Contenu du sommaire : Réfugiés, exodes et politique

Refugees in Pre-Colonial Afrika ?
The notion of refugee is relatively recent, in particular in the sphere of law. However, even before the arrival of the colonisers, Africa had experienced numerous mass migrations which had marked its sociodemographic environment. An historical view enables us to better appreciate the importance of these phenomena. During the nineteenth century in the north of present-day Central African Republic, raids by Muslim slavers provoked the displacement of populations, causing significant changes in their habitat as well as alimentary and agrarian practices. To escape from the slavers, the refugees of the period migrated to the east and south, occasionally even reaching the Sudan, where collective memory has kept the story of their adventure alive.

In the Eye of the Storm
This article argues that the elaboration of citizenship in the camps transcends the nation-state by referring to the international community. The management of the forced displacement of the population in fact « fabricates » refugees in order to maintain the « national order of things ». In the camps, the refugees are excluded from the nation-state and have only a limited control over their own lives, yet they see that their situation is recognised by the « great nations ». As the international community is perceived as being superior to the nation-state, the status of refugee has paradoxically come to be more attractive than citizenship in the host country.

Order in Exile : « Traditional » culture and human rights protection in Kenya's refugees camps
Refugee influx in Kenya in the 1990s overwhelmed the state, thus attracting international relief agencies. This article examines how relief organizations employed cultural perspectives and grouped refugees according to their ethnic, clan and gender identities in settling and governing refugees in camps in Northern Kenya and resettling them to third countries. Refugees responded by reconstructing their pre-exile cultural identities and institutions, constructing new social categories of ethnicity, clan, and « vulnerable groups » and modifying gender relations and attitudes to overcome the vagaries of hostile camp environment and to satisfy a selective criteria of accessing resources and opportunities, especially resettlement in the West. This article argues that relief agencies used « traditional » culture to assert their authority and maintain law and order in camps, but failed to promote the protection of human rights.

Citizens, Refugees, and Relief Along the Sierra Leone-Guinea Border
This article discusses some of the interactions of donors and recipients of relief aid from the Sierra Leonean conflict. Relief services for refugees are often guided by « emergency » paradigms dictating centralized solutions, which may be at odds with local understandings and ways of behaving. In the marginal border areas of Guinea, local conceptions of national identity have been constructed and contested in part due to relief actions. Whereas relief agents actively divided people into categories of « refugees » and « citizens », local people from both sides of the border found advantage in more subtle, ambiguous self-representation. Thus a « frontier citizenship » was reinvented, which due to its fluidity and ambiguity was able to transcend and manipulate the definition and national categories of the relief system.

A Diaspora divided ?
This article shows that refugees can provide assistance as well as receiving it, and discusses how this process can engender social and political transformations. Through an analysis of the contributions made by refugees in the Eritrean diaspora over the last forty years, first to the struggle for Independence, then to the new state and most recently in response to conflict with Ethiopia, the article show how during the recent conflict divisions have been exacerbated both between the diaspora and the State, and within the diaspora.

From Voluntary Repatriation to Disguised Expulsion
From 1994 to 1996 the HCR and the South African government organised the voluntary repatriation of 31,589 Mozambicans. During the same period, hundreds of thousands of individuals were expulsed from South Africa to Mozambique as clandestine immigrants. The example of Mozambican refugees in South African demonstrates the limits of the international system for the protection of refugees, powerless in the face of immigration policies which constitute, in this case at least, a new form of forced migration « in reverse ».

Perspectives for peace in Sudan in 2002 ?
Can the new international situation following the 11th of September create the basis for a new attempt to end the 19 year-long war in Somalia ? The American initiative analysed in this article appears to offer this hope. Yet it is handicapped by certain weaknesses : the internal divisions in the American political class, the weak determination of actors in the region to engage in a real mediation, the uncertainty about whether the warring parties will opt for a political solution. For a lasting resolution to be achieved, the entire Sudanese political field and the demands of all the actors will need to be taken into account, and the fragile but real progress of past peace processes will need to be integrated into the present attempt.