Lost in limbo

The global stock of refugees,those who escape war or persecution by crossing a border,has steadily shrunk in recent years.

The global stock of refugees,those who escape war or persecution by crossing a border,has steadily shrunk in recent years. The UNHCR,the UN agency with the job of looking after most of them,counted 10.5m around the world last year,well down from a peak of about 16m in the early 1990s. But few are cheering. In part this is because millions more are uprooted but do not count as refugees if they stay within their own countries,such as most of the 2.7m Darfuris made homeless by fighting in western Sudan.

The official figures also ignore 4.2m Palestinians whose families were displaced by war in 1948 after Israel was founded and who,by a quirk of history,are helped by another UN body,UNRWA. Worse,their intractable problemsleft for generations by the countries where they sought shelter in wretched camps-cum-shanty townsseem now to be typical of other refugees woes. The displaced are washing up more often in places with the least to offer. Poorer countries now host 80 of all refugees,partly because richer ones are keener to keep asylum-seekers at arms length by paying for refugees to get aid nearer to where they fled from.

That means people are surviving for years under blue tarpaulins in isolated camps: for example,about 120,000 Burundians have been sweltering in Tanzania for decades. Today about a third of refugees pass their days in camps,says the UN; in Africa well over two-thirds. Critics say this amounts to dumping victims of war in warehouses,leaving them more vulnerable than those who assimilate into the wider population. Often the result is criminality,sexual exploitation,joblessness,aid dependency and a greater chance of being dragged into war,say Amy Slaughter and Jeff Crisp in a recent paper.

The UN has started paying more attention to what it calls protracted refugee situations,which it defines as cases where 25,000 or more people of the same nationality have been in exile for at least five years in a given country. The UN estimates that nearly two-thirds of refugees today fall into this category,up from less than half in the early 1990s. Last year it counted 29 such cases in 22 countries. That number is likely to rise as,in central Africa and on the borders of Iraq,huge numbers of refugees have little prospect of going home.

Donors may be willing to keep stumping up cash for those marooned,but finding long-term solutions is much harder. Host governments are wary of seeing aid diverted from locals to refugees,so they often discourage development. Refugees themselves become more reliant on the UN. Researchers for the paper quote Burundian women in a camp in Tanzania who say UNHCR is a better husband as it brings the household more than a Hutu man would. Such dependence makes the problem all the harder to resolve.

The Economist Newspaper Limited 2009