Information about Internally Displaced Person

An internally displaced person (IDP) is someone who has been forced to leave their home for reasons such as religious or political persecution, war or natural disaster, but has not crossed an international border. The term is a subset of the more general displaced person. There is no legal definition of IDP, as there is for refugee [1], but the rule of thumb is that if the person in question would be eligible for refugee status if he or she crossed an international border then the IDP label is applicable. IDPs are not technically refugees because they have not crossed an international border, but are sometimes casually referred to as refugees.

Overview

Internally displaced persons (IDPs) are people forced to flee their homes but who, unlike refugees, remain within their country's borders. There are as many IDPs in Africa as in the rest of the world put together: around half of a global total of 24 million, though exact figures are hard to establish. While the case of IDPs in large camps such as those in Darfur, western Sudan, are relatively well-reported, little attention is paid to those IDPs who escape conflict or political violence by fleeing to larger towns and cities. There they are faced with a grim prospect of survival in an unfamiliar and threatening environment with little or no support from the government for their immediate needs or to allow them to return to their homes when the situation allows it. As one IDP woman still living in Luanda five years after the end of the conflict explained to delegates of the UK based advocacy organisation IDP Action [2]:

“I’m from Huambo, we came here because of the war, we’d like to go back but there is nothing there, we lost our families, all our houses and possessions. If there were no mines and houses and services I’d go back. Or if I was given the materials I’d rebuild my own house, but we have nothing. I live here with my seven children, my children go hungry because there is no food, we need to buy water is we want to drink and wash, because we have no access to water, sometimes people give us some water. We don’t have money for food or clothes or anything”.

This woman lives, with 330 other families – a total of 1558 people – in a camp 105 metres by 65 metres in size, smaller than a soccer field. There is no running water in the camp and only two toilets, sanitary conditions which encourage the spread of disease. The one school classroom acts as the mortuary because of lack of space. Lack of income and livelihood forces many women and girls as young as 13 into prostitution.

The weak legal framework for the protection and assistance of IDPs

There is no lack of knowledge about what to do to protect and assist IDPs, rather the problems are either a lack of will on the part of the state concerned to attempt to provide such protection and assistance or a lack of commitment on the part of the international community to support or replace the host state in these roles. In cases where a state's policies and actions are themselves the primary cause of the displacement of large numbers of people within its own borders, IDPs find themselves falling outside categories for which there are clearly defined lines of responsibility.

In 1998, the UN agreed Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement, which lay out the responsibilities of states before displacement – that is, to prevent displacement – during and after displacement. The Guiding Principles have been endorsed by the UN General Assembly, the African Commission on Human and People's Rights (ACHPR) and by the signatories to the 2006 Pact on Security, Stability and Development in the Great Lakes Region, which include Sudan, DRC and Uganda.

The Guiding Principles, however, are non-binding and routinely ignored. As Bahame Tom Nyanduga, Special Rapporteur on Refugees, IDPs and Asylum Seekers in Africa for the ACHPR has stated, “the absence of a binding international legal regime on internal displacement is a grave lacuna in international law” [The challenge of internal displacement in Africa, Bahame Tom Nyanduga, for Forced Migration Review 21, September 2004]. The existence of legal standards and obligations on states and the wider international community is no guarantee that adequate protection and assistance will be forthcoming, but for IDPs in a state unable to help or without any intention of helping, the prospects are much more grim.

The primary cause of the weak legal framework for IDPs is that the rights of individuals have ultimately been subordinated to the principles of state sovereignty and non-intervention. That the ability to provide protection and assistance is “constrained by the politics of sovereignty” is acknowledged as “ludicrous” by the British Minister for International Development, in evidence to a Parliamentary Committee [Darfur, Sudan: the Responsibility to Protect, United Kingdom International Development Select committee report, March 2005]. considering the international response to the mass killings and displacement in Darfur, western Sudan.

There is now a growing consensus that when a state fails to protect its civilians from harm, the international community has a responsibility – and perhaps even an obligation – to ensure protection. There are a growing number of cases in Africa and other parts of the world where the scale of human rights abuses and humanitarian calamity have triggered armed intervention. These include the deployments of the European Union and UN in eastern DRC and the African Union (AU) in Darfur. Too often, however, these interventions have failed to adequately protect and assist the displaced. The logic of the intervention – that international actors have at least temporarily to replace national actors in the protection of civilians – is not followed through and intervention forces often lack the resources and / or the will to fulfil the functions with which they are tasked.

