World Refugee Day

World Refugee Day

( while watching the pictures and reading the information , please just for minutes put yourself in the refugees' shoes. Think of yourself as a refugee for seconds. That may be a small tribute we pay to the refugee and we may understand their troubles-the least we can call it - )

This special day is held every year on the 20th of June.

Why the 20th of June ?

As an expression of solidarity with Africa, which hosts the most refugees, and which traditionally has shown them great generosity, the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 55/76 on 4 December 2000. In this resolution, the General Assembly noted that 2001 marked the 50th anniversary of the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, and that the Organization of African Unity (OAU) had agreed to have International Refugee Day coincide with Africa Refugee Day on 20 June. The Assembly therefore decided that, from 2001, 20 June would be celebrated as World Refugee Day.
[Note: The OAU was replaced by the African Union on 9 July 2002.]

The 20th of June, 2010
The theme for this year is " Home" .
in recognition of the plight of more than 40 million uprooted people around the world. Around 10 million of them are refugees of special concern to UNHCR.

Who is the refugee ?
a refugee is a person 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 to or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country".

where is the largest number of refugee ?
As of December 31, 2005, the largest source countries of refugees are Afghanistan, Iraq, Myanmar, Sudan, and the Palestinian Territories. The country with the largest number of IDPs ( Internally displaced persons are people forced to flee their homes but who, unlike refugees, remain within their country's borders) is Sudan, with over 5 million. As of 2006, with 800,000 refugees and IDPs, Azerbaijan had the highest per capita IDP population in the world.

Common refugee medical problems

Apart from physical wounds or starvation, a large percentage of refugees develop symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or depression. These long-term mental problems can severely impede the functionality of the person in everyday situations; it makes matters even worse for displaced persons who are confronted with a new environment and challenging situations. They are also at high risk for suicide.

Among other symptoms, post-traumatic stress disorder involves anxiety, over-alertness, sleeplessness, chronic fatigue syndrome, motor difficulties, failing short term memory, amnesia, nightmares and sleep-paralysis. Flashbacks are characteristic to the disorder: The patient experiences the traumatic event, or pieces of it, again and again. Depression is also characteristic for PTSD-patients and may also occur without accompanying PTSD.

PTSD was diagnosed in 34.1% of Palestinian children, most of whom were refugees, males, and working. The participants were 1,000 children aged 12 to 16 years from governmental, private, and United Nations Relief Work Agency UNRWA schools in East Jerusalem and various governorates in the West Bank.

Another study showed that 28.3% of Bosnian refugee women had symptoms of PTSD three or four years after their arrival in Sweden. These women also had significantly higher risks of symptoms of depression, anxiety, and psychological distress than Swedish-born women. For depression the odds ratio was 9.50 among Bosnian women.
A study by the Department of Pediatrics and Emergency Medicine at the Boston University School of Medicine demonstrated that twenty percent of Sudanese refugee minors living in the United States had a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder. They were also more likely to have worse scores on all the Child Health Questionnaire subscales.

Many more studies illustrate the problem. One meta-study was conducted by the psychiatry department of Oxford University at Warneford Hospital in the United Kingdom. Twenty surveys were analyzed, providing results for 6,743 adult refugees from seven countries. In the larger studies, 9% were diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and 5% with major depression, with evidence of much psychiatric co-morbidity. Five surveys of 260 refugee children from three countries yielded a prevalence of 11% for post-traumatic stress disorder. According to this study, refugees resettled in Western countries could be about ten times more likely to have PTSD than age-matched general populations in those countries. Worldwide, tens of thousands of refugees and former refugees resettled in Western countries probably have post-traumatic stress disorder.

Exploitation

Refugee populations consist of people who are terrified and are away from familiar surroundings. There can be instances of exploitation at the hands of enforcement officials, citizens of the host country, and even United Nations peacekeepers. Instances of human rights violations, child labor, mental and physical trauma/torture, violence-related trauma, and sexual exploitation, especially of children, are not entirely unknown. In many refugee camps in three war-torn West African countries, Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Liberia, young girls were found to be exchanging sex for money, a handful of fruit, or even a bar of soap. Most of these girls were between 13 and 18 years of age. In most cases, if the girls had been forced to stay, they would had been forced into marriage. They became become pregnant on average around the age of 15.This happened as recently as in 2001. Parents tended to turn a blind eye because sexual exploitation had become a ‘‘mechanism of survival’’ in these camps.







i have a big mouth and can say something about everything, but this time i am speechless.
i seriously don't know what it's like to be a refugee. To be uprooted from your home and country. All i know is that i hate being kicked out of my home. I hate feeling afraid -from anyone or someone-. I hate not be able to eat when i am hungry. I hate not be able to drink water, let alone dirty one. I hate cold and heat. I hate dirty clothes. I hate not having a place of my own. And i am sure that millions of these refugee feel the same but they have no choice but to take what's being giving to them, to accept that sometimes they can be sick of the heat and the cold and in both ways they can not get cool or shelter from the cold. They can not complain about using one bathrooms for hundreds of people. They can not complain seeing their futures and their kids' futures slipping in front of their eyes and can not do a thing about it. They may or mostly may not get the appropriate medical treatment they need.



Check these videos on the UNHCR channel on YouTube

Sources

www.un.org/depts/dhl/refugee

http://wrdlive.org/backup/

http://www.unhcr.org/pages/4bf4f2616.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refugee