Communication as a took for advocating the rights of refugees

The violation of the rights of refugees is usually encouraged by the total absence of information that has been well researched and chosen, which is easily assimilated and attractive. According to Hedley Burrel, the most immediate criteria for information are, ‘the deeds and acts of official personalities or celebrities, government activities whatever their nature, new and strange events, exciting or shocking revelations, and news about society happenings.’2

Communication can be seen, therefore, as a useful advocacy tool through its dual function in the defence and promotion of a person’s rights. It is, in fact, by means of mass communication, such as the media and reports by organisations defending human rights, that the cry of alarm can be raised in order to prevent or combat serious violations of refugees’ rights. It is also by means of information in those same media and by means of the educational work of organisations in civil society that refugees can learn about their rights, duties and obligations, so that they can make legitimate claims in conformity with the internal laws and regulations of the countries that give them shelter.

What is a refugee?
With regard to the status of refugees, the Geneva Convention defines a refugee as a person who ‘reasonably fearing persecution on grounds of race, religion, nationality, belonging to a certain social group, or for their political opinions, finds him or herself outside the country where he or she holds nationality and who cannot, or because of that fear does not wish to, claim the protection of the country…’

The High Commissioner for Refugees (HCR) gives humanitarian aid not only to refugees but also, more and more often at the request of the United Nations (UN), to other categories of uprooted people or those in need. Among them are asylum seekers, the repatriated (those refugees sent back to their country who must be helped to rebuild their lives together with those severely affected by the arrival of refugees), internally displaced people who have had to flee their homes but who have not crossed the frontier into a neighbouring country, and stateless people whose nationality no State wants to recognise.3

Legal protection of refugees and displaced people in the Great Lakes Region
Legal protection for refugees can be found in different instruments protecting human rights that can be divided into three categories: specific instruments such as the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (1951) and the Convention on Refugee Problems in Africa (1969); other international and regional instruments protecting the rights of the individual; and the internal legislation of host countries guaranteeing the rights and freedoms of other citizens.

The UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and the Convention Relating to Refugee Problems in Africa. The UN Convention was adopted on 28 July 1951 by a conference of plenipotentiaries on the status or refugees and stateless persons convened by the UN in application of Resolution 429 (V) of the General Assembly of 14 December 1950. It came into force on 22 April 1954.

This legal document limits the application of the term ‘refugee’ and determines the circumstances in which the term ceases to apply. It defines the general obligations on refugees, in particular those of complying with laws and regulations and any measures taken to maintain public order. The Convention also recognises rights based on the principle of treatment that is not less favourable than that accorded to nationals or foreigners according to defined circumstances.

In this way the Convention gives to refugees the right to intellectual property, the right of association, the right to justice, the right to exercise a salaried profession, the right to public education and public care.

It is important to underline that States parties to the Convention do not have the right to expel or turn back refugees. Article 33 stipulates that no refugee can be ‘expelled or turned back from the country’s frontiers when their life or freedom would be threatened by reason of race, religion, nationality, belonging to a social group or political opinions.’4

As for the African Convention on refugee problems, it was signed on 10 September 1969 at Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, seat of the OAU, by the Heads of State and Government representing 41 African countries. It came into force on 20 June 1974. Since then, June 20th has been proclaimed African Refugee Day.

The reasons for adopting this Convention were inspired by the fact that the Heads of State and Government gathered at Addis Ababa 6-9 September 1969 noted with alarm the existence of a growing number of refugees in Africa and undertook ‘to find ways to alleviate their misery and suffering and to assure them a better life and future.’ The Convention is based on fundamental instruments of international law regarding human rights, especially those that relate to the rights of refugees. It invokes the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which affirmed the principle that human beings must enjoy fundamental rights and freedoms without discrimination.5

As for displaced people, they come under the protection of international humanitarian rights that apply in situations of armed conflict, whether international or national. Displaced people are not the object of a specific convention in the manner of refugees, because they are considered civilians and so have the right to the protection accorded to civilians as long as they do not take part in hostilities. Belligerent parties must observe the following rules:

∑ Prohibition on the parties in conflict to attack civilians or belongings that are civilian in nature, or to carry out hostilities indiscriminately.
∑ Prohibition on parties to use famine against civilians and to destroy belongings indispensable to their survival.
∑ Prohibition against collective punishment – which often takes the form of destroying homes.
∑ The parties in conflict are obliged to give free passage to aid destined for civilian populations in need.6

Other international and regional instruments
As well as the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, the refugee, as a human being, is the beneficiary of other international instruments protecting human rights ratified by numerous States. Among the most important documents are:

International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (1965).

