UN Warns of Global Refugee Crisis

[unhappycamper]

An Afghan women waits to leave for Afghanistan at a UNHCR repatriation terminal in Peshawar, Pakistan, Sunday, May 24, 2009. "As a result of never-ending conflicts, we are witnessing the creation of a number of quasi-permanent, global refugee populations," Antonio Guterres said in a speech to the UNHCR's governing executive committee on Monday.


UN Warns of Global Refugee Crisis
Published on Monday, October 4, 2010 by Al-Jazeera-English

Conflicts are leading to new era of near permanent refugee populations, the head of the United Nation's refugee agency said. Yet rich countries are only willing to take a fraction of those driven forced to flee by drawn-out warfare - especially when it comes to refugees from Afghanistan or Somalia.

"As a result of never-ending conflicts, we are witnessing the creation of a number of quasi-permanent, global refugee populations," Antonio Guterres said in a speech to the UNHCR's governing executive committee on Monday.

Afghan refugees are spread across some 69 countries, he noted. Peace remains a distant hope in Somalia. Only 61 Somalis were able to return home last year.

"I do not believe there is any group of refugees as systematically undesired, stigmatised and discriminated against," he said.

Guterres called on developed countries to do more to address the huge demand for resettlement. Of the 800,000 refugees who need somewhere to go annually, only one in ten has a chance of finding a place.

[SpiralHawk]

1. "We have always been at war with Generic Nation." - Profiteers (R)

"There's good cashmoneybucks to be made with a permanent war strategery. Smirk."

- xCommander AWOL (R)

[pampango]

2. One example: Sweden has accepted many refugees, but the reaction helped the far-right Sweden

Democrats win 5% of the vote this year.

"Most immigration in the 1950s and 1960s was from neighboring Nordic countries, with the largest numbers coming from Finland. However, since the early 1970s, immigration has consisted mainly of refugee migration and family reunification from non-European countries in the Middle East and Latin America. In the 1990s, Sweden received thousands of refugees from the former Yugoslavia. Currently, about 12 percent of Sweden's population is foreign born."

"Sweden did not become a country of immigration again until World War II. The modern era of immigration can be divided into four distinct stages, with each stage representing different types of immigrants and immigration:

1) Refugees from neighboring countries (1938 to 1948)
2) Labor immigration from Finland and southern Europe (1949 to 1971)
3) Family reunification and refugees from developing countries (1972 to 1989)
4) Asylum seekers from southeastern and Eastern Europe (1990 to present) and the free movement of EU citizens within the European Union.

As a result of these differing flows, the once-dominant Scandinavians, who composed well over half of Sweden's foreign-born population in 1960, made up only one-fourth of the foreign born in 2004 (see Table 1). A significant number of foreign born today are from the former Yugoslavia and, to a lesser extent, Iraq and Iran."

"Sweden became a signatory to the 1951 UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and the 1967 Protocol, in 1951 and 1967 respectively. Individuals who managed to escape from the Soviet Union or Warsaw Pact countries were readily granted permanent residence. In conjunction with the 1956 Budapest uprising, thousands of Hungarians were accepted. Similarly, in 1968, when Prague was taken over by Soviet tanks, thousands of Czech refugees were granted residence."

"When Sweden joined the European Union (EU) in 1995, it also agreed to allow other EU citizens to work and live in Sweden. In 1996, Sweden became a party to the Schengen agreement, which allows for free movement of people across all Member States. Most cross-border movement affecting Sweden is from (and to) neighboring Nordic countries although Germany sends the most labor migrants. ... In May 2004, when 10 countries joined the EU, Sweden was one of only three existing Member States (along with the UK and Ireland) that agreed to allow citizens of the eight, new Eastern European Member States to work without formally requesting a permit; the others introduced provisional regulations to monitor migration flows. ... While the UK and Ireland have seen significant flows from Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, and some other new Members States, Sweden has experienced little such migration for various reasons. Trade unions have been able to keep out cheap labor, having succeeded in stopping a Latvian construction company, for example, from fulfilling a contract by demanding that the Latvian workers be paid Swedish, not Latvian, salaries.

"The first non-European refugees Sweden accepted were the Ugandan Asians expelled in 1972 by Idi Amin, whose Africanization policies stripped Asians of their citizenship. Of the 70,000 forced to leave, half were British Protected Persons who were accepted by the UK. The other half were former Ugandan citizens made stateless. The United States and Canada accepted young, well-educated persons. Others were resettled in various European countries; approximately 1,000 came to Sweden.

"During the 1970s and 1980s, many refugees came from the Middle East. Christian Orthodox Syrians sought asylum on the grounds of religious persecution. The Kurds were another salient group, emigrating from Eastern Turkey, Iran, and Iraq. By far, the largest groups from the Middle East were from Iran and Iraq; the Iranians arrived in the 1980s as a consequence of the war against Iraq and in opposition to the Islamic government in Tehran. Kurdish Iraqis started to arrive in the 1990s in response to increasing oppression from the regime of Saddam Hussein.""

http://www.migrationinformation.org/usfocus/display.cfm?ID=406

Sweden seems to have done a better job than most developed countries at living up to the commitments it made to the UN regarding the acceptance of refugees. It would be interesting to see how other signatories to the UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and later Protocols have lived up to their commitments.