Refugees and the Transformation of Societies

Agency, Policies, Ethics and Politics

Philomena Essed, Georg Frerks, Joke Schrijvers, Philomena Essed, Georg Frerks, Joke Schrijvers

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9780857457080
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Emigration & Immigration
• Index: Social Sciences

The refusal or reception of refugees has had serious implications for the social policies and social realities of numerous countries in east and west. Exploring experiences, interpretations and practices of 'refugees, ' 'the internally displaced' and 'returnees' in or emerging from societies in violent conflict, this volume challenges prevailing orthodoxies and encourages new developments in refugee studies. It also addresses the ethics and politics of interventions by professionals and policy makers, using case studies of refugees from or in South Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, Europe and the Americas. These illustrate the dynamic nature of situations where refugees, policy- makers and practitioners interact in trying to construct new livelihoods in transforming societies.

Without a proper understanding of this dynamic nature, so the volume argues overall, it is not possible to develop successful strategies for the accommodation and integration of refugees.

Part I

‘Refugeehood’: Claiming Spaces and
Responsibilities

1

Refugeehood, Loss and Social Change:
Eritrean Refugees and Returnees

Gaim Kibreab

The chapter discusses the losses experienced by Eritrean refugees; analyses the processes of social change; and examines whether such changes constitute stimuli or constraints on development.

Involuntary Displacement and Losses

Refugees are people who flee against their will because of fear for their lives. They are pushed from their social, cultural and economic moorings by conditions that are or are perceived to be potentially or imminently threatening to their physical safety, security, dignity, liberty and property. An actual or a perceived threat to these central tenets of human existence renders the place of abode hazardous and consequently makes the need to seek safe haven and succour in a neighbouring country or elsewhere imperative.

Though hitherto the main focus of outside interventions in refugee situations has been invariably on material losses, the nonmaterial losses experienced by refugees are equally important. Some of these include loss of national citizenship; social relationships through which memberships are formed, maintained and changed encompassing familial relations, kinship ties, friendships, neighbourhood networks; identities; informal institutions that regulate interactions; statuses; trust; traditional authority; and organisation (Hansen 1979, 1982; Baker 1981; Harrell-Bond 1986; Kibreab 1987, 1996a, 1996b, 2000; Krulfeld 1992, 1994; Zetter 1994, 1999). It is important to realise that the distinction between the material and nonmaterial losses suffered by refugees is analytical rather than real because in most developing societies access to, and control over, productive resource (land, pasture, water, forest produce, etc) and other forms of sources of livelihoods such as the right to participate in formal and informal labour markets, to obtain a business licence for engaging in off-farm economic activities are secured through membership in national citizenship or a community inhabiting spatially bounded social spaces.

As Baker observes, a person is held in position in her/his culture by diverse links of relationships to other people, organisations and social structures. These relationships do not only provide the ‘webs’ within which ‘the individual is confirmed, but also through which boundaries, structures and social support functions are provided’ (Baker 1981). When refugees flee their areas or their countries of origin and cross into other countries in search of succour and safe haven, they become uprooted from their social and cultural moorings with the consequence of being stripped of what Baker calls ‘webs of relationships’. The loss of relationships is said to represent an enormous threat and challenge to the individual's coping and adaptive capacities (Baker 1981) in the new environment. It is often assumed therefore that the burden of losses of the ‘webs’ of relationships becomes too taxing to bear and results in a breakdown of the old social order and way of life. As I have argued elsewhere (see Kibreab 1995), urban refugees adapt to such dramatic changes in gender-specific ways. Whilst men react to the changes in a confused, defeatist and chaotic manner, the need to meet the daily bread of their family members forces women to waste no time and consequently engage in menial economic activities without being constrained by their previous economic or social statuses.