International Pact Relating to Civil and Political Rights (1966).

International Pact Relating to Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966).

Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (1979).

African Charter on Human and People’s Rights (1981).

Convention Against Torture and Other Punishments or Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment (1984).

Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989).

Internal instruments of host countries. The constitutions governing countries that welcome refugees were inspired by universal principles in matters of respect for the basic rights and freedoms of individuals. Other documents, such as the penal code, the code for penal proceedings, the civil code, the code for persons and family, etc. protect refugees against any arbitrariness and persecution of which they might be the object in countries of refuge both in civil and penal matters.

Rights of refugees and displaced people: A problem for the Great Lakes
The African continent has been the theatre for many conflicts that have led to a vast movement of refugees in different countries over the last 40 years. At the start, the movement of refugees was generated by wars of independence during the 1960s. But from the 1970s it was politico-ethnic conflicts belonging to the countries themselves that caused more refugees: ‘One had believed in vain, unfortunately, that once independence had been achieved and the country governed by its own people, that would be an end to it. Authoritarian, single-party, civil or military power has produced more refugees than the colonial regime.’7

Michael E. Brown has drawn up a table of the main internal conflicts in the world since 1995 by year, the nature of the conflict, number of people displaced and number of people killed.8 In sub-Saharan Africa, he listed Angola, Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda and Somalia. Rwanda and Burundi have been especially shaken by politico-ethnic conflicts bringing with them internal displacement of the population and a massive exodus of refugees into neighbouring countries in 1959 and 1994 in Rwanda, and 1965, 1972, 1998 and 1993 in Burundi. These conflicts inflamed the neighbouring Democratic Republic of the Congo, provoking deep unrest in the social, economic and political landscape at the end of the 1990s.

Extremely difficult conditions
Following independence, African countries that took in refugees showed enormous generosity towards them, welcoming them with open arms as brothers and sisters in the spirit of the African convention on the rights of refugees. For example, the Tanzanian government offered land to those who preferred to remain and some people even took Tanzanian nationality.

But as and when the rebellions and internal crises of independent States perceptibly increased the flow of refugees,9 xenophobia went up a notch and the refugee became a real threat in terms of jobs, education, security and environment. This change of perception was accompanied by degradation in refugees’ lives and non-respect for their rights guaranteed by the many instruments protecting human rights.

The crises of the 1990s accentuated the plight of refugees who, beyond their worrying humanitarian situation, were manipulated by political forces and dragged into the different rebellions. In Tanzania, for example, refugees are currently the object of different forms of injustice in the camps. Most of the bad treatment is imputable to the ‘Basungusungu’ militia responsible for security, in the form of extortion and expropriation, payment of fines, etc. Rwandan repatriates recently returned home via Kibungo province have described the way they were maltreated by the Tanzanian police, forcing them to leave abruptly, stripped of their goods, without even being accompanied for sure by their families.

The refugees’ case
In 1993, the number of Burundian refugees in Tanzania following the October crisis was estimated at 350,000, while those who left in 1972 numbered 200,000 in addition to the Burundians established in the country for economic reasons who did not have the status of refugees.10 Such a number of people spontaneously fleeing their country is a difficult burden to support for African host countries like Tanzania which lack sufficient means to look after them.

