Forced Migration in the Middle East and North Africa

Chapter 45

Forced Migration in the Middle East and North Africa

Sari Hanafi[1]

Abstract

This chapterexamines the challenges of protracted encampment and local integration in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), focusing on the plight of Palestinians in Lebanon, Sahrawis in South-West Algeria, and Iraqis in Jordan. It begins with a discussion of the political and legal frameworks governing the situation of refugees in the MENA region. It then highlights the diversity of the causes, experiences, and responses to forced migration from different perspectives and looks at a number of major crises affecting refugees and internally displaced persons. It also considers other forms of displacement, including climate-induced displacement, trafficking, and statelessness, as well as the host-displacee relationships. The chapter concludes by analysing the main challenges of using refugee camps as a residential solution for refugees in the MENA region.

Keywords: encampment, local integration, Middle East, North Africa, Palestinians, Sahrawis, Iraqis, refugees, forced migration, internally displaced persons

Introduction

There is a long history of forced displacement to, from, and within the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), understood here to refer to the countries of North Africa (also referred to as the Maghreb:Morocco, Western Sahara/Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt), the Levant (also known as the Mashreq: Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Palestine/the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and Israel) and the Gulf (Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, Bahrain, Qatar, UAE, and Kuwait).[2]The causes of forced displacement in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have includedcolonial experiences (as in the case of Palestinians expelled from the territory which became Israel), post-colonial contexts (such as Sahrawi and Kurdish refugees), civil war (Lebanese refugees), and conflict and post-conflict situations (Iraqi refugees). Alongside experiences of internal displacement, the region has also witnessed intersecting processes of forced displacement and forced sedentarization of mobile and nomadic populations for whom movement and mobility are central parts of their lives and livelihoods.

Since the establishment of nationstates in the region, the borders between Middle Eastern countries have remained porous, enabling refugees to move relatively easily throughout the sub-region over the past century, to reach states which have broadly tolerated their presence on an official level: these include c.800,000 Palestinians hosted across the region since the 1940s; an estimated two to four million Sudanese who have fled to Egypt since the 1980s; and one million Iraqis displaced in the 1990s and 2.4 million Iraqis since 2003. In spite of this high degree of movement on the one hand, and official tolerance on the other, Middle Eastern and North African nationstates have nonetheless marginalized numerous populations, excluding them from ‘the right to have a right’, to paraphrase Arendt. Indeed, the sub-region’s nationstates have developed policies which define who is inside or outside the nation, thereby producing a mass of non-citizens and stateless groups, such as c.150,000 Kurds in Syria and thousands of children born to Lebanese mothers and foreign fathers who are stateless due to Lebanon’s nationality laws. In the Gulf area more specifically, the modern petro-monarchs defined nationality in a very narrow fashion, resulting in the exclusion of ‘undesirable’ tribes and undermining the long history of these tribes’ habitual mobility across and beyond the Arabian Peninsula. This has generated a phenomenon of stateless Bedouins, referred to as the bidoon, in all the countries of this region but especially in Kuwait, where an estimated 100,000 bidoon are based.

Due to the wide range of displacement situations in the MENA region, this chapter uses a small selection of case studies to highlight the diversity of the causes, experiences, and responses to forced migration from different perspectives. A range of major refugee and IDP crises are introduced, including Iraqis who fled their country because of the civil war; the protracted Palestinian refugee camp crisis in Lebanon; and, most recently, the displacement of Syrian refugees and IDPs due to authoritarian repression during the Arab Spring. Other forms of displacement are also briefly discussed with reference to climate-induced displacement, trafficking, and statelessness, all of which have had significant impacts on individual, collective, and national experiences in the region. Thematically, the chapter focuses on the host-displacee relationships, and the major challenges of using refugee camps as a residential solution for refugees in the region.

Regional Political and Legal Frameworks

The vast majority of refugees in the MENA regionare Palestinians, constituting about 4.3 million refugees out of the total of 5.1 million refugees currently residing in the region (56 per cent of all forced migrants). In light of the protracted Palestinian displacement, a special relationship between MENA states and the ‘international’ refugee regime has been established. While the history and present of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) and its relationship with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is the focus of Akram’s chapter earlier in this volume, a brief overview of the regional regime in place to assist Palestinian refugees is necessary at this stage.

Between 1948 and 1949 the United Nations (UN) General Assembly accorded mandates to two separate UN agencies to provide relief and protection to Palestinian refugees: the UN Conciliation Commission for Palestine (UNCCP), and the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) (Remple 2002).The UNCCP mandate included the provision of protection for allrefugees and displaced persons in Palestine and the facilitation of durable solutions as delineated in paragraph 11 of the resolution (i.e. return, restitution, and compensation based on individual refugee choice). The singularity of the UN agency for Palestinians makes Middle Eastern states’relationship with UNHCRvery complex: Middle Eastern states, with the exception of Yemen, were reluctant to ratifythe 1951 Convention and its Protocol as they were afraid that UNHCR would promote the durable solutions of local integration or resettlement for Palestinians at the expense of Palestinians’ right of return. In contrast, North African states (apart from Libya and Egypt) are all signatories of the 1951 Convention and its 1967 Protocol, although none has to date developed national asylum systems.

