(Estimated Pub Date) the Challenge of Ethnic Conflict to National and International Order in the 1990S: Geographic Perspectives- October 1995

. ‘Approved for Release: 2018/06/01 C00123268
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migration, not just at the source but also at the destina-
tion as well. Whether a group is territorially concen-
trated or not, if its members move from one territory
into another, they are changing the ethnic balance in
two regions; it is a source-and-destination dynamic.
During periods of economic decline, a high percent-
age of forcibly displaced persons are members of cer-
tain ethnic groups that are underprivileged or in the
worst p0verty~stricken regions. These are also often
the first ones who are susceptible to famine or ecolog-
ical disasters. So the way to look at the ethnic dimen-
sion of people who have fled and need to be
supported—whether they be forcibly displaced refu-
gees or intemally displaced persons or illegal
migrants—is in a typology such as that in figure 15, in
which an ethnic component can be identified in each
of the three subsets. .
Forced migration has traditionally been thought of as
a process that produces refugees, who are defined as
such because they cross intemational boundaries. It is
quite clear, and every speaker has touched on the facts
that increasing mobility and decentralization, devolu-
tion of political power, the breakdown of one-party
state systems, and the rise of tenitoriality-—be it
regional or national—make itiincumbent on us to
increasingly think of forced migration processes at the
intrastate level. It is a question of scale, I think, in
terms of how we do our analysis.
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From the humanitarian perspective, the different cate-
gories and classifications for migrants not only tend to
lose their importance but also can often infringe upon
the civil rights of certain groups that are mobile. In
many cases, those accorded refugee status are privi-
leged forced migrants. The new restrictive definitions
and laws being imposed in Europe, for instance, have
produced an upsurge in illegal‘ migrants—many of
whom are disenfranchised in the country in which
they reside—most of whom are not counted. There are
reports out of Bosnia that tensiof thousands of Bos-
nian Muslims are still movingfinto the rest of Europe.
Now that the European refugee regime has become
stricter, however, they have found ways to enter as
illegal immigrants and never get counted.
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Another important point to raise, which Dr. Kenzer
touched on earlier, is that intemally displaced people
are not being accorded sufficient attention by the
intemational community. With regard to humanitarian
concems, the internally displaced are often the most
problematic. In these cases, many of the geographic
concepts mentioned at this conference can be applied:
the question of core and periphery relations, for
instance—-most of the intemally displaced are located
at the peripheries of states and are often the first to
cross borders and become refugees.
Crossing Boundaries
In fact, many refugees were first internally displaced
people before crossing an intemational border. What
made them refugees is that they managed to cross
such a border and were thereby accorded official refu-
gee status. Many internally displaced people can be
considered to function as refugees, particularly
because internecine conflict often leads to situations
where borders within states begin to function more as
intemational borders. Look at the situation in the Cau-
casus or with Gorno-Badakhshan in Tajikistan, where
the internal borders are functioning virtually as inter-
national ones with regard to population movements. In
many cases, therefore, whether someone being forced
to move is called an intemally displaced person or a
refugee is a moot point in terms of how the intema-
tional community needs to support them or deliver aid
to them.
We should also be thinking more about the changing
nature of political boundaries. The international com-
munity is increasingly recognizing that the sacrosanct
nature of these boundaries is not as strong as it once
was. Although many members of the intemational
community considered Serb and Croat discussions
about territorial exchanges to be an anathema, there is
nothing sacrosanct about these boundaries just
because they have been in existence and have been
fairly permanent for so long. We are definitely seeing
grudging change in this direction. At the same time,
we should not underestimate the state boundaries in
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Approved for Release: 2018/06/01 C00123268