"You Don´t Have to Live Like a Refugee"
Once again my mind has wandered to refugees. This weekend I watched Blood Diamond again (unfortunately, Leonardo DiCaprio’s Afrikaans accent is lost when dubbed in Spanish). In the movie, a short glimpse of a refugee camp showed closed gates surrounding a stretching city of tents. When DiCaprio, his journalist friend, and African companion arrive at the Sierra Leone camp, armed officers inform the trio that once people enter the fenced in area they cannot leave; the officials fear rebels have hidden among those seeking asylum, and thus refuse to release anyone to freedom.
As I mentioned in my earlier posts about refugees, I do not know nearly enough about how these camps functions, the lives of the occupants, nor the governing politics. Closed off from the rest of the world, refugee camps rely on outside donations to feed and house hundreds of thousands or millions of people. Resources are scarce. Violence and rapes run rampant as the few neutral military forces concentrate on guarding the camps’ boarders from oppressive government and rebel armies. In addition to inadequate police forces, in places like Haiti where the peoples’ displacement results from natural disaster, shantytown tents can’t possibly protect against future storms. Once refugees enter these camps, they helplessly enter a city void of large-scale commerce, while prospects for improving their situations do not exist.
This is where my ignorant impressions of the micro-economies that exist in these isolated boomtown cities begin to intrigue me. A closed system where the flow of resources is cut off breeds a reliance on donations. This dependence accompanied by a lack of resources vacuums away the ability to create self-help solutions. Small-scale ventures surely pop up, as people are naturally self-reliant. But while cut off from outside markets, these people can’t begin to reconstruct cities or establish stable economies. Residents can’t replace tents with houses if construction crews can’t access wood or cement. The flow of resources stops and halts commerce (and progress) in these forgotten refugee camps.
Before any city planning can take place, refugee camps need institutional infrastructure (and that’s even before anyone can start thinking about physical infrastructure). Refugee status applies to people who can’t go home, but aren’t legally established in the places to which they’ve fled. The problem is, states don’t want to accept the burden of attending to the needs of and offering services to large populations of displaced people. Realistically, the land they’ve settled already has been expropriated, but officially, governments pretend otherwise. Let these people escape from limbo, grant them permanency so they can’t begin to rebuild a society. It is ridiculous to classify people as being from nowhere, while at the same time preventing them from legally establishing themselves.
Cynics view world problems as inevitable. Optimists view them as always working themselves out. I, on the other hand, view refugee camps as a puzzle to solve. As a master’s student who will study International Development and Urban and Regional Planning, these camps have blank slate economies to develop. Without stable infrastructure in place, the widespread available labor could easily spark the development process with a solid vision and jumpstart funds to begin converting the camps into permanent residences.
1 comments:
The refugee camps are the visible problem but what we don't see is all of the bureaucracy within the UNHCR, who is in charge of granting refugees asylum. Most of these refugees lack any kind of documentation that proves their identity so they wait and starve while the UNHCR figures out what to do with them. It takes months, even years for these refugees to get any kind of support. It is not only an economic puzzle but an international organization problem. Refugees are virtually citizens of the earth, but passports don't exist for those kind of people and nobody wants to take responsibility for them.
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