Chapter 1 - Who is a Refugee

Discussion

Story

Aceh, Indonesia: young lives in conflict

13-year-old Sri has fond memories of her home village in North Aceh in Indonesia. Though she has lived in a refugee camp in the neighbouring region of North Sumatra for three years, such a long time for someone so young, she still misses her old friends. “I had many friends back home, and very nice teachers”, she remembers. “I was very sad the day we were forced to leave because of the conflict. The whole village was chaotic. The schools closed, and my teachers fled in fear of their lives. Our neighbours and friends, who stayed behind, cried and told us that they would help protect us, but my parents were too afraid. We left our belongings behind, and travelled to North Sumatra,” Sri quietly recounts.



Formal education is often unavailable for children in refugee camps, especially for those who have already passed through primary level. If local schools do exist they are often too expensive for destitute refugee families to afford. Sri is one of the lucky ones. She is in the second year of a local junior secondary school near the refugee camp in Sei Lepan, about three hours from Medan. A humanitarian organisation has been able to provide her with a scholarship, as her family could not afford the school fees. “I love to study because it will make me smart!” Sri says with great hope. In the camp, education is still only available for elementary schoolchildren, and only a few young people have the opportunity to take their studies further.



In a resettlement area in South Tapanuli district, North Sumatra, a Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS) worker gives occasional training to the children. “They really like it,” he says, “every time I come to the camp they ask me to teach them something. And believe it or not, they also beg me to give them homework”. Homework is not normally the favourite activity of students in Indonesia, though it seems that children in conflict zones become more aware of the importance of schooling, and they seem eager to get on with their lives and continue the search for a better future that others take for granted.

“We will never return to Aceh”, Sri says suddenly, anticipating the question on the lips of the JRS worker, unspoken for fear of upsetting her. “I know that more people are fleeing from Aceh now that the problems there are getting worse”, she says. “I heard that on the radio”. Despite being only 13, she works hard to understand what is happening to her by piecing together the fragments of information that she picks up. Knowing this, it seems apparent that giving the youth the possibility to go to school is vital for peace-building efforts in the future.



In Aceh, tens of thousands of students were left without school buildings after groups went on a cruel burning spree throughout the region during 2003, as part of the most recent round of violence. Students and teachers cried while watching their school buildings go up in flames. “It made me very sad, because I feel that I am being made stupid. Why did they have to burn our school?” a second grader of a junior high school in Aceh Besar asked, with reasons to worry about his future.

Facts and Figures

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is the international organisation with responsibility for protecting refugees throughout the world.

The United Nations Refugee Convention of 1951 (sometimes called the Geneva Convention) defines a refugee as someone who "owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable, or owing to such fear, is unwilling to return".

During 2005, some 668,000 claims for asylum or refugee status were submitted in 149 countries. According to the UNHCR, the top five countries where people sought asylum last year were France, US, Thailand, Kenya, the United Kingdom, and Germany.
 

Source: http://www.unhcr.org/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/statistics 

Web Links for further information and reading

UNHCR 1951 Refugee Convention text:
http://www.unhcr.org/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/protect?id=3c0762ea4

Jesuit Refugee Service Web Site:
http://www.jrs.net

UNHCR Web Site:
www.unhcr.org