ECONOMIST: Protecting displaced Africans

Good piece (as usual) from The Economist on Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs), of which there are some two million in the Congo.


Protecting displaced Africans

Oct 29th 2009 | NAIROBI

A new treaty promises much, but will not help those who need help most urgently

AFRICA contains half of the world’s Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs)—those who have fled their homes but continue to live in their own countries. Sudan alone has over 4m of them, about the same number as the whole of Asia. Congo has another 2m or so, Somalia at least 1.3m. A score of other countries including Uganda, Zimbabwe and Kenya have hundreds of thousands more. In sum, there are about 12m IDPs across the continent.

On top of that, Africa has 3m refugees, who, by crossing an international border, have rights and can expect assistance from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). IDPs, however, are not so fortunate. No binding agreements protect them. UNHCR will help out, but generally they have to rely on the generosity of foreign-aid organisations and, occasionally, the goodwill of their own governments. Sometimes though, as in the Darfur region of Sudan, those very same governments have driven the IDPs from their homes in the first place.

An African Union convention on IDPs, signed in the Ugandan capital Kampala on October 23rd, aims to change that. Under the convention, African governments will have to look after their displaced citizens. Politicians who chase civilians out of their homes will be liable for prosecution by their domestic courts. The convention takes a strong stand against armed rebel groups, which can now also be held responsible for uprooting civilians. It calls for more assistance for women and other vulnerable people.

Some campaigners are bitter that the convention was signed in Uganda. They charge that the Ugandan president, Yoweri Museveni, himself failed to protect the 2m or so of his people displaced by the Lord’s Resistance Army, a ragtag but monstrous militia from northern Uganda that continues to mutilate and burn civilians out of their homes in Congo, Sudan and the Central African Republic. Cynics think the convention may even have been a ruse by some old-timer African leaders to avoid signing a pesky African charter on democracy and elections. Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe was among the handful of African leaders who travelled to Kampala.

Mr Museveni brushed aside criticism. A piece of paper would not bring immediate relief to displaced women in Darfur, he said, but it was a start. The Sudanese government, indeed, has not signed the convention and so far shown no inclination to prosecute its own over the killing and rape of IDPs in Darfur. But insiders reckon that enough of Africa’s governments will sign the convention to make it stick. The harder part will be getting laws on the books and providing money to look after IDPs. A coalition of aid groups thinks the UNHCR should take more of a lead in looking after IDPs and be given the money and mandate to do so. There are other questions too. Should IDPs stay in rural areas or be resettled in towns? Providing the right amount of assistance is tricky as well. Too much, and an African government risks turning camps into subsidised slums. Too little, and people die.

The most significant bit of the convention is the recognition accorded to climate-change migrants. According to the Norwegian Refugee Council and other groups, the number of Africans displaced by conflict is falling, but the number displaced by climate change is climbing fast. The International Organisation for Migration thinks most of the world’s 200m predicted climate-change migrants will be Africans. The UN points out that rain-fed agriculture in Africa may be cut in half by 2020 because of shifting rainfall. Its head of emergency relief, John Holmes, argues that 700,000 Africans were displaced by climate change in 2008. More will follow.