Picture these iconic refugee images—an African woman holding a child, gazing stoically into the camera against a backdrop of huts and tents in a barren landscape. A long line of people, men, women, and children—again, usually African—on the move with all their worldly possessions on their heads and their backs. An emaciated African child being examined in a clinic by a Western doctor or nurse in a vest with a red cross emblem.
These images have become iconic because for several decades they have encapsulated the plight of refugees. World Refugee Day (June 20) gave opportunity to reflect on the ways these images don’t really to justice to today’s realities.
While conflicts in Africa continue to displace hundreds of thousands of people, this year the U.N. refugee agency, UNHCR, is highlighting the fact that refugee numbers have increased from ten million to nearly twelve million due to the persistence of refugee crises in Iraq and Afghanistan.
While the Afghan presence in Pakistan and Iran, still numbering three million, has been a reality for decades, Iraqi displacement increased in 2007, with 600,000 newly displaced internally and still more fleeing into neighboring countries in the Middle East, especially Syria and Jordan. In all, nearly half of the refugees of concern to UNHCR are from Iraq and Afghanistan alone.
The reality of the lives of Iraqi refugees requires further adjustment of our refugee iconography. Iraqi refugees are not in camps. They live, virtually invisible, in urban areas, especially in Damascus and Amman.
They are hard to reach with basic services. Some, fearing eventual deportation, avoid registering with UNHCR. They gradually draw on whatever savings they may have brought with them from Iraq. Some try to find illegal employment in low-paying jobs in the informal sector.
Their children have had their schooling disrupted, though after extensive efforts, special international funding has been granted to support the inclusion of some Iraqi children in the school systems of the host countries.
The phenomenon of urban refugees is growing. Among the more than one million Zimbabweans outside their country in southern Africa are tens of thousands of people who could qualify as refugees living an underground existence in urban areas of South Africa and Zambia.
In Southeast Asia, host countries largely bar Burmese from accessing refugee camps, leaving them to fend for themselves in urban centers such as Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur.