The important question that arises in connection with this is how relevant this conceptual framework is in the description of refugee experiences and in the explanation of post-flight outcomes. If the phenomenon of ‘social breakdown’ exists, how does it affect refugees' capability to cope in adversity? Refugees are not homogeneous masses of people. They differ in terms of their socioeconomic background, occupation, geographical origin (urban-rural), ethnicity, status, etc. They differ in terms of their experiences associated with the conditions that prompt flight. Some flee after being subjected to horrendous treatments whilst others flee in anticipation of an impending danger (Kunz 1981). Their flight experiences are also different. Some flee individually because of fear or threat of persecution or a whole community flees because of the threat to their collective safety and security (Kibreab 1987). Some flights are also less dangerous than others are. Refugee experiences also differ in terms of destination. Among some rural refugees, flight tends to take place from rural to rural areas. Urban refugees often flee to urban areas, but some are forced against their will to stay in rural camps where the environment is unfamiliar and threatening (Kibreab 1996c). There are also refugees of rural origin who due to lack of sources of livelihoods are forced to drift to urban areas without having lived in such settings before (Karadawi 1983; Kibreab 1996c). Some refugees also flee to familiar places where they have either been before or where their clan members or members of their ethnic groups live (Hansen 1982). In such situations, there may be little or no differences between the physical and social worlds of their areas of origin and destination. Consequently the extent of adaptational change required may be minimal. Not only do all these conditions mitigate or exacerbate the extent and consequences of the losses suffered by refugees but they are also likely to have discernible impact on the process of recovery and repair.

Displacement and Social Change

Though understanding of the losses refugees experience during and after flight is important, from a development perspective, an understanding of the effects of such losses on refugees' adaptational responses is more crucial. It is thus important to ask how refugees respond to their losses and to the challenges posed by exile. Refugees' responses to such challenges are mediated by different sets of variables, including structural similarities or dissimilarities between themselves and receiving societies, availability and accessibility of resources and income-generating opportunities, availability and nature of assistance at the initial stage, host government policies and practices, attitudes of nationals towards refugees, etc. For urban refugees, availability of training opportunities, credit facilities and rights of access to business licences are crucial.

The relationship between refugee experiences and social change is a complex one and this complexity is exacerbated by lack of empirical data. One of the consequences of this paucity of data has been a lack of consensus not only among aid agencies, but also among academics. For example, whether refugees become more dependent, or more predisposed to change or become more conservative as a result of the experiences they undergo in connection with social and economic ‘uprooting’ is controversial. Research on these issues is still thin. These issues are crucial because whether refugees are perceived as a burden or a resource and consequently how aid agencies, donor and host governments respond to emergency and development needs of refugees is partly determined by their preconceived ideas concerning the impact of uprooting on refugee behaviour. If international responses to refugee situations are predicated on the assumption that refugees are traumatised, immobilised and deskilled, the emphasis of international interventions is most likely to be on care and maintenance as is often the case. This is because refugees are assumed to be unable to assess their situation critically, to take initiatives and to devise solutions to their problems. Since outsiders’ responses are often shaped by expectations, adequate knowledge on the impact of refugee experiences on social change and the expected outcome of such changes are crucial.

One of the most elaborate attempts to examine the link between uprooting and social change was made by Keller (1975) among the Punjab Hindus and Sikhs who were displaced by the act of partition of India in 1947. By studying the psychological trauma experienced by these two groups of refugees and the symptoms they exhibited, he studied whether they helped or impeded India's push for economic development and growth. Keller identified three stages in the refugee experience. The first is the period of arrival in which the refugee may be benumbed and seized by grief. This period is quite short. The second stage is marked by a feeling of guilt for having survived whilst others have died. These feelings of guilt prompt refugees to ask themselves why they survive when others could not. This engenders a feeling of being special and more deserving than others are. In the third phase, the refugee becomes aggressive. (Though Keller did not differentiate between men's and women's reactions, it is not a moot point to suggest that aggression is a typical male rather than female reaction and hence the last element in his model may not apply to female refugees.)

This sometimes leads to physical violence and sometimes to economic and political risk taking. Keller attributes this willingness to take risks to the refugee experience that generates a sense of ‘invulnerability’. One of his interviewees, for example, told him:

[W]e have gone through so much; what more can happen to us? No one can do anything to us that can be more terrible than has already occurred. Why should we be afraid? Once everything was taken from us and we have come back from our pennilessness to prosperity. If we lose it all again we could do it once more. (Keller 1975: 116)

It is these feelings and sentiments which predisposed these refugees to take risks which in many developing countries are sine qua non for economic growth and social development. In many of the rural areas of the developing world, where production decisions tend to be risk-averse to maximise subsistence security (Scott 1976; Kibreab 1996b), risk taking is a scarce resource. One of the greatest assets the Punjabi and Sikhs refugees brought into Eastern Punjab was therefore the quality of risk taking and the determination to start afresh not only to regain a lost economic position and social status, but also to discover new and previously unknown frontiers of opportunities.

