refugee camps

[image – refugee camp image page]

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@zeynep

Not actively managing the biggest refugee crisis since World War II is a stain on world’s already horrible history on helping the desperate.

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A refugee camp is a temporary settlement built to receive refugees. Camps with over a hundred thousand people are common, but as of 2012 the average camp size is around 11,400. Usually they are built and run by a government, the United Nations, or international organizations, (such as the Red Cross) or NGOs.

Refugee camps are generally set up in an impromptu fashion and designed to meet basic human needs for only a short time. Due to crowding and lack of infrastructure, some refugee camps are unhygienic, leading to a high incidence of infectious diseases, including epidemics. If the return of refugees is prevented (often by civil war), a humanitarian crisis can result.

“Refugee camp” typically describes a settlement of people who have escaped war in their home country and have fled to a country of first asylum, but some camps also house environmental migrants and economic refugees.

Some refugee camps exist for decades and people can stay in refugee camps for decades, both of which have major implications for human rights. Some camps grow into permanent settlements and even merge with nearby older communities, such as Ain al-Hilweh, Lebanon and Deir al-Balah, Palestine.

Refugee camps may sometimes serve as headquarters for recruitment, support and training of guerrilla organizations engaged in fighting in the refugees’ country of origin, often using humanitarian aid to supply their troops. Rwandan refugee camps in the Zaire and Cambodian refugee camps in Thailand supported armed groups until their destruction by the military.

ie: 2015 – wanting to disperse 350000..

http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2015/apr/17/dadaab-refugee-camp-closure-risk-350000-somali-lives-amnesty

Facilities

Facilities of a refugee camp can include the following:

• An administrative headquarters to coordinate services

David – madagascar, Adam – sandy,

• Sleeping accommodations (frequently tents)

hexayurts – Vinay, containers et al – living spaces, rebel architects, self-organizing (baan style)

Cameron, Alejandro, ..

• Hygiene facilities (washing areas and latrines or toilets)

peepoople et al

• Clinics, hospitals and immunization centers

theranus et al

• Food distribution and therapeutic feeding centers
• Communication equipment (e.g. radio)

oluvus, internet dot org, et al

• Security, including protection from banditry (e.g. barriers and security checkpoints) and peacekeeping troops to prevent armed violence
• Places of worship
• Schools and training centers (if permitted by the host country)
• Markets and shops (if permitted by the host country)

all of the above – but esp the last 4 part of short.. a nother way

Schools and markets may be prohibited by the host country government in order to discourage refugees from settling permanently in camps.

In order to understand and monitor an emergency over a period of time, the development and organisation of the camps can be tracked by satellite and analyzed via GIS.

so has means for app.. for mechanism simple enough,.. no?

Duration

People may stay in these camps, receiving emergency food and medical aid, until it is safe to return to their homes. In some cases, often after several years, the host country government may prefer to see that refugees are resettled in “third countries” which accept refugees seeking asylum. In other cases, the host country government may choose to forcibly repatriate refugees to their country of origin, in violation of international law.

Although camps are intended to be temporary, it is possible for camps to remain in place for decades. Some Palestinian refugee camps have existed since 1948, while other well-known camps such as Buduburam in Ghana have hosted populations for over 20 years.

Work and employment in refugee camps

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has a policy of helping refugees work and be productive, using their existing skills to meet their own needs and needs of the host country, to:

“Ensure the right of refugees to access work and other livelihood opportunities as they are available for nationals… Match programme interventions with corresponding levels of livelihood capacity (existing livelihood assets such as skills and past work experience) and needs identified in the refugee population, and the demands of the market… Assist refugees in becoming self-reliant. Cash / food / rental assistance delivered through humanitarian agencies should be short-term and conditional and gradually lead to self-reliance activities as part of longer-term development... Convene internal and external stakeholders around the results of livelihood assessments to jointly identify livelihood support opportunities.”

this is the short term – 1 yr to ness – that just needs a placebo-jumpstart and one success is that aid (or placebo or whatever you call it) is no longer needed

If enough aid is provided to refugees, it can help host countries too, through stimulus effects.

indeed – resources to the entire space – about ness (video) – can help entire world. reverse of schooling the world.

like the reverse of revolution. ..the reverse of conferences mentality. ie: rather than everyone coming together at say davos or skoll or lego … (imagining all the resources that go into these gatherings.. not to mention the human prep for pitches/accolading there)… the gatherings that matter are happening in unlikely places, ie: refugee camps.. and the success is that

1\ we no longer need refugee camps (from end to man made technology of war et al) and/or

2\ refugee camps become the appeal for 7 billion people.. the utopia of self organizing ness.. the revolution of everyday life ness..

 However refugee support does not usually provide cash to create effective demand, and refugees without cash are restricted by host countries lest they depress wages and opportunities for locals. Host countries also sometimes wish to avoid cultural and political changes that integrating refugees would cause.

perfect.. as the revolution is more about money less ness.. no? radical econ ness..

