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UNHCR Fears Spread of Xenophobia in Africa
By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS (IPS) - The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has expressed serious concern over the spread of xenophobia across the African continent.
Nicholas Bwakira, director of the UNHCR Liaison Office in New York, said African nations, which once welcomed refugees, are now cold-shouldering even their neighbours.
There is "increasing xenophobia", he said, judging by the fear of foreigners and strangers even among neighbours. Bwakira said there is also a growing confusion between economic migrants and genuine refugees.
"More and more African countries, which used to be generous, are closing their doors to refugees because of their economic and social constraints, and because of competition between their nationals and refugees for scarce resources," he added.
Still, he praised African nations for opening their borders to refugees despite the growing economic problems in the region. The international community, he said, has to do more in burden-sharing.
The absence of lasting peace agreements has also been a major challenge because when conflicts resumed, refugee flows increased.
The UNHCR has resumed its repatriation of Liberian refugees from Guinea and the Ivory Coast, and is also in the process of reintegrating Sierra Leonean refugees from Guinea and Liberia.
Bwakira said the resumption of civil war in Angola and the ongoing conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) are threatening to spill over or have already spilled over into neighbouring countries.
Currently, the UNHCR is spending about 300 million dollars annually to assist refugees worldwide. But Africa's refugee population alone has reached about three million persons, while over six million more have been displaced.
According to the UNHCR, there are about 12 million refugees worldwide, in addition to five to six million "internally displaced" persons and about one million asylum seekers.
Bwakira said that some of the root causes of the refugee crisis included conflicts, poverty, tensions among populations because of poverty, and internal ethnic tensions. He pointed out that there are more than 10 conflicts in Africa now being dealt with by the Security Council.
"The refugee problem could not be solved without a resolution of the major political questions facing many African states," he said.
Asked about Africans settling down in non-African countries, he said that these host nations usually accepted "the cream of the cream" of educated Africans.
Re-settlement outside the African continent was very limited because only about 5,000 to 7,000 refugees were re-settled in non-African countries - "a drop" compared with the millions of refugees and displaced persons.
Meanwhile, in a survey of the economic and social situation in Africa, the UN says that war and civil conflicts have affected 61 percent of the African population since 1963.
East Africa was the region with the highest percentage of affected population (79.4 percent), followed by Central Africa (73 percent), West Africa (64 percent) and North Africa (51 percent). Southern Africa recorded the lowest share of affected population (29 percent).
The report, which will go before a meeting of the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) in early July, says that seven of the 26 conflicts in Africa are border disputes and territorial claims related to disagreement over interpretation of colonial legal documents. The remaining 19 conflicts are classified as internal.
Some of the identified causes of conflicts are destabilisation by mercenaries, human rights violations, geopolitics and Cold War, ethnic disputes, power-sharing, and inter-clan rivalries and other factional rivalries.
The survey also points out that poorer countries are shown to have a considerably higher risk of civil war than richer countries. Because of poverty, young men and women have little to lose when they join rebel armies.
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