Newswise — BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- While European governments are considering building new camps for the thousands of Syrian and Eritrean refugees crossing their borders, an Indiana University professor said the current crisis has been caused by the very solution now under discussion.
Elizabeth Dunn, an associate professor of geography in IU’s School of Global and International Studies, spent six years following refugee camps in the Republic of Georgia, including staying 16 months in a camp for internally displaced people.
She said refugees fled to Europe because European and American donors have not provided enough support for the camps, which originally were intended to be temporary.
“The camp as a temporary structure for providing aid to people who will return home is really no longer functioning, especially in the case of Syrian refugees, who haven’t any home to return to,” said Dunn, author of the forthcoming book “Unsettled: Humanitarianism and Displacement in the Republic of Georgia.”
“We have to find a different way,” she said.
On Monday, EU interior ministers in Brussels held an emergency meeting, where the denial of political asylum was discussed along with the establishment of camps for refugees in Italy, Greece and even Africa. It’s not a viable strategy, Dunn said.
Over the past two years, the Syrian civil war has displaced more than 10 million people, 7.5 million of whom still are in the country and about 3.9 million who have sought refuge elsewhere.
“Right now there are so many refugees in Lebanon, for example, that there are whole cities that have more than half of their population as refugees. The pressure on surrounding countries and on refugee camps has been incredibly intense,” Dunn said.
Lack of support for current refugee camps a major issue
“We’ve seen that the western European countries and the United States have massively cut funding just at the moment that it’s needed,” Dunn added.
For example, the World Food Program’s budget has been cut so severely that it is down $13.16 per person per month. “You can’t adequately feed, house, clothe and educate people on these small sums of money,” she said.
“What many of the refugees have learned is that a camp is a place where you could be stuck for years and years without ever really being able to resettle and move on with your life,” she said.
This explains why so many have taken a “life or death gamble” to go to Europe, with the hope that they can reintegrate themselves into a functioning society.
The institution of refugee camps was a product of World War II. Today, people live, on average, about seven years in refugee camps.
“Camps were always meant to be temporary," Dunn said. "You can see that from the type of housing that’s provided. Those structures aren’t very durable, and yet we’re planning on people being there decades or even generations.”
Europe could learn from what already has taken place in Lebanon and Jordan, where governments have undertaken efforts to contain refugees rather than find ways to integrate them into society.
Dunn stayed in a 2,500-resident camp in Georgia in 2008 to learn more about how refugees experienced life there and how they used humanitarian aid. Most of what we know comes from the perspective of large international aid agencies, such as the U.N. High Commission for Refugees.
“One thing that we know about humanitarian aid is that it rolls in like a tsunami in an intense flow of aid right after a crisis, but then tapers off pretty quickly, leaving people without a sustainable form of income, or goods and services,” she said. “I was interested in learning what the effects were of humanitarian abandonment.”
She found that people’s health outcomes were very poor and that they were dying from treatable diseases. In camps she studied, more than 90 percent of people were unemployed.
“Because these camps were geographically isolated, reintegration into a host society -- even if it's one where they speak the language and they’re ostensibly part of the country -- it’s very challenging for people once they’re closed up in a camp.”
Previously, European nations had announced plans to accept about 160,000 refugees, a fraction of the millions of displaced people.
“The best, most ambitious plans in Europe are still falling dramatically short of the need that refugees will have worldwide,” Dunn said. “We have to start talking about how to integrate large numbers of refugees very quickly, and that’s going to be challenging given the political situation for Europe and also for the United States, which currently is taking less than 1 percent of the people who apply for asylum here.
“It’s a process that’s going to take decades and is really going to reshape the landscape of Europe and of the United States,” she said. “We need to think about long-term sustained aid as we try to reintegrate these people into Western society.”
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