The issues surrounding refugees and forced displacement are complex, and cut across a number of sectors, including development, humanitarian policy, peacebuilding, diplomacy and immigration. Responsibility for developing appropriate policy and programming to meet the needs of refugees is therefore shared…
People from eight nations are represented among the 2.3 million refugees in sub-Saharan Africa falling within UNHCR’s definition of a protracted situation (that is, more than 25,000 refugees in exile for more than five years), namely: Angola, Burundi, Central African…
Ordinarily, migration is not a ‘solution’ in the sense used by UNHCR. It is more often a temporary measure resorted to in order to overcome a deficit in the protection or assistance available to refugees. In West Africa, however, the…
The first major wave of mass displacement in Burundi’s recent history followed the 1972 ‘selective genocide’ against the Hutu population. The conflict produced one of Africa’s most prolonged refugee situations, in which over 200,000 Burundian refugees have lived in three…
Before UNHCR started its facilitated return programme in spring 2002 Burundi ranked second (after Afghanistan) in UNHCR’s global ‘country of origin’ statistics, despite its small size. With the return of half a million refugees and the majority of the country’s…
Between 1993 and 2000, Tanzania was host to almost 1.5 million refugees. Since the late 1990s, greater efforts have been made to repatriate refugees but even today there remain some 320,000 refugees and asylum seekers in Tanzania. Even with the…
The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami caused devastation in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, with over 6,000 people and thousands of livestock dead, and hundreds of acres of cultivable land wiped out. Moved by the plight of their hosts…
In 1974, following nearly twenty years of intermittent violence between Greek and Turkish Cypriot nationalist militias and an attempted coup d’état by Greek Cypriot extremists, Turkey invaded Cyprus and occupied the northern 37% of the island. 170,000 Greek Cypriots left…
The situation of Bosnian and Croatian refugees in Serbia was one of five identified for support when UNHCR launched a Special Initiative on Protracted Refugee Situations in 2008. In December 2008 a high-level meeting took place in Geneva between the…
Since the end of its internal conflict in 2000, Peru has integrated humanitarian statutes into national law and, through regional decentralisation, has tried to tackle the pervasive levels of poverty that sparked the Maoist insurgency in 1980. In spite of…