Sierra Leone's Refugee All Stars on PBS tonight!

Point of View, a non-fiction film series, is featuring the film Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars on PBS tonight at 10pm. Be sure to check it out.

The documentary tells the story of six music lovers displaced from their homes in Sierra Leone. As their country descended into devastating civil war during the 1990s, the men fled to the Republic of Guinea, where they met while living in a refugee camp. Despite the horrors of war that they had experienced, the group found sanctity in making music together. After forming the group Refugee All Stars, they toured around different refugee camps in Guinea before recording their first album, using reggae-inflected music to bring peace and reassurance to their fellow displaced countrymen.

Since its release, Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars has been highly praised as one of the best documentaries of the year. According to the group’s website, the film is often referred to as “a unique tribute to the transcendent power of music and a triumphant celebration of the human spirit.”

The story shares the unique success story of one group of refugees, but also reveals the challenges that refugees throughout the world must face. Films like this one help raise awareness about the devastating circumstances that displace millions of people but also give us inspiration to continue fighting the injustices that they endure.

President's Corner: World Bank’s New President Faces Old Challenges

As the World Bank’s board of directors was meeting on June 25 to elect Robert Zoellick its next president, Mr. Zoellick was several blocks away meeting with leaders of non government agencies to discuss his new job. He made a good impression.

Mr. Zoellick listened carefully as two dozen NGO leaders described their hope that the World Bank would play a more aggressive role in reducing extreme poverty, provide quick support to peace building efforts in post conflict societies, step up the fight against corruption, improve consultations with civil society groups in borrowing countries, do a better job integrating gender issues into its programs and many more.

The bank’s mission is to fight poverty, and it devotes large resources to this task. Last year it committed $14.14 billion to 112 projects, while its International Development Association, which makes long-term, no interest loans to the world’s poorest countries, committed $9.51 billion to 167 projects. This is a lot of money by any measure, but, of course, the World Bank’s loans are dwarfed by international trade and investment flows, not to mention the remittances that migrant workers send back to their families in their home countries. Remittances alone total about $300 billion a year and help sustain about 5% of the world’s population.

Mr. Zoellick made it clear that we wants to find imaginative ways to combine bank lending with private capital, money from foundations and regional and sub regional organizations to augment the bank’s impact.

He has his work cut for him. He faces at least three major challenges. First, he takes over in the wake of Paul Wolfowitz’s resignation following a staff and board revolt against his leadership; Mr. Zoellick understands that he must win the confidence of the staff. Second, the bank has a reputation for long studies and slow action, meaning that Mr. Zoellick will face pressure—as he did from the NGOs with whom he met—to increase the bank’s developmental metabolism. Finally, Mr. Zoellick and his colleagues must balance seemingly contradictory demands—accelerate lending programs in post-conflict environments and consult more widely with civil society groups; reduce the conditions it places on loans and pay more attention to environmental protection, gender equity, and many other necessary considerations.

“There needs to be humility in this exercise,” Mr. Zoellick said at the end of the meeting. I have no doubt that Mr. Zoellick will approach this job with the proper combination of energy, imagination, leadership and humility. He will also need persistence.

In his two previous government jobs, Mr. Zoellick helped launch two important initiatives that have yet to succeed. As U.S. Trade Representative from 2001 to 2005, Mr. Zoellick helped launch the Doha Development Agenda to reform world trade rules, an ambitious task that has failed to win necessary support. As Deputy Secretary of State from 2005 to 2006 (before going to the investment banking firm of Goldman Sachs), he helped negotiate the Darfur Peace Agreement to end the genocidal war in the western region of Sudan. However, the agreement did not produce peace. If anything, violence and displacement have gotten worse in the 13 months since the agreement was signed.

He approached both challenges with determination and great attention to detail, but the challenges he took on were huge. Based on his past record, I am certain that Mr. Zoellick won’t shrink from tough challenges, and that he will work persistently to resolve them.