[funny – this is given as a bad thing. similar to women wanting their picture on money. as a good thing.]

Refugee resettlement

Globally, about 17 countries (Australia, Brazil, Burkina Faso, Canada, Chile, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Ireland,Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States) regularly accept “quota refugees” from refugee camps. In recent years, most quota refugees have come from Afghanistan,Iran, Iraq, Liberia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and the former Yugoslavia which have been disrupted by wars and revolutions.

In the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict, Jewish refugees were initially resettled in refugee camps known variously as Immigrant camps, Ma’abarot, and “development towns” prior to absorption into mainstream Israeli society. Conversely, many Palestinian refugees remain settled in Palestinian refugee camps, while others have been absorbed into Jordanian society or the Palestinian territories. Since 1948, the sovereign State of Israel has guaranteed asylum and citizenship to Jewish refugees, while the self-declared State of Palestine remains unable to absorb the Palestinian refugees, due to lack of de facto sovereignty over its claimed territories.

whoa. redefine all that .. no?

Notable refugee camps (leaving links live from wiki page)

• Camps for Syrian refugees in Iraqi Kurdistan, including Domiz in Dohuk Governorate, Arbat in Sulaymaniyah, and Qushtapa, Basirma, Gawilan, Kawergosk and Darashakran in Erbil Governorate.
• Camps in the east of Chad, such as Breidjing Camp, hosting approximately 250,000 refugees from the Darfurregion in Sudan (since 2002)
• Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan, hosting 144,000 Syrian refugees as of July 2013, although the population in November 2013 had dropped to around 112,000 as the Syrian civil war continues.
• Buduburam refugee camp, home to more than 12,000 Liberians (opened 1990)
• Camps in the south of Chad, hosting approximately 50,000 refugees from Central African Republic
• Dadaab refugee camps (Ifo, Dagahaley, Hagadera) in North Eastern Kenya, established in 1991 and now hosting more than 400,000 Somali refugees
• Palestine refugee camps (opened from 1948 and forward)
• Camps on the Thai-Cambodian border between 1979 and 1993:^[4]Nong Samet, Nong Chan, Sa Kaeo, Site Two,Khao-I-Dang
• Philippine Refugee Processing Center for Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodian refugees fleeing wars in Indochina.
• Sahrawi refugee camps near Tindouf, South Western Algeria (opened circa 1976)
• Camps for Sri Lankan Tamils, established in India in 1983, with over 110,000 refugees by 1998
• Immigrant camps (Israel) (1947–1950) and Ma’abarot transition camps (1950–1963) to accommodate Jewish refugees and immigrants in Israel.
• Niatak refugee camp of Afghan refugees in Iran.
• Lampedusa immigrant reception center for refugees, asylum seekers and illegal immigrants on the Italian island of Lampedusa.
• Ras Ajdir refugee camp on Libyan-Tunisian border, housing more than 30,000 Libyan refugees(opened 2011)
• Hatay Province (Turkey) camps for refugees of the Syrian civil war (opened 2011)
• Dzaleka Refugee Camp in the Dowa District of Malawi.
• Ħal Far, Malta for African illegal immigrants.

See also

• Displaced persons camp
• Tent city
• Transitional shelter
• United Nations Border Relief Operation which administered camps in Thailand 1982-1993.
• United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)
• United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East

also – Vinay.. David (madagascar ness)

karam foundation – Molly

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how to build a perfect refugee camps 2014:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/16/magazine/how-to-build-a-perfect-refugee-camp.html?_r=0

Turkey long ago exempted itself from any obligation to respond at all. Technically, the 14,000 residents at Kilis are not refugees but “guests” of Turkey. This is not just semantics. The 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees prohibits states from forcing them back over borders into danger and guarantees their right to work, shelter, travel and public assistance. Turkey signed the agreement but did so with a “geographical limitation”: Its mandate applies only to refugees from Europe.

Why would Turkey be so willing to house refugees — and to house them so well at its own expense? Unlike almost all other refugee camps in the world, Kilis is not run by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Rather, Turkey’s Disaster and Emergency Management Presidency, or AFAD, asked the U.N.H.C.R. for its camp guidelines — minimum distance between tents, and so on — and then designed its own. It staffed the camps with Turkish government employees, allowing in few NGOs and giving those only supporting roles. Except for some relatively minor international donations, the financial responsibility, and all the administrative responsibility, has been Turkey’s alone.

This approach, while costly, has given the Turks a measure of control over every detail — including who is working in their country. Typically, camps are serviced by a number of NGOs, and there can be overlap — or gaps — in the services they provide. The agencies may fight among themselves or clash with local leaders; each has its own hierarchies and staff members, drawn from an unlimited number of nations. Running a camp that way, the Turkish government official speculated, would be complicated: “There’s too many people coming and going. It’s not secure. And it’s distracting.”

