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Internally Displaced, Externally Ignored: The escalating global problem of IDPs

RefugeeJuliaLadicsIn 2014, one person was displaced every three seconds. Today, in Syria, a family is displaced every minute. As of December 2014, the number of internally displaced had risen to at least 7.6 million in Syria, 9.1 million in the Middle East and North Africa, and 38 million worldwide. This displacement, caused by disaster, war, non-state violence, and the snowballing effects of climate change, is worsening every second, making it imperative that a solution is found—and found quickly.

Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) are people who have been forced to leave their home because of conflict, violence, human rights violations, or any other kind of disaster. They are often categorized alongside refugees, but conflating the two is deceptive. Refugees are people who have crossed an international border to escape persecution or danger. IDPs, however, have not. Instead, they remain displaced within their home country, often without much recourse or plan of action.

But since 1951, refugees have been protected under the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, wherein their basic rights and needs are protected in the country where they have sought asylum. IDPs, on the other hand, only have the most basic protections under human rights law and international humanitarian law and are seen simply as noncombatants. Unlike most refugees, they exist in a grey area—vaguely protected by disparate international laws but also supposedly under the protection of their government, often exactly from which they’re fleeing. Additionally, internal displacement comes with its own subset of human rights concerns, affecting food security, healthcare, and education, while children also become more vulnerable to early marriage, forced labor, and other forms of violence.

Critical to the recent surge in IDPs is the fact that the late 20th and 21st Centuries have seen a decline in “traditional” warfare, with violence becoming more internal, more fragmented, and featuring fewer obvious solutions. Consequently, many conflicts only achieve short-term resolutions or remain completely open-ended. Additionally, nonstate armed groups are more numerous and increasingly pivotal in modern warfare. Both of these conditions diminish the likelihood of a peaceful resolution, as civil wars rarely reach neat conclusions and nonstate armed groups are hard to eliminate completely, multiplying the chances that civilians will become either refugees or internally displaced.

But internal displacement doesn’t stop at violence and conflict. With average surface temperatures predicted to rise between two and six degrees centigrade and sea levels projected to rise ten feet by the end of this century, climate change and natural disasters will play a larger and larger role. And while political instability can discriminate, nature does not, making the problem of displacement a much more global one.

Because climate change has an effect on extreme weather and causes more dangerous storms and disasters, the number of IDPs from climatological crises will only grow. In 2005, 1.3 million people were internally displaced in the United States because of hurricanes Katrina and Rita.  And in 2014, nearly 20 million people were displaced because of similar disasters. While governments like the United States have many resources to deal with these kinds of disasters, developing nations do not, exacerbating global inequalities. Because those displaced will be fleeing nature rather than violence, these IDPs are less likely to flee their country to become refugees. Instead, they will simply try to internally relocate to avoid the dangers the environment poses, furthering the problem.

The problem of internal displacement, despite its urgency, does not have an easy fix. This is in part because internal displacement can be caused by a variety of issues; some, like natural disasters, are uncontrollable. Recently, though, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) adopted the “Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement” in response to the recent surge of refugees. But instead of creating new, binding obligations for UN member states, it simply reframes the issue within the context of international law. While these principles, and potentially a treaty, have their place among potential solutions to the crisis of internal displacement the world is facing today, they do not resolve the problem and do not represent any truly substantive progress.

Permanent solutions aside, any kind of immediate action for the well-being of IDPs arrives with a cornucopia of reservations. First, IDPs, regardless of the cause, are concentrated in the developing and underdeveloped world, meaning that there are fewer local resources to help with the problem. Second, foreign involvement brings with it the politics of humanitarian intervention, the Responsibility to Protect, and the elusive approval of the UN Security Council: all politics and processes that most nations want to avoid. Lastly, any aid that is available to IDPs is often hard to transmit to them, since many displaced persons are inaccessible to aid organizations either due to obstructionist governments or extremely dangerous situations.

Moreover, the resources and attention given to IDPs are woeful, even by the standards of international and refugee aid. IDPs and the crises that grant them their unwanted status are typically overlooked; the concerns most world leaders have voiced over the refugee crisis developing in Europe are prime evidence for this mismatch in attention. Although camps for IDPs exist, fewer than 10 percent of IDPs reside in them. Those who are able to live there enjoy superior organization, healthcare, and food security compared to the 90 percent who remain internally displaced without aid. Moreover, the majority of aid for displaced people, be they IDPs or refugees, is concentrated in camps that have disproportionately higher shares of refugees than IDPs.

But most of all, without a stable resolution to the conflict or disaster that originally caused displacement, not only are IDPs at risk of protracted displacement, but, in a particularly unstable region, they are also at risk for repeated displacement. Such prolonged displacement is the reason IDP numbers keep rising and why the crisis becomes more and more dire. In one-third of the countries monitored by the UNHCR, people were forced to flee again during the past year, making it less and less likely that they would return home and thus keeping them in a perpetual state of internal displacement.

In many ways, Iraq is a case study in the plight of IDPs. In 2006 and 2007, extreme sectarian violence plagued Iraq, causing the UN to declare it a humanitarian emergency and internally displacing over 2.8 million Iraqis by 2008. As the violence began to subside, some IDPs were finally able to return home. However, many displaced persons didn’t then receive the aid they were promised from the Iraqi government, and returning home prematurely led to further displacement due to randomized violence, which continued after the official end of the conflict. Six years later, with the rise of ISIL, 2.5 million new Iraqis have been internally displaced, further exacerbating the effects of the initial upheaval. Now many of these are fleeing into Syria, trying to find hope in one of the world’s most ravaged nations, and the cycle of displacement continues.

Although the problem seems concentrated in the Middle East and North Africa, now, for the first time in more than ten years, Europe is seeing large numbers of IDPs as well. The UNCHR’s Assistant High Commissioner for Protection Volker Türk has said that, “The longer a conflict lasts, the more insecure [IDPs] feel and when hopelessness sets in, many will cross border and become refugees.” This means that as these unstable solutions for violence and conflicts continue, the burden of the 38 million IDPs will begin to shift to the West, meaning that even western powers can no longer treat the plight of IDPs as an abstract problem detached from their domains.

But first and foremost, IDPs are a national problem. It is the responsibility of an IDP’s own country to protect them and ensure their safe return home, even if this often fails. It is thus unsurprising that of 193 UN member states, only 28 have national IDP laws and that one-fifth of those laws are tied to a specific event. Even the US, often looked to as a model of humanitarianism, has no laws referring generally to its own IDPs, only a law concerning those affected by Hurricane Katrina and a law concerning USAID’s role in alleviating the IDP crisis worldwide. And with such a deficiency in national laws about IDPs, it would be hard to believe that in the current climate, a multilateral treaty would either pass or have any legal clout. Therefore the responsibility lies on western nations to lead by example and implement national IDP laws before the international community can move towards a consensus and formulate a legally binding IDP regime.

The problem of IDPs is increasing exponentially and can no longer be ignored. With a more violent and politically instable world, more people are being forced to flee their homes. And with an increase in natural disasters, more and more people will have to leave the place their families have been for generations. Al Jazeera’s Imran Khan said it best: “No matter how much help [IDPs] are getting from the government, no matter how much help they are getting from international aid agencies, they would rather be back at home living in peace.” However, the less these conflicts are addressed, the longer they remain unstable, and the less the international community changes aid strategies for IDPs, the more the burden will grow and the harder it will be for IDPs to go home.

Art by Julia Ladics

 

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