Ken Bacon

RI Guest Blogger: Greg Hoadley on the Iraqi Refugee Crisis

Greg Hoadley, the Middle East editor of IraqSlogger.com, an all-Iraq news website, is our guest blogger today. He offers us his thoughts on the Iraqi refugee crisis:

"The American debate about Iraqi refugee policy has been far too limited to an emerging biparitisan sense of guilt over those Iraqis who are threatened because they worked with US forces. The rest of Iraq’s millions of refugees, the argument goes, are victims of a “civil war” or of “sectarian hatreds”-- local processes that are out of our hands, and therefore no particular responsibility of the United States.

In fact, there is no established humanitarian principle for distinguishing “good” and “bad” refugees. Many Iraqis who did not work with the United States have fled their homes and are living on the margins, in Iraq or in a neighboring country, and are in desperate need of support from the international community, whether or not they worked with the US after 2003. Moreover, Iraqi refugees -- all of the more than four million of them -- are victims of a deteriorating security situation for which the United States bears large responsibility.

How big is the problem?

There has been much important reporting and research on the question of the Iraqi refugees -- too little, given the enormity of the crisis, but enough that ignorance of the gravity of the situation is no longer an excuse. At IraqSlogger we’ve highlighted some of the most informative recent writing on Iraq’s displaced: Just this week we made available a new study by the Iraqi Red Crescent Organization that found that internal displacement in Iraq had increased by 800% over the last year.

The Red Crescent’s figures for the total number of internally displaced Iraqis are lower than the UNHCR’s estimates, which were also recently revised upward. As with Iraqi civilian casualties since 2003, we will never get a conclusive hard count of the victims, and we are left only with debates over the methodology of how best to estimate the number that we can never know with certitude. The two organizations use different methods and arrive at different results. However, the trend is clear from both studies: A desperate situation is getting worse, and the resources allocated to dealing with the problem -- inadequate to begin with -- are becoming swamped.

Another very important read on the question of Iraqi refugees is a series produced by the Brookings Institution and the University of Bern, presenting survey research of Iraqi refugees. The most recent installment, co-authored by our Iraqi colleague Ashraf al-Khalidi, was released days ago, and provides an unparalleled look at the life of Iraqi exiles in Syria. The Brookings-Bern report on Syria was preceded by a survey of internally displaced Iraqis, and another study is due on Iraqi refugees in Jordan.

As the Brookings-Bern reports make clear, the Iraqi refugee crisis since 2003 has evolved in successive waves. Earlier waves of Iraqi refugees tended to be, on the whole, wealthier and better skilled, and therefore might have fared better in neighboring countries. Combined with the depletion of the resources of the first waves of Iraqi refugees, this means that displaced Iraqis are, on the whole, becoming more destitute, more vulnerable, more marginal, and of course more numerous, and will be increasingly dependent on the international community.

For more close-up portraits of Iraqi refugees, see Jane Arraf’s exclusive report for IraqSlogger about refugees in Iraq compelled by the security situation to live in a Baghdad refuse dump. “Their old homes were in mixed neighborhoods of Abu Ghraib and al-Haswa. Their new homes are literally built of garbage,” Jane writes. Our colleague Nir Rosen’s epic New York Times Magazine cover story looks at Iraqi refugees in Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, without overlooking the plight of the twice-displaced Palestinians who have fled from exile in Iraq to an even more vulnerable exile and statelessness.

The US, which has assumed security responsibility for Iraqi civilians as an occupying power has a responsibility to act in the face of the humanitarian consequences of failure to provide security.

It is time for the United States to get serious about helping the millions of Iraqi refugees, not just those whom it found politically acceptable."

We have a mission returning from the region in the coming days, bringing with them considerable insight on the current situation. Stay tuned to our site for updates and additional information.

RI: World Refugee Day

Today, our Vice President for Policy, Joel Charny, testified in front of the House Subcommittee on Africa and Global Health on the subject of World Refugee Day and how to best address the needs of African Refugees in the coming year and beyond. For more of Joel’s testimony, check out this video.

Also, be sure to check out Ken’s editorial in the Huffington Post today.