As Turkey’s economy has grown, so has its hope of being a significant actor on the geopolitical stage. “The Turks have a burning desire to show the external world how great they’re doing. These camps are a very visible way of doing it. With the assumption that it wouldn’t last long, the cost was worth the benefit.”

There are projected to be 1.5 million Syrian refugees in Turkey by year’s end.

The Turks may have built as good a refugee camp as it is possible to build. But a camp is still a camp. And if a camp becomes a shelter not just for a few months but for years, a substitute — even a deterrent — to a real solution, how much does it matter how nice it is?

For Turkey, the grocery stores are proving comparatively inexpensive. Before the stores opened in October 2012, the Turkish government was spending nearly four times as much on food. Because before that, it was serving the refugees three hot meals a day. Catered.

Worldwide, refugee counts are at their highest since the Rwandan genocide.

whether we are talking literal and/or *figurative refugees, no?

*refugee camp as holding place (from earlier refugee quote), perhaps we include such camps/institutions/technologies as: work, school, norms, dis\orders, labels, slums, prisons, … anything that might fall under the encampment of manufactured consent .. ie: this is for the best and the best we can do..

The camp administrator reports directly to the governor of the region. With its model, Turkey has cut down on some of the major hazards associated with refugee camps: vandalism, theft, sexual assault, diverted supplies. “Any place you have 14,000 people living, and living in that proximity, there are challenges,” Batchelor continued. “But these problems that exist in other camps are much less prevalent there.”

But operating camps this way is expensive. “This has cost them,” Batchelor says. Expenditures at the Kilis camp run to at least $2 million a month. By the end of 2013, the Turkish government had spent $2.5 billion on its Syrian guests, primarily in camps — a figure that has created resentment among Turks.

Sources of aid exist, but as Kamyar Jarahzadeh, the American representative for the Coordination Group of Afghan Refugees in Turkey, pointed out, it’s “piecemeal and hard to get.” (Afghanistan is currently one of the largest countries of origin for Turkey’s refugees — and indeed the largest source of refugees worldwide for the last 32 years.) “Most people we see are getting nothing. There’s no centralized effort, and at the end of the day, even if everyone knew about aid, there wouldn’t be enough to go around.”

Some 400,000 Syrian refugees in Turkey live outside the camps. Those with means settle in apartments; the less fortunate camp in parks and empty lots.

Louis Belanger, then the humanitarian-media officer for Oxfam, told me the organization was struggling to get people to respond to the message that most Syrian refugees were outside camps but equally in need of aid. People somehow saw them as less deserving. “It is difficult to raise the funds for them,” he said.

Given the difficulties of integrating refugees into a host country’s population, those in the camps often end up staying there because aid is more readily available. But there, they can become lost in other ways, inhabiting a constant state of uncertainty.

“More and more refugees in the world in camps are in camps that have been there for a really, really long time,” says Fabos, who now teaches in the International Development and Social Change program at Clark University in Massachusetts. “That wasn’t the original model. Our model was that camps were there just to hold people temporarily until one of these ‘durable solutions’: sending them back home, allowing them to settle where they are — with legal rights — or settle them in a third place.” ..But three years ago, the largest refugee camp in the world, Kenya’s Dadaab, turned 20. It was built for 90,000 refugees. It holds more than 420,000.

“Camps are places where it’s quite straightforward to provide services for people,” Fabos says. “The U.N. and humanitarian agencies are so good at providing resources.” Every day, the World Food Programme alone operates an average of 5,000 trucks, 50 aircraft and 30 ships, as well as trains, river barges, mules, yaks, camels and donkeys. “The problem is when people start living in those situations more than the presumable amount of time that people should be living in those situations. To the U.N.H.C.R., if they live in camp for more than five years, they become an acronym: P.R.S.” — protracted refugee situation — “the majority of encamped refugees are in protracted refugee situations. The state system is more and more unable to accommodate what’s happening on the ground.”

perfect. another way. needed.

By global standards, the Syrian refugees, who have been in camps for up to three years, are new arrivals. Even so, they know what it means to put their lives on hold. “Ninety percent of the guys here are delaying marriage,” Muhammad Deeb, 21, told me. He has set up a clothing shop in a small tent, stocked with merchandise his uncle gave him the money to buy. Other refugees in Kilis, who are not allowed to work outside the camp, have also started businesses of some kind. There are canary stores, falafel stands, bicycle-repair shops and tea shops. There is a tent-size department store selling clothes, glasses and rugs; a coat shop; a jeans shop; a general store; a little joint with two slushy machines churning in two colors (red and orange); a tiny gaming cafe with three computers where a 15- and a 16-year-old sell access to playing Counter-Strike. But these typically offer little if any extra income. At one barbershop, I stopped to ask for a price list, and the proprietor said it was free.