Despite UNHCR being established to provide international protection and seek permanent solutions for refugees worldwide, UNRWA was conceived as a service provider organization for Palestinian refugees upon its creation in 1950, and was given a specific mandate by the UN which did not encompass protection or return. Despite this strict mandate, however, there have been some transgressions during the past 15 years, including the provision of ‘passive protection’ for Palestinian refugees during the first Intifada. Indeed, since its 2004 Geneva donor meeting, UNRWA has linked service provision to advocacy, and a rights-based approach to their humanitarian mandate is emerging. Relatively strong language is notably used in UNRWA publications to attract the attention of the international community about the continuous plight of Palestinian refugees. However, focusing on housing, children’s and women’s rights and other rights does not mean that the right of return has become part of UNRWA’s advocacy strategy. In effect, the USA and a number of UNRWA’s European donors consider that if UNRWA seeks a durable solution such as return, a dangerous politicization will have taken place; nonetheless, UNHCR’s case has effectively shown that being involved in the search for durable solutions does not conflict with an essentially humanitarian mandate (Takkenberg 2007).

While UNRWA has played a very important role in empowering Palestinian refugees by providing education, health, and sometimes work, this has not been sufficient to enable Palestinians to integrate into their host societies. UNRWA has at times accepted host states’ policies of keeping Palestinian refugee camps as temporary spaces.The advantages, disadvantages, opportunities, and risks of self-settlement, policies of encampment ,and local integration of refugees have been extensively debated (see Bakewell, this volume), and yet further research is necessary to critically examine MENA states’ preference for particular types of refugee campsin the region. Many refugee groups (including Palestinians across the Levant and Sahrawis in Algeria) havebeen spatially segregated in urban and desert-based camps with minimum opportunities for social and cultural integration over the course of numerous decades, and yet in the 2000s Syriareceived the largest group of urban refugees in the Arab world, integrating them very quickly in different cities. In effect, a refugee camp that was created in July 2003to host Iraqis in Hassakeh had been closed by June 2004 (Dorai 2007: 9).Why certain states have placed specific refugee populations in camps while other refugee groups have been encouraged to locally integrate in urban settings remains to be investigated in detail, especially in light of MENA states’ responses to displacement following the Arab Spring.

In addition to the UN legal framework for Palestinian refugees, MENA states have developed resolutions through the Arab League to facilitate Palestinians’ living and livelihood conditions in Arab host countries. Some MENA countries ratified the 1965Protocol for the Treatment of Palestinians in Arab States(known as the ‘Casablanca Protocol’), giving Palestinian refugees the right to work and to own property in signatory states. Seven states (Jordan, Algeria, Sudan, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, and Yemen) ratified the Protocol with no reservations; Lebanon, Kuwait, and Libya ratified the Casablanca Protocol with reservations (for instance excluding Palestinians from the right to work in certain sectors); while by 2013Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Tunisia had not yet ratified the Protocol.

Beyond the Arab League, two other bodies are pertinent in this context.First, theOrganization of the Islamic Conference and its Islamic Committee for the International Crescent, established in 1977, is mandated to ‘[help] alleviate the sufferings causes by natural disaster and war’. Second,a number of North African states are members of the African Union and have signed the 1969 Organisation of African Unity Convention Governing the Specific Aspects of Refugee Problemsin Africa. The OAU Convention is applicable in Algeria, Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia, offering the possibility for asylumseekers’ cases to be assessed in relation to the broader regional refugee definition in addition to the 1951 Geneva Convention definition.

With reference to internally displaced persons, by Spring 2013 five states (Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, and the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic[3])had signed the African Union Convention for the Protection and Assistance of Internally Displaced Persons in Africa, although the impact which this regional IDP Convention will have in signatory states remains to be assessed.

Regional Trends RegardingCauses and Types of Displacement

Refugees and IDPs

Major refugee populations in the region in the 2000s have included Iraqis in Syria and Jordan; Somali, Ethiopian, and Sudanese refugees in Egypt; Somalis and Eritreans in Egypt and Yemen, and finally Syrian refugees displaced to Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey in 2012–13. Statistics from 2011 clearly show that in addition to receiving 6,680,635 refugees from the above-mentioned populations, the MENA region was also the region of origin for 7,512,968 refugees and asylum seekers, of whom 4,319,991 are Palestinian (see Tables 45.1 and 45.2). The Palestinian territory, Jordan, and Lebanon are the most important refugee receivers as a percentage of their population, while Iraq, Libya, and Yemen have the largest IDP populations registered by the UNHCR (1,773,242).

