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EXODUS WITHIN BORDERS: AN INTRODUCTION TO THE CRISIS OF DISPLACEMENT
by David Korn
Brookings Institution Press,
147 pp., $22.95
As we end the most violent of centuries, we are witness to one of the greatest challenges to the politics of exclusion: the use of the internally displaced citizens as human shields in a war whose origins date to the middle ages. The constant images of Kosovars, ethnic Albanians caught in the borders of the former Yugoslavia, dramatize the plight of the internally displaced. They are literally men and women without a country, though they are legally neither refugees under international law, nor de facto citizens of the government seeking their exclusion. David Korn's graphic exposition of the internally displaced is a compilation of text and photographs that tells the story of over 25 million human beings who have, by dint of civil wars and shifting political alliances, become the detritus of the post-Cold War world.
Compiled from a larger research project conducted by Brookings Institution scholars Francis Deng and Roberta Cohen, Korn's work is a more readily digestible factbook. Organized into eight concise chapters, the text walks a layman through the maze of definitions, institutions, and legal concepts that form the basic lexicon for understanding the issue. Thick with facts and figures, the prose does not numb. Rather, the clearly written, and well-organized information could serve as a one-stop reading requirement for those concerned with humanitarian crises or conflict in this century.
Certain forces are clear in the crisis of displacement. The Cold War's end resulted in a series of global conflicts where states were no longer fighting each other, but were destroying themselves. Internal wars in Africa, the continent with the worst displacement (four million in the Sudan) resulted in extraordinary human suffering and collateral damage to the environment, to health, and education that may make the last two decades of this century singular for the destruction of human and social capital. "Of the countries with major conflicts since 1980, ten had more than forty percent of their population displaced." Countries in conflict-from Angola, Liberia, Sierra Leone, to Colombia-are all in a position to have large portions of their citizens displaced and unable to resettle because of the chronic insecurity that perpetuates displacement. Today 25 million men, women, and children remain in temporary shelters, with little hope of resettlement even if the fighting stops. As civil wars continue as the chief cause of displacement, we should not deceive ourselves about any short-term solution to the problem of displacement.
Korn's treatment of the issues that surround the United Nations system and the legal lacunae that continue to plague the fate of the displaced is thoughtful, setting down the key arguments that are currently being debated on the subject. One of the ironies of the U.N. system is that the agency whose mandate was to support the needs of refugees, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, is now caught in a legal no man's land on its mandate. The Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement, completed in 1998, marks a major advance in filling the legal gap that still inhibits the international community from playing a more active role. But because it is a non-binding document, its role in resolving the debate about which agency is responsible remains unresolved. Though there has been a recommendation to create a lead agency for each crisis, with UNHCR sharing the responsibility with other U.N. and non-U.N. actors such as the International Committee for the Red Cross, the proof is that operational conditions are still unformed. Tuning in on the nightly news about the Kosovo displacement reaffirms an international gap in both applying international humanitarian law to those internally displaced, as well as creating the enabling environment to address genuine emergency needs.
For those who read such a work and wonder what they can do, it is still important to recall that solutions to conflict are a matter of long-term engagement and planning. Good governance, as Korn points out, is the most important objective. A representative, democratic state does not displace its citizens. However, after reading this work one is left with a sense that unless the international community forges ahead with ways to enforce human rights standards, thereby protecting every citizen, the fate of the displaced will remain a legal debate, while donors are forced to drain scarce development resources for emergencies instead of for prevention.
Johanna Mendelson Forman works for the Post-Conflict Unit of The World Bank.
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