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No Refuge
The Crisis of Refugee Militarization in Africa
By Robert Muggah Zed Books Ltd
Copyright © 2006 Bonn International Center for Conversion and Small Arms Survey
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84813-158-3
CHAPTER 1
Arms availability and refugee militarization in Africa – conceptualizing the issues
ROBERT MUGGAH AND EDWARD MOGIRE
There is widespread agreement that unregulated small arms and light weapons – from handguns and assault rifles to man-portable missile defence systems – can kill and maim. But the availability of small arms also demonstrably undermines the protection and physical security of refugees and displaced persons throughout sub-Saharan Africa, the Balkans, the Caucasus, South and South-East Asia and Latin America and the Caribbean. The proliferation of such weapons is a central factor in the 'militarization' of refugee and internally displaced person (IDP) camps, exacerbating already difficult situations, and ultimately contributing to national and even regional instability. The problem of arms availability appears to be especially acute in so-called 'protracted refugee situations'. Moreover, the militarization of refugee and IDP camps and the trans-national contagion effects are the source of persistent and serious concern on the part of the humanitarian community, donors and host states.
This introductory chapter provides a historical and conceptual outline for subsequent chapters of this edited volume. The following case study chapters themselves summarize empirical and field-based assessments of the extent, causes, dimensions and consequences of small-arms availability and misuse in an array of refugee and IDP camps in Africa. The presentation of evidence-based material is particularly important because its insight into the discrete relationships between weapons proliferation and refugees has hitherto been limited. Rather, discussion of the topic has tended to highlight these connections deductively, from an international relations perspective. The introduction also describes the combination of grounded methodologies used to measure these relationships. Finally, the introduction proposes a number of tentative 'entry points' for improving refugee and IDP protection, 'care and maintenance', and the prospects for achieving durable solutions.
The volume is not an esoteric academic exercise. Rather, it is targeted at humanitarian providers and practitioners, international and regional policy-makers, national law-makers and researchers alike. The rationale of the volume was to provide these diverse constituencies with cross-sectional evidence of the scale and magnitude of refugee and IDP camp militarization in Africa, as well as innovative interventions that have been introduced to militate against it. In order for multilateral agencies such as UNHCR and other implementing partners to respond better to refugee and IDP camp militarization, they must ultimately be capable of generating a clear, balanced and unambiguous understanding of the dynamics of small-arms diffusion. As UNHCR personnel and implementing and operational partners know only too well, militarization can rapidly lead to the breakdown of law and order in and around camps, and to serious violations of refugee and IDP rights, thereby endangering the integrity and security of humanitarian operations, the security of host states and the pursuit of durable solutions. But it is only through effective diagnosis that appropriately tailored solutions can be introduced. The volume thus explicitly targets policy-makers – particularly those manifesting a growing concern over the relationship between refugee and refugee camp militarization and national and regional security. Indeed, there is a robust connection between increased criminality and the erosion of public security and refugee and IDP camp militarization – and it is only through an awareness of the regional and domestic security environments that meaningful interventions may be attempted. Finally, the volume should be of interest to scholars and field researchers working in the security and disarmament fields, most of whom – until recently – have had comparatively little engagement with the issue.
The emergence of a research agenda on refugee militarization
Refugee camp militarization is not a new phenomenon. As the subsequent chapters on Guinea, Uganda, Tanzania and Rwanda amply show, refugee and refugee camp militarization have been issues confronting host governments and humanitarian agencies since the inception of the 1951 UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and throughout the independence movements of former colonies during the 1960s (Loescher 1993). Though these post-colonial refugee movements aroused considerable anxiety on the part of newly independent states, early responses to the problem tended to be heavy handed. During the 1970s and 1980s, for example, camps for South African refugees in Mozambique and Tanzania were controlled by members of the military wing of the African National Congress and the Pan-African Congress, and were regularly attacked by the South African armed forces. In Angola during the 1970s and 1980s, Namibian refugee camps administered by the then Namibian liberation movement – the South West Africa People's Organization – were raided by the South African Air Force. In Zambia and Mozambique, refugee camps controlled by Zimbabwean liberation movements were repeatedly assaulted by the armed forces of the former Rhodesian government. In many cases, so-called 'armed elements' were virtually indistinguishable from the civilian population. As such, refugees were thus cast as a 'problem' and their militarization appeared to constitute a threat of the highest order (Loescher and Milner 2005b).
