World Refugee Day falls tomorrow:

Rekindling hopes for a better future

By Pramod DE SILVA

Hope springs eternal in the human breast. Hope for a better future, hope for better times and hope for justice. And if you are a refugee - a person fleeing his or her country due to conflict, persecution, abject poverty, oppression or another factor - hope is usually the only thing that helps you to live. Hope is life itself for these people.

This is why the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has selected the theme 'One Refugee Without Hope is Too Many' as this year's theme for the World Refugee Day which falls on June 20. The UN refugee agency, which turns 60 this year, will mark World Refugee Day with a rich and varied program of events worldwide and the launch of a new global awareness campaign. The UNHCR was set up in 1951 to help the estimated one million people uprooted after World War II to return home.

In 2001, a special UN General Assembly Resolution was adopted to declare the former African Refugee Day as the International Refugee Day as an expression of solidarity with Africa, which had the highest number of refugees.

The General Assembly noted that 2001 marked the 50th anniversary of the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and that the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) had agreed to have the International Refugee Day to coincide with African Refugee Day on June 20.

The focus of the World Refugee Day this year will be on the nearly 15 million refugees around the world, mostly in Africa and Asia, including four million Palestinian refugees living in 60 camps whose affairs are handled by a separate UN agency United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA).

In line with this year's theme, the UNHCR is rolling out its multimedia "One" campaign with the slogan 'Do 1 Thing'. UNHCR also has an ambitious social media (Facebook, Twitter etc) campaign to promote the day and spread awareness about the "One" campaign.

The idea is that we can do something, even a single act of charity or compassion, that will benefit the refugees and rekindle their hopes for a better life ahead. Even taking a moment to appreciate the tribulations they have gone through and recognising their courage and resilience in the face of adversity will reaffirm our faith in humanity.

Over the next six months the UNHCR will increase awareness about the forcibly displaced and stateless by telling their powerful personal stories. UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador Angelina Jolie has recorded a World Refugee Day message that ties in with the campaign and calls on people to "Do 1 Thing."

Too many

"Everyday, thousands of people run from war, persecution and terror," Jolie says. "Even one is too many. One family forced to flee is too many, one child growing up in a camp is too many, one refugee without hope is too many."

Speaking at an earlier event at the UNHCR Headquarters in Geneva, High Commissioner Antonio Guterres warned of multiple new factors that are causing displacement. He said many of these did not exist at the time of UNHCR's founding or when the major international refugee and statelessness conventions were created.

"UNHCR traditionally was supporting refugees, people that would cross a border because of a conflict or persecution," he said. "But now we see that more and more people are crossing borders because of extreme poverty, because of the impact of climate change, [and] because of their inter-relation with conflict. So there are new patterns of forced displacement and the international community needs to be able to tackle those challenges."

Indeed, the world must take cognizance of new issues such as displacement due to climate change and act urgently to formulate viable solutions. Rising sea levels, increasing desertification, weather-induced flooding, and more frequent natural disasters have become a major cause of population displacement in several parts of the world, a trend that is very likely to continue. According to UN predictions, there could be as many as 50 million 'environmental refugees' in the next few decades.

Focus on Rome

It is in this context that the UNHCR will be marking the World Refugee Day tomorrow. The Italian capital of Rome will be the focus of this year's events on World Refugee Day, with High Commissioner Guterres due to present UNHCR's annual statistics report. He will also preside over a special commemorative event that will be attended by Italy's President Giorgio Napolitano and six refugees, including a Polish survivor of the Holocaust in World War II.

Rome's ancient Colosseum will be lit in UN blue, one of many monuments around the world to be colourfully illuminated to mark the occasion, including the Empire State Building in New York. For the first time, the Tokyo Tower, Japan's second tallest artificial structure, will be lit in blue for three hours from seven o'clock on the evening of June 20. Many other events related to the day will be held throughout Asia.

There will also be competitions, tree planting, speeches, poetry recitals and photography exhibitions, including a special collaboration with the Magnum agency "60 Years, 60 Lives" to mark UNHCR's 60th anniversary in a year that also marks the 60th anniversary of the UN Refugee Convention.

Refugees often live in dire conditions, though some countries do have well-equipped established camps. Unfortunately, countries to which refugees flee are themselves poor and can hardly afford to provide creature comforts to a large population of displaced persons. This is where the UNHCR comes in. More than half of all refugees of concern to UNHCR live in urban areas. They all face three possible solutions: repatriation; local integration or resettlement.

Seeking asylum

When a person or family decides to leave their home country and seek asylum elsewhere, they generally travel to the closest safe area possible. Thus, while the world's largest source countries for refugees include Afghanistan, Iraq, and Sierra Leone, some of the countries hosting the most refugees include countries such as Pakistan, Syria, Jordan, Iran, and Guinea.

Apart from refugees, the world also has to face the problem of people displaced in their own countries. These Internally Displaced People (IDPs) actually outnumber refugees - according to the figures released by the Geneva-based Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), there were 26 million IDPs around the world in 2008.

Although they are not refugees in the strictest sense of the term, the UNHCR is caring for around 14 million of these IDPs, which is, in fact, more than the total number of refugees of concern to UNHCR. The leading countries with Internally Displaced Persons include Sudan, Angola, Myanmar, Turkey and Iraq.

Sri Lanka, which had an IDP population of nearly 300,000 in May 2009 (at the end of the battle against terrorism), succeeded in resettling a vast majority of its IDPs and only a few thousand still remain in the welfare villages. This is a very creditable achievement, compared with other countries which faced similar situations.

The refugee problem is a blot on humanity. But it is unlikely to go away if the world's conflicts are not resolved. Peace is the one vital factor that can create a conducive environment for refugees to return to their home countries. The international community should strive to resolve these problems, which will be a Ray of Hope for refugees the world over. That is the One Thing that the world needs to do, urgently.