Short Term Heaven, Long Term Limbo: Visiting a UNHCR Refugee Camp in Rwanda
BY CARLOS E. SLUZKI
No less than 20 million of people, escaping wars, civil wars, persecution, ethnic cleansing and the like, are currently living as refugees beyond the borders of their own countries, and a still larger number are living as displaced persons within the boundaries of their country. Their protection is the core mission of the UNHCR, a United Nations refugee agency that developed and manages, frequently with the collaboration of NGOs, hundreds of refugee camps throughout the Balkans, the Middle East, Africa, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, East Timor, Sri Lanka, Southeast Asia, and Colombia.
The logistics entailed in providing for this population when an emergency arises is enormous. And those humanitarian harbors are reasonably conceived and designed as short-term, emergency refuges, as temporary stations for desperate people awaiting return to their homeland when the conflagration is over, or resettlement in a third country when return is not viable. However, while the triggering violence and socially disrupting crisis was expected to be short lived, with the hope that, once resolved, the refugees would be able to return to their own countries, violent conflicts can be, and currently are, protracted, lasting for years. Consider the decade of steady violence and civic turmoil in central Africa’s Great Lakes region, or the five-year long crises in Chad or Afghanistan. In these and other circumstances, millions of people escaped their countries and obtained harbor in refugee camps organized for a short-term stay, where they ended up remaining for years, without any other place to go. Thus, refugee camps conceived and designed as short-term solutions, in many cases become de facto long-term provisional cities never designed for that purpose.
A few years ago I spent several weeks in Rwanda as part of a research project on coexistence jointly sponsored by UNHCR, Harvard University, and Tufts University. In that land-locked, impoverished country we visited several cooperatives of extraordinary women who had been able to pull themselves from the horrors of the 1999 genocide–their families hacked to death in a race-hate frenzy—and, with courage, persistence and illumination, managed to create thriving agricultural collective enterprises and new communities within three years. We interviewed some of those women and spent time recording their feat, and, alas, we also met with others who were still struggling to emerge from the social chaos of the prior years. We interacted with officials responsible for the development of the Gachacha native process of reconciliation, and, last but not the least, shared many meals and rich conversation with the extraordinary Cindy Burns, who directed the UNHCR Rwanda office and currently directs the even more complex UNHCR Uganda program.
And we visited a UNHCR refugee camp in northwest Rwanda, a camp populated by some 17,000 Congolese refugees—mainly Banyamulenge and Banyamasisi tribesmen of remote Tutsi ethnicity who had been steadily escaping the violence of the eastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) since the beginning of the civil war in 1997, with new streams emerging in 1999 with the exacerbation of violence in that regional hotbed. This camp harbors 5 percent of the 330,000 Congolese refugees spread throughout neighboring countries, not counting the 1.8 million internally displaced and the estimated 3.8 million Congolese who have died already as a result of that conflict.
Approaching it from the road, the camp emerged as an extraterrestrial design, an out-of-this-world experience: following the contour of barren meadows and covered by a light canopy of visible dust were interminable rows of blue tarp tents that drew a seemingly endless labyrinth, stretching to the horizon. UNHCR employees originally from Gabon, Sierra Leona, and Rwanda itself cordially welcomed us into their facility and explained how they managed the flow of people in and out. To be precise, camp entry is reasonably tight, to reduce the possibility of infiltration by Interahamwe militia, but the exit is loose. People could leave the camp at will, but to go where? Back to Congo and its chaos? Into Rwanda, an arid country with a 0.4 percent of irrigated cropland, a GDP per capita half of that of Bolivia, and an average life expectancy of 40 years? Or perhaps neighboring Lesotho, where 60 percent of the population lives below the poverty line and 42 percent of children under five years old are malnourished? After living in the camp for years, most refugees seemed settled into considering the camp as a temporary but-indefinite setting, as at least they receive food, shelter, healthcare, and live in a low-risk environment. Their future seemed not to include their own lives, but only those of their children: The camp’s school system, impressive for its extension and robustness, features a broad program of elementary and secondary education in dozens of solid buildings—contrasting with the provisionality of the refugees’ tarp tents—and even the promise of university scholarships for excelling students.