On today, of all days, take a moment to reflect on the lives of those who are undergoing tremendous sacrifices to attain safety and peace for their families. It is surprising how easy it is to forget that those numbers we hear all of the time reflect the lives of actual people, each with their own story and each with their own struggle.

If Tony Bennett Ruled the World

Today for World Refugee Day I attended the UN Refugee Agency’s event at National Geographic with some colleagues. The speakers included Paula Dobriansky, Under Secretary for Democracy and Global Affairs and Ellen Sauerbrey, Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration. Both women highlighted the US refugee resettlement program, which was a strong focus of the entire event, particularly with the theme of World Refugee Day being “A New Home, a New Life”.

Two refugees who now live in the United States gave their perspectives on the cultural challenges of resettlement. Ishmael Beah is a former child soldier from Sierra Leone (you can read more about Ishmael and his recent book here). He addressed the audience with a plea, to be lenient and understanding of refugees who resettle to the US. Ishmael said it’s not always easy to embrace a new culture quickly, and that it’s important for people to accept refugees and the traditions that they still hold onto from their homelands.

John Dau is a refugee from southern Sudan, one of the so-called Lost Boys of Sudan, whose journey to the US is chronicled in the film, God Grew Tired of Us. He also talked about his experiences with resettlement to the US. When he was still in the Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya, a group of them would gather to discuss what they knew about America. Some refugees said the technology was so advanced that you ordered food in a restaurant by just pushing a button. Others had heard that American women all carry guns in their small purses. John told the audience that he kept asking himself, “What is this country?” However he said his perception changed after he arrived to the US and it turned out to be a nice place. John stressed that resettlement can have a positive impact on how outsiders view America. It can also bring opportunity and a new life for many refugees, as his own experience has shown.

It was good to hear the stories of these two refugees on a day that is supposed to highlight the plight of the 34.5 million refugees and internally displaced people around the world. However, there was not enough focus on what can be done to assist those who are not being resettled and who continue to live in difficult conditions, like this Iraqi refugee woman in Amman, Jordan and this Burmese refugee woman in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

At today's event, Tony Bennett received the UN Refugee Agency’s humanitarian of the year award and performed his song, "If I Ruled the World", which is featured in a public service announcement for the Aid Darfur campaign. Holding back tears, he told the audience that he hopes one day the world will wake up to the importance of these issues.

Until then, we at Refugees International will continue to highlight the situation for the displaced around the world and advocate for their improved protection and assistance.

National Call-In Day for Iraqi Refugees: Your Support Counts

As all of you know (or should know by now) World Refugee Day is tomorrow, June 20^th. Our National Call-In Day for Iraqi Refugees is just one of the ways that you can personally draw attention to the situation in Iraq. Two million Iraqis have fled their own homes and gone into other countries seeking refuge and another two million are internally displaced, moving to safer places within Iraq. For more information on how you can help, click here.

Other organizations are also launching campaigns in support of Iraqi refugees. EPIC is doing their part. By clicking this, you can you can write to your member of Congress and urge them to establish a comprehensive plan to assist Iraqis who have been displaced by the violence.

The Women’s Funding Network has also joined in on Refugees International’s own action item to Congress and is also encouraging their members to urge Congress to increase funding for Iraqi refugees.

Shooting off a quick email and calling into the White House hotline may not seem like a lot, but policy makers do notice when a groundswell of voices tells them to pay attention to an issue. Do your part to secure some peace of mind for these families, lost amid the chaos of war. My colleagues are now in the region meeting with families and it’s clear that these people need our attention now more than ever.

President's Corner: The U.S. Needs To Do More to Help Iraqi Refugees

For the last six months, my colleagues and I at Refugees International have been working to generate more resources and protection for displaced Iraqis. There are hopeful signs of progress, although much needs to be done.

The 2.2 million Iraqi refugees, most of whom are living in Syria and Jordan, are placing heavy demands on their host countries. The State Department has started a program to improve educational capacity in the region, so that refugee children will have a better chance of going to school. Part of the program will involve hiring Iraqi teachers, which will provide needed income for some refugee families.

