Refugees are one of the most serious problems of our time. Daily the numbers escalate. No one really knows how many people have been uprooted but one may be very sure the problem in Africa is not going away. Chambers (1985a) predicts that between now and the year 2004, another twelve to fifty million 'mass distress migrants' in Africa will require assistance, their movements caused by war, civil disturbance, persecution, food shortage, and famine. Meanwhile, relief budgets climb and humanitarian agencies proliferate.

William Shawcross's Quality of Mercy is one of the rare opportunities for the public to examine the work of some of those humanitarian organizations that the world has created in an attempt to bind its self-inflicted wounds. But the problems Shawcross depicts are general; they have been around for forty years. Inside the agencies it is well-known that the same mistakes have been repeated over and over again. Howard Adelman, director of the Refugee Documentation Project, York University, Ontario, in his study of the United Nations Relief and Works Association (UNRWA), has found a similar pattern of outside intervention which left behind as many problems as the humanitarians set out to solve. UNRWA was instigated both to help preserve the peace and to provide a short-term relief and works programme while refugees were either repatriated or integrated into the economic life of the local communities. Thirty-five years later UNRWA continues to exist with over 17,000 employees. In only nine of those thirty-five years can some form of peace be said to have existed in the Middle East.

Why is there no tradition of independent, critical research in the field of refugee assistance analogous to that for development studies? It is assumed that the impact of development projects will be evaluated, but humanitarian programmes have never been subjected to the same scrutiny. As one observer put it. 'Refugee organisations are becoming more and more an almost impregnable system, protected by the strong shell of their mandate to dispense what is regarded as "charity"'. (Alternative Viewpoints 1984.) Many readers, including refugees, may react to the contents of this book much as did one of my assistants in the field, Lali Ferdinand Vuciri, an interrupted secondary school student.

My findings in this research were things I had never known before. The research in itself has been a revelation to me. Although I am refugee myself, I came to learn much more about the refugees than I had known before. But the people who were experiencing such fates were refugees like myself and they came from the same country as me.

Hopefully, one result of reading this book will be to stimulate others to say as he said, '...from my findings, I have developed certain ideas for the research....and I imagine if I had the time, I would develop a research on my own and do it in an original way from my own conception.'

Given the body of literature which evaluates the impact of aid, few practitioners in the development field (who think about such matters) still retain unquestioned confidence that their interventions are always beneficial to the recipients. Nevertheless, development projects are expected to have measurable, usually visible, and hopefully, positive outcomes. Refugees are, by contrast, viewed as a temporary phenomenon, and money given for their assistance falls under emergency relief - a budget line on a par with an interstellar black hole. From the funders' point of view, concern for accountability is limited to establishing the financial credentials of the agencies through whom aid is channelled, and ensuring that it reaches those for whom it is intended. The importance of evaluating the impact of relief programmes is not widely appreciated.

Recruitment to development work does not lay great stress upon the personal motivation of staff. '... for donor and recipient alike aid policy is shaped by self-interest; enlightened self-interest, no doubt, but self-interest all the same. For aid is about trade, about making friends, and influencing people, about investment now for dividends...Moral issues may be bandied about, but only bandied.' (Bell 1984.)

Humanitarian work, on the other hand, is thought to be selfless, motivated by compassion, and by its very definition suggests good work. Most voluntary agencies place as great an emphasis upon the motivations of their employees as upon their technical expertise. Some sacrifice certain material comforts to work overseas. This, together with the relative insecurity of the profession (and in some cases, the low salaries received), may reinforce the notion that work under a humanitarian banner is above question. And, as relief is a gift, it is not expected that any (most especially the recipients) should examine the quality, or quantity, of what is given.

The research reported in this book is a first attempt to make an independent study of an emergency assistance programme. For it I selected the emergency assistance programme in the Yei River District, southern Sudan as the location for the study. I began by observing the role of the interveners - both expatriate and host government staff- and the nature of their interventions in response to an influx of refugees from Uganda.

There are a number of types of interventions involved in the assistance programme for refugees. There are the two types of international aid agencies: the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and non-governmental (NGOs) or international voluntary agencies. In southern Sudan, there were also two indigenous voluntary agencies providing assistance and at one time an abortive attempt was made by refugees to organize their own humanitarian group. The Sudan government established the office of the Commissioner for Refugees (COMREF) under the Ministry of Interior to administer refugee programmes in the country. This office appointed project managers in refugee-affected areas; one was assigned to Yei, responsible to the general project manager for the south.