We toured the camp, starting at the common open market with a meager display of turnips, potatoes, cigarettes, and soap, and behind it, the endless rows of tents, interspersed by common toilet facilities and water facets. Children played soccer and ran around with great brouhaha in the broad spaces between some rows. Women looked at us with dead-pan expressions from their tents, while men, a minority in the camp, walked around in small groups. We also visited the camp health facilities, several wooden huts both for out and inpatients, managed by four nurses and medics, three nursing assistants, and one part-time medical doctor shared with other camps. The health facilities served the camp’s general population, but its seasoned personnel paid special attention to newcomers—detecting and treating malaria, infections, and child malnourishment and dehydration. Their medically sound protocols were highly pragmatic, with hand-painted signs detailing treatment in Kenyarwandese—“During the first two days, if the symptoms are X, then do this; during the following two days, do that…”
We drank cold drinks—dry, very hot weather is the rule—while chatting with the staff in a mixture of English and French, genuinely praised them for their extraordinary work, and returned along the bumpy road back to Kigali. The dust behind our vehicle soon erased the eerie vision of a labyrinth in the middle of nowhere and of people suspended in time, prisoners of their fate, blessed to be alive and hoping for a better life for their children, waiting not knowing very well for what, dreaming of returning home while the world they knew disintegrated, while the world we know continues to offer them little acts of kindness and enormous acts of indifference.
As we were leaving, flooded with admiration for the way UNHCR carried on its daunting mission, I was musing on how much the course of regional wars has changed over time, and the potential impact of those changes on the agency’s mission. It may be the case that the UNHCR, like with so many other institutions, will be confronting the task of evolving new ways of providing its services, balancing the reality of both short and long-term stays with the need not to relieve the pressure on the international community to provided security in the regions from where these people come.
How could one design, I asked myself, camps that served both the short-term needs and the pragmatic reality of long-term stay? In an attempt at answering that question, I envisioned some first steps:
- Redesign camps not in rows of tents but in clusters of perhaps ten dwellings, opening inward towards a common space, recreating a small village. Offer those dwellings to families that know each other from before, or those with whom they share a language or even an ordeal, so as to facilitate the steady social networking central to fostering resilience and well being. In fact, urban planners/architects should re-design refugee camps so as to maximize their communal living-friendliness
- Develop educational programs for adult refugees aimed at general education, health-related issues, and even a basic orientation to sociopolitical issues so as to provide them with a broader context for their own plight
- Entice refugees, from the beginning, to participate in collective activities, from music making to artisan skill-building, including the development of some steady production of their own native arts and crafts, connected in turn with a fair-price crafts venture that would sell their products abroad. That would add meaning, connections, and a sense of shared endeavor; provide them with a project for day-to-day; and enhance their skills in a remunerated future oriented activity, crucial both when they happen to return or to resettle, and if they end up in one of those protracted waiting, interminable even in the heaven of the refugee camp.
In sum, I was musing, refugee camps may need to be somewhat rethought, without entailing a major shift in the agency’s current overall process, so as to allow the integration of long with short term needs while remaining faithful to UNHCR’s current mandate.
By the dawn of 2006, the picture on refugees has not improved. 200,000 refugees from Darfur are pouring into Chad, over 2 million Afghani refugees are still living in refugee camps in Iran and Pakistan, other 2 million refugees from different parts of the world are seeking harbor in Germany, Tanzania and the United States, while new or renewed conflagrations keep on uprooting new streams of defensless and resourceless civilian populations away from their homeland. And, for those living in the camp we visited, the violence in East Congo continues unabated, and the flow of new refugees far exceeding the flow of people in process of repatriation. In sum, they are still living in limbo.
Carlos E. Sluzki (csluzki@gmu.edu) is research professor at the College of Nursing and Health Science (http://cnhs.gmu.edu) and at the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution (http://icar.gmu.edu) at George Mason University; and clinical professor of psychiatry at George Washington University School of Medicine (http://www.gwumc.edu/smhs).
