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RURAL REFUGEES IN AFRICA: WHAT THE EYE DOES NOT SEE
Author(s) -
Chambers Robert
Publication year - 1979
Publication title -
disasters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.744
H-Index - 70
eISSN - 1467-7717
pISSN - 0361-3666
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-7717.1979.tb00175.x
Subject(s) - refugee , library science , guardian , poverty , sociology , political science , history , law , computer science
NUMBERS AND TYPES OF REFUGEES qualify as refugees in the strict legal sense; when refugees of long residence should cease t o be counted; whether, and if so for how long, to include refugees who have repatriated; and whether to include displaced persons who are within their countries of origin. Moreover, the numbers of refugees in Africa change constantIy with new influxes and repatriations. Two sets of figures can be distinguished: first, totals of estimates for known and recogruzed refugee situations; and second vaguer totals for the continent as a whole. The gap between these is considerable and appears to be widening. Thus adding the totals on a map published by UNHCR in Spring 1979 (UNHCR, 1979a) gives 2,140,000 refugees (see Table 1 .);but the figure cited by the OAU SecretaryGeneral in an interview published at about the same time was the more usual 4 million (UNHCR, 1979b, p. 4) presumably including the unrecognized Guineans, the Zaireans and