The issue of refugee and IDP camp militarization became a more prominent concern in the post-colonial period. Despite mounting alarm among humanitarian agencies, host states and certain donor governments, the militarization of refugee camps nevertheless continued unabated into the 1980s and 1990s – particularly in western, central and north-eastern Africa. Throughout West Africa, for example, refugee settlements frequently experienced militia recruitment. The movement of heavily armed militia between Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea, Cote d'Ivoire and other countries exacerbated already simmering political tensions between states and undermined the physical security and safety of refugees and hosting populations. So too in the Great Lakes, where rebel groups exploited refugee-populated areas of Tanzania and the former Zaire in order to recruit young men, but also as conduits for illegally acquired goods and resources. The pathologies of militarization soon began to leak into other spheres of local and regional economies.
International concern over refugee camp militarization – particularly among those trapped in protracted refugee situations – has grown apace. A growing academic community has evolved to account for the challenges such militarization represents. Many observers began to claim that refugee militarization, while not new, had increased in frequency during the 1990s when compared to previous decades (Loescher and Milner 2005a; Loescher 1993). According to Stedman and Tanner (2003), some 15 per cent of all refugee crises reportedly involved militarized refugees during the 1990s. The former High Commissioner for UNHCR, Sadako Ogata (1998), also lamented the 'world-wide ... problem of separating refugees from fighters, criminals, or even genocidaires'. A sanguine observer of the UN, Shawcross (2000), ominously noted that 'in the eighties the militarization of camps had been the exception and in the nineties it had became commonplace'. But dissenters also soon emerged. Other commentators disputed the apparent escalation of refugee militarization in the 1990s. Lischer (1999), for example, contends that refugee militarization was not as widespread as commonly perceived, arguing that 'the dominant view of widespread refugee militarization is reinforced by journalists and scholars who focus on a few notorious instances of violence'. While her conclusions were reached on the basis of a single proxy indicator of refugee militarization – political violence – hers nevertheless remains an important cautionary observation.
Though debates have grown more sophisticated, there is, in fact, comparatively little evidence of the extent and pervasiveness of refugee militarization in Africa or elsewhere. While it is true that many governments are adamantly convinced that uncontrolled small-arms availability potentially fuels refugee and refugee camp militarization, little is actually known about where weapons are sourced or stored, and the extent to which they are present in camps themselves. Indeed, hosting and expelling states often denounce refugee and IDP camps for their being 'awash' with weapons, with 'flows' pouring into and from these encampments, without having any basis for such claims.
There are many examples of governments identifying refugees and IDP camps as the source of insecurity and arms availability. The Chadian authorities, for example, have recently expressed concern to UNHCR over the alleged flood of arms into Sudanese Darfurian refugee camps and complained of their being controlled by militia despite comparatively little evidence to back this up. In northern Kenya, the newspapers have repeatedly pointed to the Kakuma and Dadaab refugee camps as doubling as weapons trans-shipment points: illegal firearms are alleged to have been stockpiled by Somali and Sudanese refugees and ultimately smuggled to urban centres such as Eastleigh, in Nairobi. By way of comparison, refugee camps in Guinea are popularly condemned for harbouring enormous caches of carefully buried Sierra Leonean, Liberian or locally sourced weaponry. In most cases, however, even in the rare instances where weapons caches are discovered in these countries, they are commonly stored outside camps, for fear of detection. In the case of Tanzania, for example, the ICG (1999) has observed that weapons are generally not seen in many camps and that military activities often take place outside the confines of settlements. On the other hand, this suggests that a narrow focus on the prevalence and misuse of weapons in camps alone provides only a partial glimpse of the likely distribution of arms or the severity of their impacts.
It is clear, however, that militarized refugee and IDP camps do exist and can present a legitimate threat to security. But despite the potential political and security risks presented in such contexts and the growing prominence attached to the issue by UNHCR, there is comparatively limited empirical research to explain either the causes or manifestations of the phenomenon on the ground. This is partly because the international relations scholars and politico-legal experts who have explored related issues have tended to underplay the political and military implications of refugee fluxes, preferring instead to treat refugees as an unfortunate consequence (read: collateral damage) of armed conflict as opposed to a potential independent variable in conflict onset (Weiner 1992/93; Ferris 1993). Realist-inclined scholars in particular have tended to emphasize more traditional security threats and tensions between defined nation-states – whether political or resource-related – and to a much lesser extent the particular role of non-state actors. Moreover, as the refugee studies field itself became increasingly shaped by an emergent 'humanitarian paradigm' that privileged rights and needs-based discourses, refugees came increasingly to be cast as 'victims' (and later 'survivors') and not so much potentially active agents involved in possible cross-border political violence (Havinga and Bocker 1999; Chambers 1986).
