The now-infamous genocidal violence plaguing the Darfur regions of western Sudan has finally breached borders. According to reports released last week, the relocation of Sudanese refugees into impoverished camps in neighboring Chad has manifested into an extension of one of the world's worst displacement catastrophes.
Arab militias, unleashed upon Sudanese citizens by the government in the regeneration of civil war in 2003, have pushed through the desert and pillaged Chadian villages. While stealing their cattle, burning their crops, looting their homes and slaughtering their families, the Janjaweed rebels have forced more than 20,000 civilians to flee their homes — injecting widespread instability into regions that currently serve as vital U.S. oil interests.
While current trends in political violence reveal that the majority of today's conflicts are internal, the export of Darfur's war reveals how easily bloodshed in one nation can spawn large-scale transnational strife, sucking entire regions into destructive chasms. In the case of the Sudanese genocide, it reflects the failures of the international community to effectively protect and aid war-effected populations — an endeavor vital to minimizing the consequences of conflict.
Meanwhile, last week's development in east Africa was of direct relevance to corresponding political happenings in Washington, where the U.S. Senate voted to renew the controversial Patriot Act. Along with the Real ID Act of 2005, the Patriot Act severely expands the definition of terrorist activity to include any individual providing "material support" to an armed group.
Yet it implicates imperiled civilians who are forced to bribe rebels to save their lives. In failing to separate deliberate from coerced support, victims of terrorism are too easily designated as terrorist supporters. Because countries that host refugees depend on the financial support and resettlement efforts of industrialized countries, these porous Patriot Act provisions serve to deprive innocent exiles of much-needed sanctuary, prompting nations to diminish support for their refugees.
With more than 25 million individuals exiled within their own borders and around 12 million exiled out of them, displacement crises have become focal points for the international legal community, which has recognized the lack of concrete protections and effective response paradigms for the victims of natural and man-made disasters. While noting the threats that refugee flows pose to regions — particularly when they receive inadequate support — it remains that citizens exiled within their own borders are left in legal limbo and sealed off from outside responsibility.
While external migrants enjoy specific legal protections under the 1951 Convention on Refugees and fall under the care of an entire agency, the UN High Commission on Refugees, internally displaced citizens — consequently, left exiled within dangerous range of the violence which forced them to flee in the first place — retain no international protections. Though indigenous migrants' claims to international assistance are entrenched in human rights and humanitarian laws, "sovereignty as responsibility" preaches that the internally displaced are protected solely by domestic governments — oftentimes, the very regimes that promote their persecution and prove fundamentally incapable of defending citizens.
In exposing the repercussions of forced migration — and how it threatens the stability of regions, not just individual countries — the changing face of the Darfur conflict instills a heightened sense of urgency in those attempting to devise mechanisms protecting all war-affected populations. The establishment of the non-binding Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement in 1998 by the UN Human Rights Commission recognized the need for a legal mandate protecting internal exiles designated to particular international or regional bodies. As displacement becomes a destabilization tactic by both rebel groups and governments — and threatens to bridge states' violence — the need for international action on the part of both internal and external migrants is evident. For they are not just the problems of impoverished and seemingly "insignificant" nations.
Massive civilian displacement in war-torn Iraq has led many Arab states to fear a spillover of sectarian violence into their countries. Meanwhile, the U.S. is still recovering from the overflow of displaced citizens left temporarily homeless in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina — which itself reveals the drastic repercussions internal exoduses can have, even in the world's most powerful and prosperous nation.
Though some migrants may never cross borders, the manifestations of their plight — health epidemics, famine, environmental degradation, social hostility and economic instability — inevitably do. To minimize the consequences of wars and natural disasters — and prevent the spread of perpetual violence, such as Darfur — legitimate laws protecting all disaster-affected populations must be bound to bodies that can develop effective and prompt relief responses.
Adam Lichtenheld ([email protected]) is a junior majoring in political science and African studies.