The darkest period for refugees in Africa was that of the genocide in Rwanda, when more than two million Rwandans fled their country to Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of the Congo between April and September 1994. The media called this an exodus and as many returned after November 1996.11 Several hundreds of thousands of babies were born in exile. In August-September 1994, Médecins sans frontières registered 15,000 deaths in one week from a cholera epidemic. Of 80,000 contaminated people, 50 people died afterwards.12

The Canadian Paul Laurin, sent by the NGO CECI to serve in the 1994 emergency, went to the Goma region, Eastern Congo. He expressed his feelings on discovering the misery of Rwandan refugees there:

‘The sight of these people, as much in the towns as on the road or in the Katale and Kibumba camps, struck me forcibly. To see them at the end of their tether and desperate is a very traumatising experience. The thought that some of them will not make it to their final destination, where international aid was getting ready to meet their basic needs, pursues us tirelessly.’13

The voluntary repatriation of Rwandan refugees from camps in the north-west of Tanzania in 2002 totalled 23,474, of which 19,000 went home during November and December, according to UNHCR spokeswoman Ivana Unlova, quoted by IRIN on 3 January 2003.

As for Burundian refugees, voluntary repatriation is under way but it is handicapped by the ongoing war. Refugees helped by UNHCR to return home pass through the north-east of the country, while spontaneous returnees are received at transit sites at Makamba and Rutana, where UNHCR considers that security is not good enough to carry out repatriation and reinstatement operations.

The case of those displaced
Those displaced by war have not always been paid attention by UNHCR, whose mandate is to look after refugees. This differentiation has been at the bottom of a conflict that has flared up several times in Burundi following the 1994 crisis in Rwanda. Indeed, having fled the 1993 massacres,14 these displaced people took up temporary shelter without any assistance at all. Some sources estimated the number of deaths at 50,000, others at between 80,000 and 100,000.

In the northern provinces of Ngozi and Kirundo, Rwandan refugees were placed in relatively well-run sites (well-built shelters, water and food, sanitation, etc.), while displaced people, a few yards away, had to make do with huts covered with eucalyptus leaves without any help from UNHCR. Those in charge tried to explain the UN’s different approach to a refugee and a displaced person, but in vain. Today, UNHCR-Burundi is repatriating and reinstating Burundian refugees coming from Tanzania, but is coming up against the problem of displaced people estimated at 432,809 individuals spread over 212 sites, some 6% of the total population, of which 60% are young people less than 20 years old.15

In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the figures for dead displaced persons after the war are very high. For example, Michel Cariou, Agence France Presse editor wrote in September 2001 that the 1998 war in the Congo led to more than 2,500,000 dead. Another UNDP source, Humanitarian Report 2000, reckoned that the Ituri region, ravaged by ethnic conflicts among Hema and Lendu, looked like a humanitarian disaster within six months. Here they counted some five to seven thousand dead and 180,000 displaced people and access by humanitarian organisations to the victims was restricted because of insecurity.16 The same source states that in 1988, at the time the second Congo war started, the people displaced from Katanga were in Kivu. In mid-May 2000, the number of displaced in the province was estimated at 250,000 on both sides of the front-line.

Manipulation and political activism
With the exception of the bloody events of 1959 in Rwanda, when all the Tutsi refugees who fled the country were not first involved in massacres, the other similar crises that broke out later were characterised by massacres carried out in the country earlier and the flight of their perpetrators followed by thousands of others closely related or of the same ethnicity who feared subsequent blind repression. Thirty years later, the Rwandan diaspora would constitute the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) to reconquer the country in a war that began in 1990. At that time, some Rwandan refugees in Burundi were targeted by the security services because of their activism on behalf of the RPF, to the point of being imprisoned. This was despite the fact that then regime in Kigali pressuring Bujumbura had marked a certain complacency by Burundi with regard to the RPF.

In Burundi, Hutu rebels attacked the south of Burundi and the capital in April 1972, systematically massacring Tutsis. The rebellion was suppressed by the regime of that time, but other Hutus who had not taken part in the massacres were made to pay the price, provoking a significant flight of the Hutu population into Tanzania. Some of these refugees would later create the Palipehutu, one of the rebel movements currently very active in Burundi.

In August 1988, Hutu rebels massacred Tutsis at Ntega and Marangara respectively in the provinces of Kurundo and Ngozi and, following military repression, fled to Rwanda, then under Juvénal Habyarimana where they profited from the regime’s complacency. They would benefit from the amnesty as part of the policy of national unity under Buyoya I, but they would not delay going back after the crisis of October 1993 which also provoked a significant flight of Hutus into Tanzania.

