In this season celebrating a bright light in the east and the miracle of an incandescant menorah, there is nothing but relentless darkness for the globe’s untold millions of refugees and internally displaced persons. Not only are nearly 2 million Gazans displaced, as well as millions of Ukrainians, but the incessant wars of Africa have forced millions of the world’s poor to flee violence between armies and the depredations of warlords and irregular fighters. In Asia, one of the largest refugee camps in the world daily sheds people fleeing in flimsy boats to possible succour elsewhere. There are migrants from Haiti, Venezuela, and even China who cross Central America and Mexico to find work in the United States. Iraqis, Afghans, Eritreans, and many more risk dangerous passages across the Mediterranean Sea to Europe. All of these peoples seek a providential landing that, for far too many, remains perpetually beyond reach.
For both refugees and displaced persons, now there are massive shortages of services customarily provided by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF), the World Food Program, the International Organization for Migration, international charities such as Mercy Corps and Save the Children, and regional relief agencies. UN operations depend upon donor support from the world’s richest countries; their appropriations are not rising to meet the compelling contemporary needs because of the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, climatic disasters in places like Bangladesh, the escalating costs of staple grains and vegetable oils (again because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine), and because of the sheer number and variety of compelling cases. The overall result of these many unforeseen contingencies is immense suffering for those already badly harmed by enforced flight from customary surroundings and family settings.
In Africa alone, refugees have experienced the slashing of their food rations and living stipends, making mere existence that much more precarious. Having fled violence, famine, and insecurity in search of survival, many African refugees now find themselves faced with similar circumstances in the very spaces designed to protect them. In Uganda, Africa’s largest refugee-hosting country, the UNHCR is only managing to fund 39 percent of urgent local food and shelter requirements. Burundi is experiencing a 12 percent decline in its available funds despite very large increases in the number of displaced persons and returning Burundian refugees that it attempts to feed and shelter.
Food rations are dwindling everywhere. Maize supplies, customarily used in East and Central Africa to make a starchy staple porridge known variously as posho, nshima, bukari, ugali, igikoma, pap, and mealymeal have been cut drastically because the UNHCR and other units responsible for large refugee encampments are running out of cash. According to one refugee experience, as reported in The Conversation, “There is no food. There is no health care,” she said. “We are being trampled. You reach a point where you have nothing. You will just die.”
Food shortages lead almost directly to insecurity in the increasingly huge camps that house displaced persons and refugees everywhere. On its border with Somalia, Kenya’s Dadaab complex nominally houses 200,000 persons, mostly refugees from the insurgency that has engulfed Somalia since 2006; it is now being expanded to house a new inflow. The al-Qaeda linked al-Shabaab Islamist movement has been attacking the government of Somalia ever since, recently with U.S., Turkish, and African Union backing for Somalia's weak Federal Government army.
A further 200,000 refugees from the conflicts in Sudan and Ethiopia are housed at Camp Kukuma in the sparsely settled desert area of the Turkana District of northwestern Kenya. Some residents have sheltered there for two decades or more.
Another 80,000 refugees are housed in Jordan, at the Za'atari Refugee Camp.
The brutal battles now in Sudan between the irregular Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and the regular Sudanese army (SAF) have displaced about 5 million persons from the country’s central cities, from southern provinces such as Blue Nile, and from the Abyei Administrative Area adjoining South Sudan. Even more have fled Darfur, in the west, where ethnic cleansing is being supervised by the RSF (as in 2003-2006). At least 200,000 Africans from Darfur have fled across the border into Chad; there they are gathered as refugees in makeshift camps that – like those in Bangladesh, Kenya, and Tanzania – tend to become overcrowded permanent centers of misery and acute suffering.
Another 7 million frightened villagers have fled their homes in the North and South Kivu provinces of the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo to escape marauding insurgent groups, particularly the Islamist Allied Democratic Forces (now also called the Islamic State in Eastern Africa) and the Rwandan-backed Tutsi-officered M23 movement.
About 100,000 Africans have also been compelled to seek safety away from their home villages in northern Mozambique. There a crypto-Islamist collection of youths has harassed the towns and villages near Mocimboa da Praia, offshore of which Western exploitation of offshore petroleum finds has begun.
Hunger in so many of these camps, and even on Greek Aegean islands near Turkey, also leads to thieving of food supplies and to the offering of bodies in exchange for rations. Again from The Conversation: “Famine in the camp is torturing us,” said Amani, a father of seven. “Lack of food is causing our children to become thieves. The moment it is dusk, they break into homes seeking the food they saw you bringing into the house. They don’t look for anything else – just food.” Young girls, even boys, are trafficked. Anything goes in these increasingly desperate camps for food.
As immense as Kenya's camps are, the Kutupolong camp near Cox’s Bazaar in southeastern Bangladesh houses nearly 900,000 Rohingya refugees from western Myanmar. They fled and were forcibly pushed out of the Buddhist-controlled Rakhine State (in what was once Burma) essentially because they were Muslims, and different from most Burmese. Yet, the Rohingya had resided in Rakhine State for upwards of a century, could not legitimately be considered or called Bangladeshis, and had long been marginalized in what was their own country.
Bangladesh gave the expelled minority shelter in hastily erected Kutupolong. But Bangladesh, with its own immense poverty and job shortages, has refused to permit the refugees from Burma to work outside the camp itself, and has even resettled some smatterings of these former rice farmers on desolate islands in the Andaman Sea.
Thousands of determined Rohingya have fled their hastily erected flimsy dwellings in the crowded camp for Aceh, 1,100 miles away by sea on the northwestern tip of Indonesian Sumatra. Or they have attempted to sail to Malaysia. Few voyages have been successful, with many shiploads of refugees adrift last week and earlier in the Andaman Sea or the Indian Ocean, and with little likelihood of a favorable reception in semi-autonomous Aceh or the coastal states of Malaysia. Local residents have been pushing boats back out to sea even as their Rohingya occupants have been dying from thirst, acute hunger, or disease.
Migrants are turned away from Europe, or from the U.S., just as they are rounded up if they approach Finland overland from Russia or Hungary from North Macedonia and Greece. No nation, bar Canada, is prepared to welcome immigrants with open arms. The residents of sprawling, cluttered, malaria and diarrheal festering refugee camps the world over only with difficulty can extricate themselves and their children from such domains of hopelessness. Schools in the camps function only partly; health services are mostly lacking, and the futures of so many of inhabitants of refugee camps remains heavily, even disastrously, compromised.
These refugee and internal displacement flows are driven by wasteful wars, just as they are today in Gaza. They constitute the detritus dispersed by narcissistic contenders everywhere (as in Myanmar, Sudan, and Ukraine). Theirs is the sad return on greed and kleptocratic corruption, as in Uganda. Likewise, terror, as in Gaza, contributes to the dispersion of citizens caught in crossfires.
Ending conflicts and calming insurgencies could lead refugees to return to their homes. In the absence of that unlikely result, how to better the lives of those forced to flee homes and countries is a responsibility of wealthier and more secure populations and countries the world over. Contributions to UN and private relief agencies will help. So will the dampening of war, intrastate and interstate. Meanwhile, major financial flows must go urgently from wealthy countries to ameliorate the plight of the globe’s millions of displaced persons. They are a charge on us that must not be ignored.