This article appears in the following Refugee Survey Quarterly issue: CHILDREN AT RISK [View the issue table of contents]
Refugee Children and their Future
*Otto Hieronymi is Professor of International Relations and former Head of the Programme of International Relations and Migration and Refugee Studies, Webster University, Geneva, Switzerland. The original impetus for the topic of this article came from the tragic and frightening example of the largest and oldest group of refugees in the world, where people were born, third, fourth, and fifth generation of refugees and to whom their leaders and friends have held out as the only hope for the future, the return to a past that no longer exists – and the way it is presented it never existed: the Palestinians in the Middle East. If we raise fourth and fifth generation children in squalor and call them refugees and we tell them that their only future is a non-existent past 40 or 60 years ago – how do we expect them to grow up into self-respecting, peaceful, and hard-working adults? How do we expect them to be impervious to the siren songs of religious extremists and of violent nationalists and terrorists?
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Abstract |
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Although children constitute half of the world's refugee population, the long-term future of refugee children still does not receive sufficient attention in the general debate on the refugee issue, and in particular on so-called durable solutions. The positive impact of the successful integration and assimilation in the past of millions and millions of refugees is largely discarded as irrelevant under "today's changed conditions". Equally ignored are the lessons that should have been learned from having allowed during the last 60 years millions and millions of generations of children to be born and raised as refugees with the only future promised to them being a "return" to the past. The conclusion of the present article is that refugee children represent a tremendous potential for the good and also for future crises and suffering. Thus, one of the principal litmus tests of the quality of refugee policies should be: "What do they do for the long-term future of refugee children?"