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Refugee Crisis Examined at CWS Interfaith Summit on Africa

The Gambia's Anglican Bishop S. Tilewa Johnson, dubbed "the refugee bishop" because of his assistance to streams of refugees from Gambia's neighboring countries, dialogues with participants at the Interfaith Summit on Africa. Photo: Rick Reinhard Photography

July 21, 2006

by Carol Fouke-Mpoyo/CWS

Washington, D.C.-- African religious leaders, along with their U.S. and international counterparts and advocates, at an international meeting here urged more work to prevent conflict, strengthen economies, and prepare for natural disasters, among root causes of the crisis of displacement in Africa.

Participating in a "critical issues dialogue" on uprooted people, held here as part of the Church World Service-sponsored "Interfaith Summit on Africa," they also called for better protection of refugees and internally displaced people, whose lives are marked by insecurity, material and spiritual want, and often "legal limbo," without status both in their country of first asylum and upon repatriation to their home countries.

The World Refugee Survey 2006 estimates that there were 3,176,100 refugees in Africa at the end of 2005. The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre puts the number of internally displaced people in Africa at 12.1 million in 20 countries.

Serving as resource person for the "uprooted people" dialogue was Gambian Anglican Bishop S. Tilewa Johnson, who said he was nicknamed "the refugee bishop" because of his engagement with refugees. The Gambia has hosted a succession of refugees from Liberia, the Casamance region of Senegal, Guinea Bissau, and Sierra Leone.

Bishop Johnson urged people of faith to listen to refugees' individual stories and not generalize. "They are people who have been thrown together. They didn't choose to be together," he said, urging faith groups to extend pastoral care to refugees.

With many African countries suffering bad governance and conflict, "Any African living in Africa can, at any time, become a refugee," he said, then asked, "How can we manage and avert conflict? We must look at the root causes of displacement."

Among top recommendations that dialogue participants reported back to the larger summit was support for African solutions to African problems--for example, an African Union peacekeeping mission to Darfur, Sudan. To date, inadequate support for such a mission has led the world community to turn to the United Nations for such a mission.

Even as war and persecution create refugees and internally displaced persons, Africans also suffer displacement due to natural disasters, poverty, and unemployment, participants noted. In particular, young people are leaving rural areas and migrating to cities to seek work.

Too often, one participant commented, they end up turning to crime to survive. Dialogue participants urged an emphasis on jobs development in rural areas and on education in trades that enable African young people to support themselves, whether or not they choose to go on to pursue a university education.

They also urged African governments to develop mitigation strategies, so that when a natural disaster, refugee influx, or other emergency hits a rural area, people living there are better able to cope, reducing their displacement to towns and cities that cannot accommodate them all.

Faith leaders also prioritized the need to advocate for protective and humane immigration laws in Africa and outside, and for their governments to increase protection of internally displaced persons.

Participants cited refugees' and internally displaced persons' diverse protection needs and called on their governments and the international community to do more to protect them. Anglican Bishop Onono-Onweng of Uganda said his country has about two million people displaced by war. "Our parliament has put out its own guidelines on how to manage its IDPs," he said. "When we have IDPs, we must protect them," citing as an example the Lord's Resistance Army's abduction of displaced children.

A participant from Benin, host to 15,000 refugees from Togo, said, "We've encouraged them to go home," but when they do, the Togolese government considers them supporters of the political opposition and often arrests them. Many dialogue participants joined a delegate who called for resolution of the "legal limbo" refugees often find themselves in, commenting that many refugees from the Great Lakes countries have no legal status in their country of refuge, but then are denied legal status back home, too, when they repatriate.

International support for the UNHCR's humanitarian aid to refugees needs to be increased, dialogue participants said, and the United Nations' mandate needs to be extended to persons forcibly displaced within their own countries.