The ineffective organizational responses to the plight of IDPs

A designated UN agency – the High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) – has the responsibility for monitoring and coordinating aid and support to refugees. No such agency exists for IDPs. Responsibility is shared among several agencies. An attempt at coordinating the input of the various UN agencies through an Internal Displacement Unit within the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) served only to repeat what an independent evaluation identified as “the systemic failures of the UN in dealing with internal displacement...[including] lack of accountability, lack of responsibility, lack of collegiality among agencies, and lack of commitment to the collaborative approach [External Evaluation of OCHA’s Internal Displacement Unit, E Stites and D Tanner, January 2004, quoted in An Examination of the Protection of Internally Displaced Persons in International Law with Reference to Darfur, Barbara Coll, 2005]”. In Liberia, the contrast between the support given returning refugees and returning IDPs was stark: “returning Liberian IDPs fall victim to a partial, ad hoc arrangement where agencies and organisations will only be able to cater for the recovery needs of a certain return community if they happen to operate there [Implementation of the Collaborative Response in Liberia, Anne Davies and Magnus Wolfe Murray, Forced Migration Review 2005]”. The same authors pose the central question that

“[i]n the absence of a single organisation responsible for the world’s estimated 25m IDPs, and given the difficulties of taking collective responsibility for them through a collaborative approach, what other options are available? If no single agency holds specific responsibility, it follows that no one has accountability either. Yet collective responsibility often leads to lack of accountability, confusion, duplication and inefficiency”.

In response to these problems, the Inter-Agency Standing Committee, the primary OCHA mechanism for coordinating humanitarian relief among UN and non-UN agencies, proposed a new division of responsibilities with a view to better delivering protection and assistance. This specified that UNHCR will have the responsibility for protection of IDPs, as well as for the provision of emergency shelter and the management of camps, with other agencies having lead responsibility for other specialist tasks such as health, water and sanitation. One obvious implication of this decision is that “UNHCR must expand its presence in Africa” [UNHCR: expanding its role with IDPs, Roberta Cohen, Forced Migration Review 23, May 2005].

Countries with significant IDP populations

• Burundi due to fighting between government and Hutu rebel groups.
• Chad due to close by Darfur and civil war in eastern Chad.
• Colombia due to the war between the government, FARC, the AUC and other armed groups
• Cyprus due to the intercommunal troubles of 1964 and the 1974 Turkish invasion and aftermath.
• The Democratic Republic of Congo due to ongoing war
• Ethiopia due to the Somali Civil War (mainly in Hartishek refugee camp).
• Iraq due to forced displacement during Saddam Hussein's regime, and fighting between the Multi-National Force and Iraqi insurgent groups.
• Indian-administered Kashmir due to anti-Hindu and anti-India insurgency
• Sudan due to civil conflicts in the South and Darfur in the west
• Uganda due to the insurgency of the Lord's Resistance Army
• West Bank and Gaza due to house demolitions and land confiscation by the government of Israel.

IDPs by country

Figures below are taken from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre.^[1]

• Afghanistan: 132,000 (2006, UN)
• Algeria: 1,300,000 (2003)
• Azerbaijan: 578,545 (2006, UN) - 686,000 (2007, gov.)
• Bangladesh: 500,000 (2000, gov.)
• Bosnia and Herzegovina: 134,000 (2007, UN)
• Burundi: 100,000 (2006, UN)
• Central African Republic: 212,000 (2007, UN)
• Chad: 172,000 (2007, UN)
• Colombia: 1,976,000 (2007, gov.) - 3,940,000 (2007)
• Côte d'Ivoire: 709,000 (2007, UN)
• Cyprus: 210,000 (2005, UN)
• Democratic Republic of the Congo: 1,007,000 (2007, UN)
• Ethiopia: 100,000 - 280,000 (2006)
• Georgia: 221,000 (2006, UN) – 247,000 (2007, gov.)
• Guatemala: 242,000 (1997, UN)
• India: 600,000+ (2007)
• Indonesia: 150,000 - 250,000 (2006)
• Iraq: 2,000,000 (2007, UN)
• Israel: 150,000 (2001) - 420,000 (2006) (See: Internally Displaced Palestinians)
• Kenya: 431,000 (2006, UN)
• Lebanon: 200,000 (2006)
• Myanmar: 500,000 (2006)
• Russia: 158,000 (2006, UN)
• Serbia: 227,000 (2007, UN)
• Somalia: 400,000 (2006, UN)
• Sri Lanka: 650,000 (2007)
• Turkey: 953,000 - 1,201,000 (2006)
• Sudan: 5,355,000 (2006)
• Uganda: 1,297,000 (2007, UN)

Notes

References

• The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Refugees by Numbers.
• Ilaria Bottigliero, "Displaced Persons Caught between War and Peace in Asia", 2 ISIL Yearbook of International Humanitarian and Refugee Law (2002), pp. 117-133.

External links

• Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), Norwegian Refugee Council
• The Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement
• IDP Action
• Website of the UN Representative of the Secretary-General on internally displaced persons
• http://www.brookings.edu/idp Brookings-Bern Project on Internal Displacement]
• Forced Migration Online provides access to information resources, including a searchable digital library consisting of full-text documents
• IDP Voices IDPs tell their life stories – in their own words
• Forced Migration Review magazine with regular IDP news
• World 'forgets' internal refugees, BBC News Online, 5 November 2005
• Photojournalist's Account - Images of displacement in Sudan
• Refugee Law Project, Ugandan organisation working with IDPs
• Women's Commission for Refugee Women and Children
• "New Rights, Old Wrongs: Colombia has eased some abortion restrictions—but displaced women still suffer" Winter 2007 article in Ms. magazine about how the conflict in Colombia is affecting the health and rights of IDP women
• "Visiting the IDP camps in Northern Uganda" : Malcolm Trevena's account of visiting the IDP camps in Kitgum, Northern Uganda