I observed other types of outsiders who have an impact on refugee assistance programmes. Various foreign delegations occasionally visit. For example, when Ambassador Douglas, an advisor to President Reagan, visited Yei River District, he saw wheelbarrows being used to transport the very ill to the clinic in one settlement. Afterwards UNHCR was under pressure to supply the district with an ambulance.

Journalists also play a very important role. International power politics influence the extent and the manner in which an emergency is covered. One of the effects of media publicity is to attract more international agencies as well as more financial aid to an area, but another is the way journalists contribute to the stereotyping of refugees as helpless. However, both host governments and international agencies are wary of the press. Depending on the situation and their vested interests at a particular time, they may concoct ways of keeping journalists out, or of limiting their access to information. Alternatively they may actively encourage and facilitate press coverage of an incident. Very few journalists reached the remote area where this study was conducted.

Researchers themselves intervene; this study included a team of refugees which actively participated in evaluating the assistance programme, wrote reports, addressed agency meetings, and discussed findings with government administrators and refugee communities. The effectiveness of assistance needs to be continually assessed. Hopefully, involving refugees in monitoring projects would encourage greater flexibility in the responses of everyone to both delivering and receiving aid.

Refugees began entering southern Sudan from Uganda in 1979, and by March 1982 the influx had reached emergency proportions. This situation persisted throughout most of the fieldwork, which was carried out during two six-month periods in 1982-3. The numbers of refugees living in assisted settlements escalated from 9000 in March 1982 to 47,311 at the end of September. By September 1983, when this study was completed, the UNHCR office count of assisted refugees in settlement was 95,000.

After the first six months of observing the emergency programme from the perspective of the agency, government, and other outside interventions, a team and I conducted a survey of a random sample of all assisted refugees. Data describing 10,675 individuals, members of 2017 households, were collected in 22 settlements and 3 transit camps. There were also those refugees who had remained self-settled in the district, outside the relief system. At the time their numbers were greater than those under the aid 'umbrella'. Interviews were administered to 3814 of these households in several localities. The study also included the local population and its relationship to the aid programme and to the refugees. In the course of conducting interviews, members of the team recorded verbatim responses: 75 exercise books were filled. Over 200 children's drawings of 'refugee life' were collected and about 100 hours of refugee voices were recorded in the course of my own interviews. Specialized studies of markets and schools were conducted both in settlements and in the areas where unassisted refugees were living within the Sudanese community. A lawyer on the team examined the way disputes within the settlements were handled and studied the courts throughout the district. His research was continued for a further nine months after I left the Sudan.

Fortuitously, another team, funded by the Overseas Development Administration (ODA), was conducting a survey of Yei River District, preparing an overall development plan for the area. Originally this plan was to have been designed without taking account of the refugee population. When it was discovered that refugees outnumbered the locals by a ratio of at least 2 : 1, it became clear that they could no longer be ignored. Our two teams were able to collaborate in the field to some extent, and the refugees' and my own knowledge of Yei River District and its people was greatly increased by the information collected by the ODA team. Both studies were fortunate in having recourse to the official census data for the district collected in both 1981 and 1983.

The aim of the research, so far as possible, was to describe the actual living situation of the refugees, the impact of various assistance groups, their interconnections, and their impact on each other. From this it is hoped that the assistance programme may be assessed within the context of the people's own efforts to organize and develop their communities. The overwhelming focus of this study is on the economic impact of the programme, but as it had other social and psychological consequences as well, these must be included in its assessment.

The aim of the assistance programme was to help refugees become economically independent. Aid programmes acknowledge that there are categories of people, referred to as 'vulnerable groups', who will never be able to support themselves. Definitions of vulnerability usually only include orphans, widows, the socially or physically handicapped, and sometimes women-headed households. In this study the definition of vulnerability is widened and is related to the overall objective of the assistance programme: that refugees should become self-sufficient through agriculture. Refugees who are unable to achieve this goal, for whatever reason, are considered vulnerable.

The assistance programme laid great stress on equity: everyone had a right to the same amount of food rations and material aid. Observations in 1982-3 suggested that many households were unlikely ever to be capable of supporting themselves through agriculture. By treating all refugees as equal the programme had the unintended consequence of exacerbating economic differences, with the most vulnerable groups growing ever more dependent and impoverished. This trend was confirmed by following up vulnerable households in one settlement in 1984.

In 1984 a multi-disciplinary team of seven Oxford students spent two months in Yei River District to conduct further research. Four settlements and their surrounding Sudanese communities were included in their studies, in addition to a mixed population of unassisted refugees and locals living near Panyume. Studies were made of household economies and these data were linked to the development of trade, markets, and the taxation system of the district. The situation of vulnerable families was surveyed and a mental health scale was administered to a sample of adults. A nutrition survey was also undertaken and case histories of the families of malnourished children were collected. Bilharzia and intestinal worm surveys were made. Work was done with a library and a self-help senior secondary school which opened in September 1984. Both the library and school are 'integrated' projects, i.e. they involve both Sudanese and refugees. I refer to the team's findings at several points throughout the book.