After months of bureaucratic delay, the Bush administration is poised to start resettling thousands of Iraqis in the U.S. In February, the State Department announced plans to resettle as many as 7,000 Iraqis by Sept. 30, but the program hasn’t really started. First, the Department of Homeland Security took four months to draft new security procedures to process Iraqis. Now, DHS is working to assemble teams to interview the thousands of Iraqis referred to the U.S. by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees for possible resettlement. The resettlement flow will increase from a drip (only two Iraqis were admitted to the U.S. for resettlement in the last two months) to a trickle.

However, President Bush has not publicly expressed any interest in the plight of Iraqi refugees.

Refugees International has been urging President Bush to speak in support of Iraqi refugees.

Learn how you can help us in our efforts by joining our National Call-In Day for Iraqi Refugees. World Refugee Day is June 20, and it would be a great time for him to reaffirm America’s commitment to help Iraqi refugees.

Working Through the Rainy Season

This was just sent in from the field by our peacekeeping associate Erin, who is traveling on mission in South Sudan with senior advocate Andrea. Erin and Andrea have been on the road for 2 weeks now, looking at the situation for returning refugees and displaced persons. They've been meeting with non-governmental organizations as well as the UN refugee agency and the UN peacekeeping mission in Sudan.

I am sitting in a little tent on the banks of the White Nile in Juba (Sudan) where I am faced with the strange simultaneous realities of thatched mud huts, and wireless internet access. Of course, this is a rare technological exception in a town that has only recently seen the end of some 20 years of conflict.

Juba is the hub of the south - possible future capitol of South Sudan (depending on the results of the planned 2011 referendum on independence) and home to countless UN agencies and NGOs. The 'international community' is nowhere to be seen today though…it's Sunday and it's raining…hard…again…

In case anyone was wondering, I am here to tell you that "rainy season" is not just a clever name. In fact, in a country with only a handful of paved roads, and virtually no functioning sewage systems, a country in which the majority of people live in homes constructed of mud and straw, the rainy season is a real threat to health and survival.

For the government and international organizations working here, this is a five-month-long logistical nightmare.

Andrea and I recently visited Malakal (a town in Upper Nile state). Our little plane landed just after one of the first big rains of the season, and every road in town was calf deep in water. Even in a 4x4 it was a struggle to move, and while the tuk-tuks and donkey carts were putting up a fight there's only so much a donkey can do, you know!?

Like Juba, (and most of southern Sudan) Malakal faces a major shortage of basic services and infrastructure; water, sanitation, health care and education systems are all well past their breaking points. There is no shortage of new residents though.

In spite of the rains, the poor conditions, and the lack of adequate financial and political support, refugees and IDPs continue to move back towards the south after years, and sometimes decades in camps and temporary residences. This is a positive sign, an indication that the people of southern Sudan have confidence in the peace that has been established here. Unfortunately, this also means that many returnees are facing truly miserable living conditions that are only going to get worse as the rainy season wears on.

Human Rights in a Virtual Age

Today Amnesty International unveiled a new website called Eyes on Darfur where they will post satellite images from villages and sites in Darfur to highlight the ongoing human rights violations that are taking place. By posting the pictures online for the entire world to see, Amnesty hopes to pressure the Government of Sudan to allow UN peacekeepers into the conflict-ridden western part of the country.

The concept is an interesting one, particularly considering how complicated Khartoum makes it for outside groups to gain access to Darfur in order to report on the atrocities that are taking place. The last time RI conducted a mission to look at the crisis in Darfur was in July 2006. Since then it has gotten more and more difficult for us to obtain permission from the Government of Sudan to travel to the region. In the past year we have issued reports on both the requirements for a hybrid UN peacekeeping force in Darfur, as well as the potential drawbacks of a UN presence in eastern Chad.

Eyes on Darfur is very similar to something that the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and Google Earth launched in April (and which Megan blogged about). The initiative, called Crisis in Darfur, partners the Holocaust Museum's focus on the genocide in Darfur with satellite images from Google Earth to help you visualize the destruction that is taking place in Darfur.