Whenever I asked those Eritrean refugees and returnees who were involved in risky income-generating activities, their usual answer was ‘kabti zihalefnayo zikefi'i yelen’ – ‘Nothing is worse than what we have been through.’ Sudan being an Islamic state is ruled by Sharia law, which, inter alia, prohibits drinking and selling of alcohol. Noncompliance is a criminal act punishable by long imprisonment and flogging in public. Yet there were a number of refugees who made a living by smuggling alcoholic drinks from Eritrea to Khartoum. There were also many refugees who were involved in cross-border trade and took goods from Sudan up to the Eritrean cities and brought the same to Sudan from Eritrea during the war. Afew of the refugees were also involved in dangerous activities such as forging of documents, including passports. Many of these paid heavily if detected but they were not deterred from pursuing such activities. Asked why they took such dangerous risks, most of them said, ‘We have seen the worst and there is no suffering we cannot endure.’ In the 1980s, a considerable number of Eritrean refugees from the Gulf States and Western Europe also invested their savings in trucks in Sudan. In view of the political instability that characterises post-independence Sudan and in view of the marginalised position of the refugees, these were indeed risky undertakings. During the late 1980s, the trucking industry was dominated by Eritrean refugees. This enabled Sudan to overcome a major bottleneck in its national economy (Kibreab 1996a). At the time of the fieldwork (1997-98), the border between Eritrea and Sudan was closed. Some areas were even heavily mined. In spite of the potential danger, I met a number of returnees who continued pursuing cross-border trade. In March 1998, a landmine blasted off injuring a lorry driver and some of the traders. Two days after, I met one of the traders who was injured in the blast in Tessenei. I asked him whether he had learned his lesson not to take such risks. He replied, ‘I have already been back to Sudan twice since the incident. Where there is risk, there is big money.’

Keller's study in India and the findings of my own studies on Eritrean refugees and returnees show that the breakdown of the old way of life instead of constraining development and change provides a stimulus for creativity and innovative adaptation. These changes in combination with severe deprivation and poverty seem to set refugees free from the manacles of tradition, culturally prescribed roles, as well as from the dominant value systems and norms. The reason why creative and innovative adaptation is entwined with displacement is that when a familiar universe of associations and sanctions is distorted or destroyed, the need for reorganisation becomes indispensable (Taggart 1918, quoted in Mabogunje 1974; Barnett 1953). Drawing on Taggart and Barnett, Mabogunje, for example, points out that ‘unsettlement irrespective of its cause has a tendency to create a fluid situation in which the old values are no longer operative’ (Mabogunje 1974-75: 52). He further states: ‘…with the old sanctions and compulsion gone or of doubtful validity, the way is open for the creation and the acceptance of new interpretations’ (ibid.: 52). Poverty and deprivation are also often the motive forces of innovative change and adaptation. As Wilkinson perceptively states: ‘Development comes out of poverty, not out of plenty, as many economic theories would lead one to suppose. Poverty stimulates the search for additional resources of income and makes people willing to do things they may previously have avoided’ (1973: 5). Eritrean refugees and returnees are definitely doing things which they previously avoided or even dreaded doing.

The link between the breakdown of the old way of life and structures, and openness to innovative change is rarely appreciated by either aid agencies or planners. Not only is this crucial link disregarded, but aid agencies and planners often interpret the breakdown of the old organisational structures as being synonymous with loss of capacity to think and to work out solutions to immediate and long-term problems. That is the reason why relief agencies instead of enabling refugees to build on their capability, do for them the things which refugees previously did for themselves. The consequence of this is that agencies fail to recognise refugee initiatives and capabilities. ‘For them’ as Mister argues ‘it becomes necessary to bring in western concepts and structures without being aware that these might be alien to those that already exist’ (Mister 1982). The dominant view of refugee relief assistance workers is lucidly summarised by Harrell-Bond. She states:

It is usually assumed…refugees are generally not only physically too weak to take responsibility for themselves but mentally too disoriented as well. Whether this assumption is made explicit or not, most relief workers operate on this basis. At the outset of an emergency, refugees are treated like patients being admitted to hospital…(Harrell-Bond 1982: 1-12)

One of the major assumptions underlying outside intervention in refugee situations is, therefore, the assumption of generalised inability of refugees to help themselves. This generalised helplessness is said to be developed in response to loss of home, work, role, status, lifestyle, self-esteem, self-worth, personal identity, trust in the self and others (Baker 1981).

The corpus of knowledge on refugees and refugee assistance programmes is permeated by such assumptions (for critiques see Kibreab 1993). What follows is an analysis of the responses of Eritrean refugees to some of the challenges posed by displacement in Sudan.