This book is organized into two parts. The introductory chapter surveys some of the assumptions behind the present approach to assisting refugees, my own assumptions which led me to undertake this study, and discusses the methods which were applied. Chapter One describes the characteristics of the Ugandan influx into southern Sudan from 1979. Chapters Two and Three look at the operational effects of the assumptions about how best to help refugees, by first describing the way the settlements were organized and the programme was administered, and then examine some demographic features of the refugee population. Part Two of the book looks at the results of the delivery of such services as protection, food, medicine, education and employment. I go on to consider the question of the vulnerable categories and the psychological problems of refugees. Finally on the basis of some evidence, I consider the possible long-term impact of the refugees and the aid programme on the district. This book draws heavily on case material. Individual statements have been selected to illustrate general problems which were observed or revealed by the statistical data collected.

This case study of the emergency assistance programme in Yei River District has a significance far beyond the specific refugee and host communities living there. The location of the research, southern Sudan, was directed by the objectives of the study - to examine an international humanitarian response to an emergency refugee influx. While the findings cannot always be generalized to every emergency, they do raise profound questions concerning the role of relief, its link with development, the role of voluntary agencies and international organizations, and the impact of outside interventions and funds on the capacity of host governments to manage their own affairs. While a study of emergency assistance to refugees, the book argues that the very concept, refugee, may be an artificial category maintained more for the convenience of donors than for the people involved.

'Time for solutions' was the slogan of the Second International Conference on Assistance to Refugees in Africa (ICARA II) held in Geneva in July 1984. This conference has been described as representing a 'milestone', even a 'turning point', in the search for the ever elusive 'durable solutions' for refugees in Africa. While recognizing that aid programmes have failed dismally to bring refugees off relief rolls and onto the path of economic independence, and to help them 'integrate' into the social and economic fabric of their host community, ICARA II still aimed to convince 'donors' that even more outside intervention is required. 'Additionality' was the term which was invented to describe the amounts of money required, over and above development budgets, to support projects which would aid refugee-affected areas and 'integrate' refugees and their hosts. Without doubt additional funds are urgently required. The question is who will be determining how they will be spent?

Implicitly, and at times explicitly, ICARA II also marked the growing disfavour into which the large and bureaucratic UN agencies have fallen and a growing preference for NGOs to carry out projects. One government, Britain, pledged all of its 5m Sterling 'additional' funds to be spent on projects designed and executed by its own voluntary agencies.

Although the aim of ICARA II was to find funds to support projects which would strengthen the infrastructure of refugee-affected areas in host countries, rehabilitation programmes for returnees were also included in the submissions put to 'donors' (i.e. governments which support the budget of UNHCR). Although most refugees would no doubt argue that there have been no significant changes in the political situations which led to their flight which would allow them to return home in safety, rehabilitation programmes have been mounted in both Ethiopia and Uganda. There is reason to be concerned that the assumption that aid determines the movements of people may have the greater weight in decisions as to which ICARA II projects will receive funding, thereby cancelling the main thrust of the new approach to develop refugee-affected areas. Certainly the mood among donors favours the return home of refugees from these two countries.

So despite the enthusiasm of the humanitarian community for the results of ICARA II, there is little evidence to suggest it actually does mark a change in the basic philosophy of how refugees are best assisted. There has still been no research which would indicate how aid might actually facilitate such goals as 'integration' of refugees and their hosts. Even the term, 'integration', has yet to be defined. According to at least one observer, ICARA II was

...a great disappointment. This opinion, I admit, is not shared by representatives of many other non-governmental organisations who were present....I found the format and the presentations dull and, at times, insulting....There was no dialogue or give-and-take; speeches had all been prepared well in advance without any reference to what had been previously said....There were no surprises...

I was further disappointed at the colonialism evident in Geneva. That colonialism, the wealthy whites of World One being benign to their darker brothers (very few sisters) of the Third World, was quite transparent. It was compounded by those representatives of African countries who have been co-opted by the life style of the West. I find it more and more difficult to believe that decisions concerning refugees can be made in palaces and Mercedes. Worst of all, the refugees of Africa were not represented ! ! (Moan 1984.)

Are the same mistakes which have been made over the last forty years about to be repeated, this time on an even grander scale?

Oxford

May 1985