These two epistemic approaches – the realist international relations and humanitarian perspectives – failed to take into account the many genuine security and military risks presented by refugee and IDP camp militarization. Proponents of the 'realist school' focused primarily on external and well-defined military threats to territorial integrity, while ignoring 'unconventional' military actors (for example, armed elements posing as refugees). On the other hand, ostensibly humanitarian approaches concentrated on the specific 'experience' of displacement – with the displaced person acting as the referent – and paid comparatively little attention to its political and security implications. Fortunately, over the past decade, discursive transformations in both security and so-called forced migration studies have yielded a more progressive inclusion of refugees and IDPs as both a referent object and a dynamic agent of potential social transformation. Many scholars in both fields now consider, to varying degrees, that the presence and movement of refugees across borders constitute a potentially legitimate threat to regional and national security (Loescher and Monahan 1999; Loescher and Milner 2005b).
Refugee and IDP camp militarization has been the focus of growing attention from a combination of researchers, policy-makers and humanitarian practitioners during the last decade (UNHCR 2001c; Lischer 1999). Though a vibrant debate persists over what precisely constitutes 'militarization', whether refugees or IDPs can themselves retain this classification while armed, and the extent to which illegal weapons exacerbate the problem, there is an emerging consensus in key normative declarations and enabling mechanisms that the preservation of the 'civilian' character of refugee camps is essential to safeguarding their non-political and humanitarian character. Unfortunately, however, when measured against the sheer output of rhetoric and policy formulation on the subject, there is actually comparatively little conceptual clarity or empirical evidence from the ground.
Priority areas for research There are no comparative studies of refugee and IDP camp militarization currently available. Rather, instead of overarching comparative review, researchers have occasionally explored the interface of refugees, refugee camps, host communities and armaments in discrete contexts. Certain reports have described refugee camps themselves as conduits for smuggling and trafficking of small arms, though many of these remain unsubstantiated. It is regularly assumed that refugees – particularly young unemployed men – are themselves the central actors in perpetuating and sustaining a lucrative trade in arms – whether from their country of origin or domestically from a combination of criminal gangs and corrupt police and ex-combatants. Notwithstanding the fact that refugee and IDP camps are themselves primarily home to the elderly, women and children, weapons are often believed to be circulating within camps and between dormant armed actors and their host communities. Governments have been quick to level accusations against the humanitarian community that they are 'sustaining' and 'abetting' this insidious trade, questioning its neutrality and impartiality. They have been even quicker to accuse refugees themselves of trafficking in arms and taking advantage of the host state's hospitality. These same governments seldom admit that they themselves may be implicated in the weapons movements that are in fact taking place.
There can be little doubt that the issue of small-arms availability has potentially profound implications for the work of humanitarian agencies and the fulfilment of their mandates. Worryingly, senior government, representatives of the armed forces and police officials throughout Africa continue to justify restrictions on asylum and forced repatriation by pointing to the 'refugee-related' flow of arms and ordnance, although they can seldom validate the relationship. Coupled with increasing reluctance among developed countries to sanction third-country resettlement, the emergent 'war on terror' and the growing priority attached by donors to in-country protection and care and maintenance for IDPs, there is a real danger that refugee asylum and refugee protection are being threatened by a poor reading of the issue.
Together with the UNHCR, the Small Arms Survey and the Bonn International Center for Conversion (BICC) recognized that comparative research on the issue was urgently needed. Following extensive consultations, it was decided that a systematic empirical investigation in Africa – the continent with the most severe incidence of refugee and IDP camp militarization – should be undertaken. By considering, inter alia, the scale and magnitude of arms trafficking into, through and around refugee and IDP camps, the impacts of small-arms misuse on refugee and IDP security and host populations and the response of host states and international agencies to the issue, it was felt that such assessments might provide a constructive contribution to reducing the yawning gap that separates reality from rumour and speculation. What is more, these assessments could usefully raise awareness of the issue among decision-makers working on both arms control and migration policy, and facilitate the design and evaluation of concrete interventions to improve the protection, care and maintenance of refugees by international humanitarian agencies and hosting states.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from No Refuge by Robert Muggah. Copyright © 2006 Bonn International Center for Conversion and Small Arms Survey. Excerpted by permission of Zed Books Ltd.
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