IDPs in Africa: a case for concerted action

“We’re proud of what we do…But people’s villages have been burned, their crops have been destroyed, their wells spiked, their family members raped, tortured and killed – and they come to us, and we give them 2,000 kilocalories a day” [Kenny Gluck, Head of Operations of the Dutch branch of Médecins sans Frontières quoted in Protecting Two Million Internally Displaced: The Successes and Shortcomings of the African Union in Darfur, William O'Neill and Violette Cassis for the Brookings-Bern Project on Internal Displacement, November 2005]

IDPs in Africa
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 24.5 million (as of end 20006 - figures from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, www.internal-displacement.org). Many IDPs face imminent threats to life; others in situations of long-term displacement suffer a systematic denial of rights - civil and political, economic and social. In a continent wracked by conflict and where little progress has been made in tackling poverty, IDPs are at the extreme of vulnerability. The response of host countries and of the wider international community is inadequate in policy and in practice and belies publicly stated commitments to Africa.

Most IDPs in Africa are forced to flee because of armed conflict. Three countries – Sudan, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) – account for approximately 8 million of the global total of IDPs.

Attention on Africa, but not on African IDPs
In recent years, Africa has moved up the world's political agenda: the Millennium Declaration included an intent to “meet the special needs of Africa”, with particular reference to poverty reduction, institutional development, conflict prevention and resolution.  These sentiments were repeated in the 2005 UN World Summit Outcome. African governments themselves established a New Economic Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD), a plan for economic and social development which recognized “that peace, security, democracy, good governance, human rights and sound economic management are conditions for sustainable development. [African leaders] are making a pledge to work, both individually and collectively, to promote these principles in their countries, sub-regions and the continent [NEPAD Political Governance Policy, http://www.nepad.org.ng/political_governance.htm].

Most of these initiatives, though undoubtedly positive, are about proposing big solutions to big and interconnected problems of poverty, conflict and governance. IDPs appear, if they appear at all, as the product of armed conflict. There is little identification of the particular and ongoing vulnerabilities of IDPs, particularly the long-term displaced. What is needed alongside these macro-level strategies are concrete legal and policy solutions to the specific vulnerabilities of IDPs.

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.

A weak legal framework converts into weak policy responses, costing lives
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 muddled and inadequate organizational response 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].

Several organs of the AU have a role in policy development and intervention on behalf of IDPs. Coordinating functions rest with the Division of Humanitarian Affairs within the AU Commission while political leadership in response to humanitarian emergencies and raising the profile of the plight of displaced persons in Africa rests with the Sub-Committee on Refugees of the Permanent Representatives' Committee. A further Coordinating Committee on Assistance to Refugees, Returnees and the Displaced provides advice to the Permanent Representatives Committee and acts as an interface between humanitarian field staff and policy- and decision-making organs. But the African Union itself acknowledges that its efforts to support IDPs are “nascent, albeit progressive” and that it possesses limited resources to meet the protection and assistance needs of the displaced [The African Union's Institutional Framework for responding to Forced Displacement in Africa, Patrick Tigere and Rita Amikhobu, Conflict Trends 2005].

Towards solutions
Some African countries have adopted policies or laws based on the UN Guiding Principles. The AU is said to be exploring the possibility of a new regional legal framework focused solely on the needs and rights of IDPs. If this comes to fruition, it will send an importsant signal that IDPs should receive greater attention. The real test, though, comes in how policies that are sound on paper are applied in practice and how far governments succeed in protecting the rights of IDPs. IDP Action believes that there are two main paths to the better protection of IDPs in Africa:

1, states should adopt policies or laws specifically designed to address the protection and asssistance needs of IDPs and concentrate resources on the full and efficient application of such policies or laws. The expertise and experience of local civil society organizations dealing directly with, or acting on behalf of, IDPs should be taken into account. The international community should provide technical and financial assistance for such efforts. The African Commission on Human and People's Rights should play the role of researching and promoting good practice among African states.

2, states unwilling to protect and assist their IDP populations and / or which are the cause of people having to flee should be pressed by their peers in Africa and the wider international community to desist from actions which force people to become displaced. The AU and the UN should uphold their responsibility to protect by providing assistance and protection to populations at risk in cases where states are unwilling to do so themselves. UN agencies and international NGOs should redouble their efforts to ensure a coordinated humanitarian response.

About IDP Action
IDP Action is a UK-registered charitable association which promotes the rights of IDPs across the world, but gives particular priority to IDPs in Africa. This is because there are more IDPs in Africa than in the rest of the world put together. It also reflects the need for regional as well as national responses and that IDP Action can achieve more by focusing on particular governments and regional institutions.

IDP Action works to promote the rights of IDPs by:

• Conducting research that highlights the specific needs of IDP populations in Africa;
• Building the capacity of African CSOs to hold their governments to their responsibilities towards IDPs;
• Catalyzing national and international NGOs to act in cases of displacement emergencies;
• Advocating for donor governments, regional and international institutions to place the needs of IDPs at the centre of their policy decisions.