Dividing Divided States. Gregory F. Treverton

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СКАЧАТЬ citizenship is the enduring people issue, refugees and their security will be an acute one in secessions. Even with goodwill on both sides, it will be hard to avoid the perception of drop-dead dates, touching of mass movements of people. Almost any secession will leave some people in limbo. A critical part of that limbo can be citizenship, the issue discussed in the previous chapter.

      More immediately, though, secessions are likely to produce refugees, for those who identify with the original state and those who back the breakaway region will not be neatly separated. Indeed, in the 1990s, the world learned anew the horror of “ethnic cleansing” as the former Yugoslavia split apart. Even in less bloody cases, people will often have moved for military service or government employment, or they may have fled from fighting. If the last, they would become internally displaced persons (IDPs) if they remained in the original state. When secession occurs, however, they become refugees if they are not located in the state with which they identify.

      After secession, the two states can negotiate separately with third countries into which their citizens may have fled. But Sudan, for instance, had to deal with perhaps two million southerners who lived in the North at the time of secession. Those who seek to move to their country of identity will face security risks, and while they may be welcome in principle in the state with which they identify, that state may be ill prepared to integrate them.

      This chapter outlines the major issues related to refugees and secession and makes suggestions based, in particular, on four cases involving breakaway states—India and Pakistan after the partition of British India; Russia and the breakup of the Soviet Union; Bosnia-Herzegovina after the disintegration of Yugoslavia; and Georgia and Abkhazia after Georgia’s independence from the Soviet Union.

       Policy Suggestions

      Start Early in Improving Public Understanding

      It is important to educate the most affected local communities about the implications of a secession well before it happens, and also to give them ample time to digest the new borders. In the India-Pakistan case, in the haste to achieve independence, none of this occurred. In fact, the Radcliffe Line was announced only two days after the two countries declared their independence. This may have added to the uncertainty, fear, and panic in local communities, particularly among religious minorities. In contrast, Sudan had the advantage that division long had been on the agenda, and had occurred de facto to a considerable extent even before the formal secession of South Sudan.

      Assess Refugees’ Intentions

      An assessment of the refugees’ intentions can help countries forge more coherent and long-term strategies to quickly integrate them if they so wish. Both Indian and Pakistani leaders simply assumed initially that most of the refugees were there only temporarily. Thus, these governments did not start thinking about integrating refugees until the overcrowding of refugee camps was becoming a problem.

      The lessons of Bosnia may be less immediately relevant to a country like Sudan; after all, the returnees to South Sudan were not, in general, returning to places where they were not wanted. In Bosnia, where ethnic conflict was the direct cause of displacement, it was naïve to view returning displaced persons to their homes as undoing the ethnic divides created by war. While multiethnic communities may be desired in principle by national (and international) entities, the rights of displaced persons, including the right not to return to their place of origin, should be paramount.

      Make Sure Formal Agreements Are Rooted in Real Agreement

      While formal agreements can be valuable for outlining the principles of returning IDPs to their homes, they will prove woefully inadequate if both parties are not committed to the process. The language of such agreements is typically broad enough that either party can stall the process without violating the letter of law. Such was the case between Georgia and Abkhazia; the latter, having achieved an Abhaz ethnic majority in Abkhazia, had little interest in seeing displaced Georgians return.

      Prepare for the Returnees

      When a nation breaks up, mass population movements of ethnic minorities toward their ethnic home can ensue even in the absence of ethnic persecution and violence. The migrant-receiving country must therefore have adequate institutions and support for potential returnees from the onset. Russia was not well prepared for the migrants when the Soviet Union came apart, and thus many of them wound up feeling disillusioned at best.

      Transparency in resettlement benefits is also key, as the Pakistani case showed. Indeed, by favoring Punjabi refugees over Bengali ones, the Pakistani government fueled the tensions between these two groups. In particular, if tensions between different factions are high before partition, it is important to have key institutions like law enforcement functioning well, so as to be able to maintain order if tensions escalate. In India and Pakistan, these institutions were barely functional at partition. If they had been better, many deaths and displacements could have been avoided.

      Protect the Returnees

      In the event of a partition or secession, even when relations between the two states are acrimonious, it still may be possible to come up with joint solutions to facilitate the evacuation of refugee populations. The establishment of the Military Evacuation Organization by India and Pakistan is a good example. IDPs have frequently been used as political capital to establish or maintain a majority population in an area where political clout falls along ethnic lines—as they were in Bosnia. To combat this, durable solutions for the displaced should be viewed first in humanitarian terms.

      Benefit from Third Parties

      Third parties, especially UN organizations, can be very helpful both as providers of assistance and as guarantors of agreements. Especially in secessions like Sudan’s, where the countries are both poor and inexperienced in dealing with large population inflows, the international community can help the migration and settlement process. It can therefore be helpful for states to work with UN organizations, especially the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) both to establish needed institutions and to provide direct assistance to the returnees. That lesson emerges strongly in all the cases. In Russia, for instance, the UNHCR and the IOM, along with several NGOs, not only helped the Russian government set up the institutional and legislative framework for dealing with migration, but also provided direct assistance to the migrants themselves, in the forms of both financial support and capacity building, in order to facilitate their integration within Russia.

      Those third parties must, however, be truly neutral. The UN Observer Mission in Georgia (UNOMIG), for instance, was composed entirely of Russian troops, and Russia had provided both arms and assistance to Abkhazia. In any case, given the lack of real agreement between Georgia and Abkhazia, UNOMIG has been able to sustain a ceasefire but hardly can guarantee the return of Georgian IDPs or refugees.

      Avoid Letting Those Who Do Not Wish to Return Become Bargaining Chips

      Georgia-Abkhazia in the mid-1990s was in some respects the mirror image of Sudan in 2010, for ethnic Georgians wished to return to their homes in Abkhazia but could not feel secure enough to do so. In the case of southern Sudanese in the North, that was not the case. The Georgian government was so focused on repatriating the IDPs that it took years to even begin to seriously try to integrate them in Georgia; they became a bargaining chip. Negotiations should aim to make sure that southern Sudanese or other IDPs who wish to return to the state they identify with do not become a bargaining chip.

      Protect Those Who Do Not Wish to Return

      A key strategy for migrant-receiving countries in avoiding a sudden flood of migrants is negotiating and advocating for the protection of ethnic minorities in the states where they reside, as Russia did with many of the other newly independent states (NIS). In general, СКАЧАТЬ