abduction, disease and deprivation of basic necessities. They suffer higher rates of mortality than the general population, sometimes as much as 50 times greater.

Findings from my U.N. missions as representative of the secretary-general on IDPs (1992-2004) underscore the degree to which the expectation of internal protection by states is, for the most part, fictitious. During my travels, I would meet and dialogue with the authorities, visit the internally displaced for an onsite assessment of their conditions and needs, and then return to brief the authorities and offer preliminary conclusions and recommendations. This typically included asking the displaced persons what message they wanted me to take back to their leaders. In one Latin American country, the response was: "Those are not our leaders. In fact, to them, we are criminals, not citizens, and our only crime is that we are poor." In a Central Asian country, the response was: "We have no leaders there. None of our people is in that government." In an African country, a senior U.N. official explained to the prime minister, who had complained of inadequate support for refugees in his country, that U.N. capacity to assist refugees in the country was constrained by the need to assist "your people," the internally displaced and other war-affected communities. The prime minister's response was, "Those are not my people. In fact, the food you give those people is killing my soldiers."

Genesis of international response

The plight of the internally displaced emerged into international consciousness in the late 1980s and the early 1990s for reasons connected to the end of the Cold War. Foremost among these reasons is the steady rise in the number of internally displaced persons associated with the increase in internal conflicts. In 1982, it was estimated that there were 1.2 million internally displaced persons. By 1992, the number had increased to 24 million. Concomitantly, as superpower rivalry came to an end, Western governments' geopolitical advantage in accepting refugees was diminished and their willingness to do so began to wane. This led to a desire to find a way to protect and assist displaced persons in their own countries so as to discourage them from seeking asylum abroad. The end of the Cold War also marked a shift in the international attitude toward intervention in domestic affairs, particularly where states caused, or failed to react to, massive humanitarian crises within their own borders.

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Francis M. Deng, a longtime Sudanese diplomat, was from 1992 to 2004 the U.N. secretary-general's representative for internally displaced persons. He is now a Robert E. Wilhelm Fellow at the MIT Center for International Studies and directs the Sudan Peace Support Project.