Among those who fled were the instigators of the massacres that had swept away ten of thousands of Tutsis and opposition Hutus. The authors of these massacres would later belong to the National Council for the Defence of Democracy, of which a faction is still active in the country. At the moment its base is in Tanzania where it recruits combatants in the refugee camps set up there, often by force and at the risk of losing their lives in case of refusal. Thus it was that 24 Burundian refugees were burned alive on 19 and 24 January 2002 near Kigoma while trying to return to Burundi. Seventeen people were burned on 24 in Gakongo and Kaziramunda, two villages near the frontier between Burundi and Tanzania. The RPF attributed the massacre to a group of Burundians opposed to the return of refugees, while the Burundian Press Agency attributed it to Tanzania.17

During the Rwandan genocide, which carried off 1,074,000 victims (951,100 names have been published), the Belgian journalist Colette Breackman thinks that from 200,000 to 250,000 men, women and children killed Tutsis and opposition Hutus with their own hands.18 Among the killers were ex-members of the Forces Armées Rwandaises (FAR) and the Interahamwe militia. These groups, together with Burundian rebels, have continued their political activism and military training. This situation lay behind the two Congo wars in which Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi played a key part in the east of the country in 1996 and 1998. During these operations, certain sources indicate that thousands of refugees were killed by the armies of these countries. According to the Peace Link for Africa Campaign: ‘Numerous mass graves witness to the attempt to do away with the refugees and to the military objective these refugees represented. The mass graves are everywhere but always hidden and very difficult to get to.’19

These few examples show to what extent refugees have paid a heavy price for the activism of certain among them who, from exile, continue to carry out political activities, including military reconquest, at the cost of enormous sacrifices.

Advocating the rights of refugees and displaced people in the media
Taking account of the context of crisis described above, characterised by many different kinds of violations of refugees’ rights, it can be seen that information plays a key role in the defence and promotion of the rights of refugees and displaced persons. Information about a humanitarian catastrophe provoked by wars, climate hazards and other natural phenomena such as volcanic eruptions, alert humanitarian organisations to mobilise to save human lives in danger of death.

It is also by means of communication and news that pressure is exerted on those responsible for violating the rights of refugees who would prefer to remain anonymous and away from the press, human rights organisations and religious groups that might otherwise draw attention to them. States that welcome refugees are the first to be concerned about flagrant violations of human rights, but other forces present, such as rebels, can equally be called I to play.

The media also allow refugees and those displaced by war to stay informed about current events in their immediate or distant environments, particularly on how the human rights situation in their country is changing so that they can at last decide to return home. It is also through being informed that refugees come to learn the rights enshrined in the Refugee Convention (1951) and other national and international agreements protecting human rights.

The forced displacement of people to sites inside and outside their countries is a consequence of situations of conflict and the mass violation of human rights. Communication and media being other ways of fighting open to war leaders, it becomes necessary for organisations that defend refugee rights and for independent media to take precautions against spreading partisan information. False news and information affects the judgements and attitudes of decision-makers, aid workers and the international community. This is why all news editors - newspaper, radio or television - of all organisations must question what urges them to inform, as well as the news they must discover, and treat it with the maximum objectivity possible.

Facts being the first thing an editor seeks, working ‘in the field’ is an excellent way of making contacts and collecting raw information. The grassroots is the best place for interviews, reporting, photography and video.

Media and Internet
Information discovered, whatever its revelatory content or professional treatment, has no value if it is not widely spread through the media, web and electronic networking. Local media (newspapers, radios, television) and international press agencies such as Reuters, Agence France Presse, New China send international despatches. They act as multipliers for outlets that adapt news for their publics. A study report by an organisation involved in the defence of the rights of refugees or displaced people should be channelled as broadly as possible.

However, such broadcasting is limited by the priorities and editorial policies of press agencies and other media. That’s why organisations that defend refugees’ rights should set up their own bulletins, web sites linked to powerful research engines and electronic listserves containing the main addresses of decision-makers on the national and international scene to increase their capacity or outreach. Three examples come to mind.

