Forced Migration Online: Blog

This podcast was recorded as part of the Oxfam Archive Oral History project.

It features an interview with Maurice Herson, Editor of Forced Migration Review and previously Deputy Humanitarian Director and Head of Humanitarian Programme Advisory Team at Oxfam.

‘Rwanda and the Great Lakes: A Personal View from the Oxfam Archive” is the second of a two-part series. In this recording, Maurice speaks about the Great Lakes emergency and the Rwanda genocide.

The first podcast focused on Maurice’s career in Sudan in the 1980s.

• Listen to the podcast
• Subscribe via iTunes

This podcast was recorded as part of the Oxfam Archive Oral History project.

It features an interview with Maurice Herson, Editor of Forced Migration Review and previously Deputy Humanitarian Director and Head of Humanitarian Programme Advisory Team at Oxfam.

‘Sudan in the 1980s’ is the first of a two-part series. In this recording, Maurice speaks about his career as a Relief Coordinator in Sudan.

The second podcast in this series will be released next week. It will focus on the Great Lakes refugee crisis of the mid-1990s.

• Listen to the podcast
• Subscribe via iTunes

A new collection of photographs, focusing on Karen and Karenni refugees in Thailand, is now available to view in the FMO photo gallery.

The Karen people reside primarily in southern and southeastern Myanmar (Burma), where they make up approximately 7 percent of the population. The Karenni people are a subgroup of the Karen people.

An estimated 400,000 Karen and Karenni refugees have fled to Thailand, in order to escape persecuting by Myanmar’s military government, many of them living in camps on the border. These photographs provide a rare glimpse into daily life in two camps along the Thai-Burma border: Mae La and Ban Mai Nai Soi.

The photographs were taken by Amity Malack, a graduate from the Monterey Institute of International Studies.

A full archive of FMO photo collections can be accessed through the FMO photo gallery.

• Photographs: Karen refugees in Thailand

Forced Migration Online has recently published a new resource summary, focusing on Angola.

The Republic of Angola is on the west coast of south-central Africa, and has an estimated population of around 13 million people. Wealthy in natural resources, it is now one of the fastest growing economies in Africa, fuelled mainly by its oil production.

Despite this apparent wealth however, the country faces enormous socio-economic problems. These are the product of a 27-year long civil war, which raged from 1975 to 2002 between the governing MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola) and UNITA (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola). At the height of the civil war, it is estimated that over 4 million people were displaced.

All our summaries provide links to key resources, websites and documents exploring contemporary debate on on key issues, in forced migration as well as links to wider issues concerned with human rights and displacement.

Our full collection of resource summaries, focusing on specific regions and themes, can be accessed from the links below.

• Angola resource summary
• Regional Resource Summaries
• Thematic Resource Summaries

Forced Migration Online has recently published a new resource summary, focusing on Algeria.

The summary provides an outline of present and historical causes of forced migration within Algeria. It also gives an overview of Algeria’s relationship to various international refugee conventions and its role as host to several thousand refugees including the Sahrawi, as well as refugees from Palestine and Sub-Saharan Africa.

All our summaries provide links to key resources, websites and documents exploring contemporary debate on on key issues, in forced migration as well as links to wider issues concerned with human rights and displacement. Our full collection of resource summaries, focusing on specific regions and themes, can be accessed from the links below.

• Algeria resource summary
• Regional Resource Summaries
• Thematic Resource Summaries

We are pleased to announce that the ‘photo gallery’ section of Forced Migration Online has been re-launched. In addition to enjoying an improved layout when browsing individual albums, users will also be able to search our full database of photographs.

There are now over 600 photographs in the FMO image database, including a new album of photos on the topic of “Self-Settled and Settlement Refugees in Uganda” (© Ayla Bonfiglio, 2008).

Uganda is one of the few countries to allow refugees to either settle themselves within the national population, or to live in a refugee settlement. This collection of photographs was taken during a comparative study on self-reliance among refugees from these two settlement contexts.

If you have a collection of photographs relating to forced migration and are interested in submitting them for inclusion on FMO please visit our submissions page.

