Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
thousands. After the civil war in Rwanda calmed down in
1996, the UNHCR and the World Health Organization
watched and aided as 500,000 Rwandans returned from
across the border in the Democratic Republic of Congo
(Fig. 3.17).
wait in refugee camps for resettlement and still qualify as
temporary refugees.
The United Nations helps ensure that refugees and
internally displaced persons are not forcibly returned to a
homeland where persecution is still continuing. Once the
violence subsides in a place and the conditions improve,
the UNHCR helps return refugees to their homelands, a
process called
repatriation
.
In the 1990s, hostilities broke out between the Hutu
and Tutsi ethnic groups in Rwanda that led to a genocide
killing hundreds of thousands and a disastrous exodus of
more than one million refugees who fl ed to neighboring
Democratic Republic of the Congo (then called Zaire),
Tanzania, and Uganda. The Tutsi-Hutu strife in Rwanda
spread to neighboring Burundi and dislocated tens of
Regions of Dislocation
The refugee situation changes frequently as some refu-
gees return home, conditions permitting, and as other new
streams suddenly form. Yet we can make certain general-
izations about the overall geography of refugees. Today,
the region of North Africa and Southwest Asia, including
Iraq and Afghanistan, generates more than half of the refu-
gees worldwide. Subsaharan Africa comes in second with
about 20 percent of the world's refugees (Fig. 3.18).
Figure 3.17
Zaire-Rwanda border region
. Hundreds of thousands of mainly Hutu refugees stream out
of a refugee camp in eastern Zaire, heading home to Rwanda in November 1996.
© AP/Wide
World Photos.