Studio Tubane in Burundi. This not-for-profit studio was established in Burundi in 2000. It has a radio production unit that specialises in broadcasts aimed at linking Burundians both inside and outside the country. It broadcasts programmes on national reconciliation and human rights. Its programmes are broadcast on RTNB, Radio Culture and Radio Publique Africaine. The programmes are made by Burundians working in different socio-economic sectors, disaster victims, refugees in bordering countries as well as others in the Burundian diaspora that left the country for various reasons. Studio Tubane has also experimented with a web site on which its radio programmes are also located.

Radio Ngara. This station in Tanzania is situated near the refugee camps. It focuses on refugee questions, both informing them and conscientising them about various matters.

The BBC. BBC radio broadcasts programmes in Kirundi and Kinyarwanda to refugees, who can communicate with others from their country of origin or who are in another Great Lakes country by means of these programmes.

Conclusion
The Great Lakes Region of Africa has been the scene of the most serious violations of human rights in the second half of the 20th century. Every form of violence has been seen, such as massacres on a huge scale, war crimes and genocide. It is obvious that this context of the denial of justice and the right to life only contributed to and multiplied the forced movement of people towards haphazard refuge inside and outside their countries.

Of course, States, the UNHCR and humanitarian aid agencies are doing their best to compensate for the sufferings of those affected, but they often face a situation in which their rights are violated with the silent complicity of the media and the absence of pressure groups.

Consequently, the media and other means of mass communication can become tools for advocating the rights of refugees and other victims by calling attention to flagrant violations of those rights. It is also by means of communication that those same rights, many covered by national and international treaties promoting human rights, can be popularised so that people take it upon themselves to defend them.

Communication also meets the needs of refugees who have a right to information both about their immediate environment as well as further a field. Such access keeps them in contact with their home country and puts them a favourable position with regard to objective sifting of facts and helps prevent manipulation.

Finally, organisations involved in the defence and promotion of the rights of refugees are called upon to take advantage of media diversity and of progress in information and communication technologies to do research and studies on the situation facing refugees, draw conclusions and communicate them widely to national and international decision-makers.

Paper presented at the WACC-sponsored seminar on ‘The right to communicate, refugees and displaced persons in the Great Lakes Region’, Kigali, Rwanda, 24-26 March 2003.

Notes
1. Le Dictionnaire de Notre temps. Paris: Hachette, 1991.

2. Hedley Burrel, in ‘A Free Press’. USA Information Agency, 1992, p. 8.

3. See ‘Emergency in Afghanistan”. HCR web site.

4. Convention on the status of refugees.

5. André M. Mangu, ‘The African Convention of refugee problems and thirty years afterwards: What to do and how to check the flow?’. Presentation at the third Pan-African workshop on procedures of the African regional system for human rights, organised by the Institute for Human Rights and Development in Africa, 25-27 September 2001, p. 8.

6. See the CICR web site. www.icrc.org/fre/réfugiés_personnes_déplacées

7. André M. Mangu, ibid. p. 83.

8. Michael E. Brown. International Dimensions of Internal Conflicts.

9. Africa had some 7.2 million refugees in 1999. See André M. Mangu ibid.

10. Interview with an HCR-Burundi worker.

11. www.perso.wanadoo.fr/rwanda94/sitepers/dosrwand/aujou.html

12. The daily Libération, quoted at www.perso.wanadoo.fr/rwanda94/sitepers/dosrwand/aujou.html

13. See the CECI web site: www.ca/ceci/info/fra/article/reinser/laurin.htm

14. Called acts of genocide in UN report of 1996.

15. See the annual report of LBDH ITEKA, 2001.

16. www.cd.undp.org/ocha/chronic2001.htm

17. See APF 30 January 2002.

18. Colette Breackman, Terreur Africaine, 1996. See www.perso.wanadoo.fr/rwanda94/sitepers/dosrwanda/aujou.html

19. www.peacelink.it/Africa/za_297f.html