In early April 2020, 3.9 billion people, more than half of Earth’s population, were subject to some form of lockdown related to the Covid19 coronavirus pandemic. The public health crisis surrounding the virus reveals more about the consequences of the underfunding of public health services worldwide than the virus itself. Nonetheless, defying the closure of national borders and entire regions, the pandemic of war and conflict, leeching public health funding in many states, has continued to claim a greater number of lives and force people to flee within and across state borders.
United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) figures show that around 80 million people were displaced worldwide in 2019, almost 11 million more than in the previous year. More than half are people displaced within their own countries and 29.6 million are “refugees and others forcibly displaced outside their country”. Five countries – Syria, Myanmar, South Sudan and Afghanistan, along with Venezuelans displaced abroad – make up almost 70% of refugees, with neighbouring states – Uganda, Pakistan, Colombia and Turkey – accommodating the largest numbers. Indeed, 85% of refugees (and displaced Venezuelans) are hosted in developing countries: “The Least Developed Countries provided asylum to 27 per cent of the total”.
“One per cent of the world’s population – or 1 in 97 people – is now forcibly displaced”, a figure that is increasing at a rate that continues to “outpace global population growth”. This situation has created a new one percent at the other end of the wealth and power spectrum. The worsening economic crisis worsens is likely to see this one percent used as a target by states for discriminatory policies that scapegoat their inadequate response to the needs of the wider community, such as homeless citizens and victims of domestic violence, for example.
Refugees in a time of Covid19
The global pandemic has obscured, not slowed down the pace of conflict. In one of the fastest-growing crises in the world, in the Sahel region of west Africa, in Burkina Faso alone, “the number of IDPs [internally displaced persons] rose from 560,000 in early February to 848,000 at the end of April, representing 288,000 additional people in approximately three months”.
At the best of times, overcrowded and cramped refugee camps without adequate access to food, water, sanitation and health care are a public health disaster, including the world’s largest refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, home to one million Rohingya refugees from neighbouring Myanmar. Social distancing is impossible in such a densely crowded area with limited sanitation facilities and an internet ban that limits access to public health information. Thousands of other displaced people worldwide are held in inhumane conditions in immigration detention facilities. Refugee camps and hosting areas are also susceptible to hostile attacks.
Refugees are adversely affected by “skyrocketing xenophobia, racism and stigmatization” during the pandemic. Some states have excluded refugees and other migrants completely from their pandemic response. Malaysia, lauded for its positive response, clamped down on undocumented migrants, including asylum seekers, through immigration detention in cramped and unsanitary conditions to help containment. Such centres were later identified as high-risk, making the move counterproductive.
Adrift at sea
The European closed border response led to a 43% fall in asylum claims made in the European Union between February and March 2020. Although “3,000 asylum seekers arrived in Greece by land and sea since the start of March, a precipitous drop from previous months and compared to previous years”, this did not deter the Greek coastguard from carrying out pushback operations, sending refugees and migrants back to Turkey, with the European border agency Frontex and other EU states aware of this illegal action.
European states, such as Cyprus, Italy and Malta have used the pandemic as an excuse to deny entry to hundreds of refugees arriving by sea, citing border closures and a national health emergency. Overland, there have been increasing reports of the violent treatment and abuse of asylum seekers and migrants trying to enter the EU via Croatia and Bosnia. In the Vucjak camp on the Bosnia-Croatia border, water supplies were cut off to residents. Also citing its pandemic response, since March, the US has expelled 20,000 migrants and asylum seekers, admitting only two.
In Asia, 269 Rohingya refugees stranded at sea off the coast of Malaysia who were detained on arrival in the country in early June will be sent back to sea; the Bangladeshi authorities have refused to accept them and they cannot return to Myanmar. In April, almost 400 Rohingya refugees were not even allowed to disembark in Malaysia and were sent back, starving, to Bangladesh in a two-month journey that claimed the lives of 30 of them. Other returned refugees have been sent to a remote, uninhabited island in Bangladesh.
Death because of hunger
Curfews and restrictions on movement accompanying the Covid19 pandemic have meant there is no or little work for anyone, accompanied by an inflation in the price of food and daily necessities. Many refugees are not entitled to government financial aid to deal with the pandemic and for those without a legal status, work is the only means of supporting themselves and dependents. A fall in remittances from family members in wealthier countries also affects refugee camp dwellers. Lockdowns and curfews thus pose a greater threat to the lives and well-being of refugees than Covid19.
One in Libya told the World Food Programme: “Every day, I am afraid of death because of hunger”. Syrian refugees in neighbouring countries have made similar statements, with the situation forcing them to cut back on food and buying medicines. Displaced Venezuelans who must go out to work are also exposed to the risk of “stigmatization and discrimination for perceived inability to comply with lockdown and physical distancing measures”. In Kenya, “Refugees and vulnerable groups have been hit by food insecurity, inability to pay rent, poor and overcrowded living conditions, loss of income, harassment from police, and limited access to hygiene”.
In various countries, the UNHCR is providing cash support to refugees, including Syrians in neighbouring countries, refugees in Libya, and displaced Venezuelans in Brazil have been given UN debit cards. Such schemes, however, are not sustainable in the long term and face funding shortfalls from donors, restricting the number of beneficiaries. In addition, with the International Labour Organization estimating in April that a number ““significantly higher” than the 25 million it forecast” in March becoming jobless as a result of the pandemic, the competition for all jobs is likely to rise, putting refugees in an even more precarious and insecure position as well as increasing discrimination against them.
The one percent
The number of displaced people, refugees and asylum seekers worldwide has doubled over the past decade. Over 40 million are children. Tens of thousands are unaccompanied and alone, of whom thousands have disappeared in Europe alone over the past decade and are vulnerable to physical and sexual exploitation. The closure of schools during the pandemic has hit refugee children particularly hard. The increasing poverty of their parents and guardians also poses an increased risk of child labour for many refugee children.
Toying with solutionist responses to Covid19, states have squandered the opportunity presented by the pandemic to address health inequalities within their borders, including refugees, and to close inadequate refugee camps and immigration detention facilities. Portugal, however, has applied a positive strategy of extending citizenship rights to all asylum seekers up until 30 June.
On the other hand, a UN call for a “global ceasefire” during the pandemic has fallen on deaf ears. The very states the UNHCR calls on to provide financial support to refugees are those whose foreign and military policies perpetuate conflict and environmental crises that lead to mass displacements of populations.
Refugee crises are becoming increasingly long-term situations: Palestinians have been displaced for over 70 years, longer than even the existence of the 1951 Refugee Convention, the conflict in Afghanistan has seen Afghans displaced abroad for almost five decades and the Syria conflict is almost a decade old, with the largest number of people displaced internally and abroad. For many, such as the Rohingya survivors of genocide in Myanmar, there is no home to return to; they have been wiped out of their own history and lands. Ultimately, resolving the causes of conflict and displacement, including climate change, is the only practical way of resolving refugee crises.
With the pandemic having exposed entrenched socioeconomic inequalities, discrimination against this underclass of displaced, stateless and undocumented persons is likely to take the edge off the need for states to address such inequalities in healthcare, education, housing and elsewhere in a time of economic crisis, as well as scapegoating them for the failure to do so. Refugees are no longer offered protection but are pawns in the power games of other states. Ahead of the seventieth anniversary of the Refugee Convention in 2021, the politicisation of this legal status requires revision rather than the definition of a “refugee”.
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