Another interesting online project focused on Darfur is a game called Darfur is Dying. By playing the game you take on the virtual role of a displaced person in Darfur. In order to “win” you must successfully build a shelter, collect food and water, and simply stay alive.

Education and advocacy like this do make a difference. These various websites and tools can help a wider audience better understand the enormous tragedy facing millions of people in Darfur, and inspire them to pressure the US government to do more to end the crisis.

President's Corner: Protecting Iraqis - The U.S. Is Off to a Slow Start

For the second month in a row, the U.S. has admitted just one Iraqi refugee into the U.S. for resettlement. This sorry performance comes in the face of a State Department effort to show that it is aggressively protecting Iraqi refugees.
In February, Secretary of State Rice set up a special task force to deal with Iraqi refugees, the fastest growing refugee population in the world today. Undersecretary of State Dobriansky, the head of the task force, said on Feb. 14: “Efforts to assist and protect refugees include resettlement for the most vulnerable. The United States will do its part. We are expanding our capacity to receive referrals from UNHCR and plan to process expeditiously some 7,000 Iraqi refugee referrals in the near term.”

What does expeditious mean? Since February there has been a marked slowdown in the resettlement of Iraqi refugees. The U.S. admitted 11 from Iraq in February, eight in March and one each in April and May. If this is the State Department’s definition of expeditious, Iraqi refugees have little hope of coming to the U.S.

One explanation for the slowdown is that State was waiting for the Department of Homeland Security to draft standards for screening Iraqis. DHS announced its standards last week. This should clear the way for faster resettlement. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees has referred about 5,000 Iraqis to the U.S. for processing.

DHS has a responsibility to make sure that our refugee resettlement program does not admit terrorists, war criminals and other threats to U.S. security. But the resettlement program is one of the least likely ways for a terrorist to gain entry into the U.S. To qualify for resettlement, a refugee must generally pass interviews and background checks by the UNHCR, the State Department and DHS. This process seems to have no trouble screening refugees from countries known for supporting or sheltering terrorists. In the current fiscal year, which started Oct. 1, the U.S. has resettled 2,767 refugees from Iran and 219 from Afghanistan, where both the Taliban and Al Qaeda are increasingly active. By contrast we have resettled only 70 from Iraq.

The sad thing is that many Iraqis with legitimate claims for resettlement fled Iraq because their lives were in danger after working for the U.S. Translators and others who have assisted U.S. soldiers, diplomats, contractors and humanitarian agencies are frequently attacked because they are seen as collaborators with an American-led occupation force.

With new DHS standards in place, I hope the stage is set for a rapid increase in resettlements from Iraq. If not, Iraqi refugees will be victims of the current inability of American and Iraqi troops to create secure conditions in Iraq and victims of Washington’s unwillingness to give particularly vulnerable Iraqis refuge in the U.S.

For the latest on the Iraqi refugee crisis click here and here.

And, as always, remember to visit our website for information on the crisis and our ongoing efforts to assist refugees.

Sudan Update

Today’s Washington Post took the time out to highlight the Save Darfur Coalition and how advocacy can make a difference in places like Sudan.

While President Bush made a step in the right direction this week by enacting limited economic sanctions against Sudan, the bloodshed has only continued. Earlier today, the Associated Press reported that:

“Hundreds of women and children fled by foot and on donkeys from Darfur to the neighboring Central African Republic after their town was attacked by planes and helicopters, the U.N. refugee agency said Friday.

The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees was rushing aid to the 1,500 refugees who made the grueling 125-mile journey over 10 days, said spokeswoman Jennifer Pagonis.”

This puts in particularly sharp relief the abhorrent tirade from Sudan’s Ambassador to the United Nations yesterday, John Ukec Lueth, denying the genocide. As Dana Milbank reported yesterday:

"The United States is the only country saying that what is happening in Darfur is a genocide," Ukec shouted, gesticulating wildly and perspiring from his bald crown. "I think this is a pretext."

What’s more, when asked about the two million displaced Sudanese citizens, Mr. Lueth’s response was merely to say:

"I am not a statistician."

No Mr. Lueth, you are no statistician. And we are not blind.