Table 45.1: MENA forced migrants by country of asylum

Table 45.2: MENA forced migrants by country of origin near here>

Protracted Refugee Situations

Over two-thirds of the world’s refugees are trapped in protracted refugee situations, withkey cases characterizing the MENA region: Palestinians displaced since the 1940s;Kurdsoriginating from Iraq, Syria, Turkey, and Iran;and the Sahrawi, who are identified by UNHCR as ‘one of the most protracted refugee situations worldwide’ and correspond to the organization’s second oldest refugee caseload (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2011). These cases demonstrate the major difficulties in achieving durable solutions, and the challenges faced by individuals, families, and collectives in these contexts. Protracted refugee situations are caused by the combined effect of inaction or unsustained international action both in country of origin and the country of asylum, with protracted refugees often subsisting without socio-economic or civil rights such asrights to work, practise professions, run businesses, and own property (also see Milner, this volume).

Protracted refugees are often confined to camps or segregated settlements where they are virtually dependent on humanitarian assistance. While the Sahrawi refugee camps in South-West Algeria have been identified as ‘ideal’self-sufficient camps by Western observers who celebrate their democratic, secular, and female-friendly socio-political structures (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2013), refugee camps elsewhere in the region have been seen as ‘insecurity islands’ (a term used by Lebanese right-wing politicians),being treated as a space of exception and an experimental laboratory for control and surveillance. In such contexts, the host country and humanitarian organizations alike have dealt with protracted refugees as objects to be administered, rather than as potential subjects of historical or social action. Nonetheless, this does not mean that protracted refugee subjects cannot emerge and resist this control, but rather that state sovereignty and humanitarian governmentality attempt to reduce the subjective trajectories of these individuals.

The case of Palestinian refugees’presence in Lebanon is particularly pertinent as it is characterized by deep ethno-national divisions, political confrontation, and, in the post-civil war years, ideological controversy. Of the 260,000–270,000 refugees residing in Lebanon, up to two-thirds live in refugee camps served by UNRWA, or in small communities (known as ‘gatherings’) adjacent to the camps where people have access to UNRWA services and those offered by Palestinian and other NGOs.

Distrust between refugees and citizens in Lebanon is well documented, with many Lebanese citizens (especially Christian Maronites) holding Palestinian refugeesresponsible for the civil war. The majority of Lebanese citizens vehemently oppose the permanent integration of Palestinians in the country. Importantly, tawteen (the Arabic for ‘implantation’ or settlement), is also strongly rejected by Palestinians who insist on the right of return to Palestine. References to tawteenoften accentuate public phobia against Palestinians’ basic rights. Debates in Lebanon about Palestinians’civil and economic rights typically start by affirming that the objective should not be tawteen,and Palestinians’rights have systematically been substituted by humanitarian or security solutions. Indeed, in a deeply divided political and sectarian context, the only common ground between the various Lebanese political parties is that tawteenis a taboo. The Lebanese position on the local integration of Palestinians also translates to discriminatory policies as, after 60 years’ living in Lebanon, Palestinian refugees’ legal status remains like that of a foreigner, with the Lebanese state having implemented restrictive policies with regard to Palestinians’social, economic, and civil rights (Hanafi and Tiltnes 2008).

Policies of protracted encampment are very problematic on numerous levels. In the case of the Palestinian refugees in the Palestinian territory and in Lebanon, one can witness that camp dwellers have developed a specific identity which is related to the very nature of the camp. The camp as a closed space forms the very conditions for facilitating the use of specific types of politics by the host countries and UNRWA, as refugees are gathered in a centralized and controlled place where they can be under constant surveillance. In the pretext of facilitating service provisions, the camp is conceived as the only possible space, and yet this ‘care, cure and control’ system has transformed refugee camps into disciplinary spaces.

The case of the Algerian-based Sahrawi camps studied by Fiddian-Qasmiyeh (2011, 2013) also suggests a problematic mode of governance. Established by the Polisario Front in 1975–6 with Algerian support, the Sahrawi refugee camps are estimated to house between 90,000 and 125,000 refugees, and they have been administered by the Polisario with substantial support from the UN, humanitarian agencies, and civil society networks. Fiddian-Qasmiyeh critically assesses the whole status of the camps as follows:

while the camps are consistently represented [by the Polisario] to humanitarian observers as ‘ideal’ self-sufficientrefugee camps which meet donors’ priorities regarding ‘good governance,’ [there is an] urgent need to question mainstream assumptions regarding conditions and dynamics within the Sahrawi refugee camps, and to develop policy and programming responses accordingly. This is particularly significant given that idealized depictions of life in the Sahrawi refugee camps potentially risk normalising the status quo, thereby hiding the anomalous nature of the Sahrawi’s protracted displacement and failing to engage with the political causes, impacts and potential solutions to the conflict.