Making up for the Losses: Eritrean Refugees in Sudan

Though this may not be true in every case, studies on the responses of Eritrean refugees in Sudan show that they responded to their losses and to the challenges by developing new and broader forms of social networks, occupations, skills, survival strategies, relationships, divisions of labour, and social organisations. In a chapter of this size it is not possible to discuss the diverse income-generating activities in which the refugees engaged to make ends meet and to expand the scope of their coping strategies. Nevertheless, it is important to point out that at the heart of this lay diversification of economic activities, which, inter alia, enabled the refugees to spread risks and to ensure stable supply of minimum subsistence needs. As Krulfeld and Camino (1994: ix) state: ‘The refugee experience is a complex process characterised by loss and regeneration.’ In most social situations, whenever there is a disruption or breakdown, there is always a process of construction but seldom reconstruction.

Though the construction process may involve utilisation of some of the constituent elements of the broken-down social order and informal social institutions, the outcome is rarely a replica of what existed before. Studies conducted by the author among Eritrean refugees in Sudan over a period of nearly two decades show that a particular way of life, social relations, social networks, informal social institutions and social organisations that break down due to involuntary displacement and exile are not reconstructed. They are replaced by new forms of social relations, networks, social organisations and institutions. Though some of these new forms provide threads of continuity with the past, it is more appropriate to conceive them as being embodiments of change and transformation. The new forms of transethnic and transreligious social organisations, networks, occupations, practices and ways of life that have developed during the last three decades among Eritrean refugees in Sudan and the way the former refugees are tapping into this social capital to construct their communities and livelihoods in the areas of return in Eritrea, suggest that a return to the past is either not possible or most probably undesirable.

Data elicited from key informants representing a cross-section of the refugee and returnee populations show that a return to the past is seen as highly undesirable. Though some of the problems that faced the refugees were familiar, the circumstances under which they occurred were radically different from the past. This necessarily required new approaches, alliances and solutions (Kibreab 2000). Thus, the raison d'être of postflight construction efforts is to overcome problems that arise in the unfamiliar social and physical environment. The post-flight situation of Eritrean refugees in Sudan seems to fit Krulfeld and Camino's eloquent description, namely,

For refugees, these experiences are attended by liminality, in which they are caught in positions of transition from a more orderly and predictable past to a new and as yet unpredictable future. Refugees tend to be marginalised in their new societies; that is, to suffer from feelings of alienation and, more often than not, lower status than they had in their countries of origin. In such positions of liminality and marginality, all aspects of their lives are called into question, including ethnic and national identity, gender roles, social relationships, and socio-economic status. (Krulfeld and Camino 1994: xi)

In the case of Eritrean refugees, and this may be true elsewhere, it is these experiences that telescoped the otherwise protracted processes of social change and transformation. For example, prior to their displacement, the large majority of the refugees were either pastoralists or agropastoralists. In Sudan, all have become sedentarised. Without suggesting that sedentarisation is a good or a bad thing, this undoubtedly constitutes a dramatic social change in such a short time. Prior to their displacement, very few of the refugees were involved in cash crop production (Kibreab 1987, 1990). This is no longer the case in exile. In the six refugee settlements in Qala en Nahal, for example, up to 50 percent of the refugees' hawashas (plots) were planted with the cash crop – sesame – every season (Kibreab 1987, 1996b). After the dramatic reduction in productive capability of the renewable resources in the settlements – particularly arable land due to unsustainable land use practices precipitated by misconceived government policy which kept the refugees in a state of confinement (see Kibreab 1996b) – the majority of the refugees have been deriving their major sources of livelihoods from wage labour by working in the large mechanised rain-fed schemes in the Gedaref region. A large number of men, women and children also migrated to the irrigation schemes of Semsem, New Halfa and El Rahad to pick cotton during the dry season (Kibreab 1987, 1990). Of those who are settled in the three villages of Es Suki (Fatah el Rahman, Kilo 7 and Awad es Sid), particularly women and children participate in weeding and clearing of the cotton fields as well as in cotton picking. In the preflight period, only a small proportion of the households participated in wage labour (Kibreab 1990).

In the early 1980s, when the productivity of the land was adequate and when there was supplementary provision of food aid, only a few women participated in agricultural production (Kibreab 1987). By the second half of the 1990s, the productive capability of the land in the settlements decreased substantially (Kibreab 1996b). This led to a dramatic increase of women's participation in agricultural production. During the peak seasons, most of the male spouses wer...