"Escape from FEMAville"


Refugees, not detainees
Kerry Howley wrote an article for Reason examining some of the issues.

This is bad. There are few surer ways to make people sick, hopeless, and stripped of agency than to pack them into collective camp-like conditions for an indefinite time period. Katrina's displaced persons are not technically "refugees" (as the law defines the term), and there's a levee-sized space between any international refugee and a New Orleans native waiting for his home to emerge from five feet of toxic water. But current international practices are a how-to guide for turning temporary refugee situations into protracted hellholes. "Warehousing" is the risk aid workers run when they throw up ad hoc housing with no clear plan to dismantle it. Merrill Smith, editor of the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants' (USCRI) World Refugee Survey, defines it as "the practice of keeping refugees in protracted situations of restricted mobility, enforced idleness, and dependency—their lives on indefinite hold." For refugees in Africa and Asia over the past twenty years, the transition from camp to resettlement has taken longer than at any point in history. To some extent, this is a result of donors pouring aid into camps rather than integration, keeping refugees contained rather than compensating host countries for absorbing them. Smith describes the change as a shift from "viewing refugees as agents of democracy to seeing them as passive aid recipients."

The results are ugly, as USCRI documents. Throwing refugees together spreads disease, engenders mental health problems, and creates security issues. Camp security has a tendency to turn militant, and authoritarian law enforcement can lead to "fatalistic paralysis" that makes starting over more inconceivable as time passes. Worst of all, isolation prevents displaced people from forming the social networks that help them spring back. It's tough to job hunt when you're packed in with thousands of other homeless, jobless, increasingly passive people.

Temporary housing goes up faster than it comes down. Abroad, host governments develop bureaucracies that depend on an inflow of aid destined for refugee camps; some camps in Africa have endured for decades. Here in the U.S., mobile homes set up after last year's Hurricane Charley still fill a corner of Punta Gorda; the village has been dubbed FEMAville. In a Slate piece on the history of emergency housing, Witold Rybczynski writes, "relief can be the enemy of reconstruction." He's talking about homes and sidewalks, but the wrong kind of relief can keep people from reconstructing their lives as well.

I think people are concerned, but I don't think they are looking hard enough.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Fri - September 16, 2005 at 08:47 PM  Tag


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