• FMO photo gallery
• New album: Self-settled and settlement refugees in Uganda

The film ‘Jenin‘ is now available to view online. Jenin is a documentary film depicting the events before, during and after the Israeli invasion of the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank on 5 April 2002. Produced by the Palestinian Return Centre and directed by Mohammed Bakri, the film documents the events through a series of interviews with some of the Palestinians effected.

• Jenin
• Subscribe via iTunes

In a new report entitled ‘Unlock the Camps in Sri Lanka’ Amnesty International has urged Sri Lanka’s government to set free hundreds of thousands of Tamil war refugees currently detained in camps. The report is a wide-ranging critique of the conditions in which some 300,000 Tamils are now living and includes testimony from refugees now abroad, or their relatives.

• Amnesty International
• BBC News ‘Colombo ‘must free’ war refugees’
• Sri Lanka Ministry of Disaster Management & Human Rights

Talk Together 2009, an ambitious conflict resolution project taking place in Oxford August 5-19, will examine the situation facing an estimated 170,000 people living in refugee camps in Algeria and separated from their families in the disputed territory of Western Sahara. Participants include young people from across the conflict zone, some of whom have grown up in refugee camps, as well as students from ‘neutral’ countries. The project is supported by partners including the European Commission, British Council and United World College. The project course will be filmed and there are also plans to develop a school’s version of the film to aid the learning of conflict resolution skills in schools. Talk Together invite you to demonstrate your support by joining their Facebook group or following them on Twitter.

• Amnesty International Public Statement
• TalkTogether website
• Talk Together Blog
• Talk Together on Twitter
• Talk Together on Facebook
• Donate to Talk Together
• United World Colleges website
• Western Sahara Research Guide
• Western Sahara Research Summary

Issue 32 of Forced Migration Review: Statelessness is now available in the digital library (FMR is one of five journals available).

A ‘stateless person’ is someone who is not recognised as a national by any state. They therefore have no nationality or citizenship and are unprotected by national legislation, leaving them vulnerable in ways that most of us never have to consider. This latest issue of FMR includes 22 articles by academic, international and local actors debating the challenges faced by stateless people and the search for appropriate responses and solutions.

The issue also includes 17 articles on other aspects of forced migration, among which are a mini-feature (comprising four articles) on refugee status determination and articles on European migration policies, Colombia, Ecuador, disaster IDPs, Europe-Africa cooperation, trafficking in Iran, cash grants for refugees and reproductive health care in emergencies.

Full Issue

• FMR 2009, No. 32: Statelessness

Individual Articles

• Statelessness: what it is and why it matters
• UNHCR and responses to statelessness
• North Arakan: an open prison for the Rohingya in Burma
• We have no soil under our feet
• Ethiopia-Eritrea: statelessness and state succession
• Am I stateless because I am a nomad?
• Kenyan Nubians: standing up to statelessness
• The Universal Birth Registration campaign
• Contesting discrimination and statelessness in the Dominican Republic
• Advocacy campaigns and policy development
• Reducing de facto statelessness in Nepal
• The end of Bihari statelessness
• Childhood statelessness
• Stateless persons from Thailand in Japan
• Combatting statelessness: a government perspective
• No place to go: statelessness in Israel
• The lost tribes of Arabia
• Nowhere people
• The legal limbo of detention
• Displaced Kosovo Roma and property rights
• Stateless Roma in Macedonia
• Remember the forgotten, protect the unprotected
• Statelessness and the right to citizenship
• Refugee status determination UNHCR and individual refugee status determination
• Refugee status determination: three challenges
• Refugee status determination in southern Africa
• Refugee protection in Turkey
• An institutional gap for disaster IDPs
• Unmet refugee needs: Colombian refugees in Ecuador
• Europe-Africa cooperation in Mali
• Towards an EU-wide regularisation scheme
• Return and re-admission in states’ migration policies
• Iran: migrant smuggling and trafficking in persons
• RAISE: Reproductive health-care provision in emergencies: preventing needless suffering
• UNHCR: On the money
• Brookings-Bern: Internal displacement and peacebuilding in Colombia
• NRC: One last chance for Colombia’s victims
• IDMC: Stateless former farm workers in Zimbabwe
• Letter from the field: The experience of refugees in Oru refugee camp, Nigeria