In Syria, he says, in a village of 5,000, there would normally be two weddings a month. Here among Kilis’s 14,000, there’s one wedding a month. “We have no respectable jobs, no house, so no girlfriend,” he said. For now, that’s fine with him. He still expects that the revolution will triumph, and he won’t live here long.

Currently, the number of years a refugee lives in a refugee camp is, on average, 12.

“We hoped it was one month or two months,” one family told me, as we sat in their trailer. “We wake up, we sleep, we wake up, we sleep, we eat food, we always watch TV to see what’s going on. We’re all very bored. There’s no purpose in a life like this. One day is like another.”

perfect.

Besides the comforts, and the cleanliness, and the impressive facilities of the Kilis camp, there is one important thing to note: Nobody likes living there.

“It’s hard for us,” said Basheer Alito, the section leader who was so effusive in his praise for the camp and the Turks. “Inside, we’re unhappy. In my heart, it’s temporary, not permanent.”

“What if it was permanent?” I asked him.

Quickly, he answered, “It’s impossible to accept this.”

perfect.

The U.N.H.C.R.’s Batchelor acknowledges that despite the high level of assistance in the camps, “the emotional protection has become quite a challenge.

“In a noncamp setting,” Batchelor went on to say, “if people are able to keep themselves engaged, that provides a healthy outlook, helps establish local integration, keeps alive their skill sets if they repatriate.” The longer a refugee resides in a camp, the harder it can become to sustain psychological well-being. But camps remain the default solution.

the default solution

“Refugee camps have become the mechanism to try to control people,” Fabos says. “They prevent them from interacting with your citizenry. There certainly have been cases where refugee camps are places where exiled political movements will train and collect arms and plan attacks. But it’s also the case that refugee camps don’t provide opportunities for livelihood.

The aid is very small compared to the actual needs.”

reading the god of small things – by Arundhati:

“They provided the care (food, clothes, fees), but withdrew the concern.” amzn.com/k/Jq2JydXVQcyH…

2 needs ness

When it comes to refugees in camps like Kilis, their relatively comfortable existence might make finding meaningful solutions for them less urgent.

Unlike almost all other host countries, Algeria gave its refugees the right to govern themselves. “There, camp is not a place of suffering and hunger,” Herz says. But the flip side is that “there’s very little pressure for Morocco to withdraw because people are not dying anymore.”

why this is a need for global systemic change… they would just be modeling it for the rest of us – with their “time off” ness (rather than waiting for a big enough group of people to take time off to give this a try)

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i added this page after reading/chewing on this challenge from ideo in regard to refugee camps. (and while reading rev of everyday life)

https://openideo.com/challenge/refugee-education/research

here is their (ideo’s) research page on refugee camps:

http://www.openideorefugee-education.com/

Over 50 million people globally have been forced to flee their homes – leaving behind their schools, jobs and communities. Men, women and children must start again, either in new regions of their home countries or in host countries around the world. Amid uncertainty about the future, one thing is for sure: refugees need skills and information to help them adjust to their new circumstances, integrate into communities and thrive.

so yeah. what if this is a perfect opportunity to model the revolution of everyday life, ie: the embracing of uncertainty the entire world needs. the need to be/become antifragile.

perhaps this is the perfect time for global systemic change. and perhaps refugee camps are the perfect place/opportunity to model (for the rest of the world) that a nother way is possible. one that embraces uncertainty  by facilitating innate curiosity – making us all antifragile.

ie: rather than waiting/looking for enough people willing to play this game.. (1 yr to be 5, 1 yr to try commons, et al).. realizing there are already – enough eclectic people in spaces.. who might love that we listen to their innate ability to self-organize… rather than give all that up in order to be further oppressed/controlled/prepped – in the guise of aid.

some comments –

on school and the need to fund books, resources, teachers..

you have to use what is in your heart

education for what?

we need a space where we can gather.

so – maybe we are doing this school thing, this funding books et al thing.. all wrong… no?

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[sent this to ideo challenge]

perhaps this is an ideal time for global systemic change. and perhaps refugee camps are ideal spaces/opportunities to model (for the rest of the world) that another way is possible. a way toward/of antifragility through embracing/facilitating uncertainty/daily-curiosities.

what we all need: revolution in reverse – a revolution of everyday life.

zoom out version (short): addressing a problem deep enough that all of us would resonate with it today, via a mechanism simple enough that it’s accessible/useable by all of us today, in an ecosystem open enough to set/keep all of us free.

detailed version: a people experiment.

simple version: a nother way

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on the need to model another way

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“An absence of refugees means an absence of war.” @melissarfleming @UNRefugeeAgency #visioneering http://t.co/JVHWozL0U1

Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/xprize/status/596358084089384960

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