From Responsibility to Response: Assessing National - Brookings

Georgia From Solidarity to Solutions: The Government Response to Internal Displacement in Georgia
registered IDPs—as well as the registration of individuals
who were displaced by the conflict and then lived
abroad (IDP status is terminated if the individual leaves
the country and establishes permanent residence or
acquires citizenship of another country) but who have
since returned to Georgia but still cannot return to their
areas of origin. 39
IDPs displaced by the August 2008 conflict initially
were registered through another process. Although IDP
registration is a mandated responsibility of the Ministry
of Internally Displaced Persons from the Occupied
Territories, Accommodation and Refugees, in the aftermath
of the August 2008 conflict, the suddenness and
scale of displacement—130,000 persons became internally
displaced in five days—overwhelmed the capacity
of the MRA in many respects, including registration. As
MRA was considered to be ill equipped to mount emergency
registration of the newly displaced, the government
turned to the Civil Registry Agency (CRA) of the
Ministry of Justice to complete this essential task. The
CRA, with support from USAID, recently had upgraded
its information technology and invested in staff training,
both of which were mobilized for this purpose. 40
Significantly, UNHCR also decided to partner with and
support CRA rather than MRA in registering the new
IDPs. Inevitably, that experience raised serious questions
within government as well as among international
stakeholders of whether data collection responsibilities
for IDPs—and even focal point responsibility for IDP
issues overall—should remain with the MRA in the
long term (see also Benchmark 7). 41 MRA, for its part,
39 Government of Georgia, Law of Georgia on Forcibly
Displaced–Persecuted Persons, Article 6(3), paras. (c)-(d).
40 U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID),
“Georgian Agency’s new Infrastructure Is Put to the Test,“
14 February 2009 (http://georgia.usaid.gov/ka/node/126).
41 Interviews by author and Guy Hovey, with government
representatives, UNHCR, international NGOs and
donors, Tbilisi, February-March 2009, in connection
with the USAID-FORECAST project to provide technical
assistance on IDP issues to the Ministry for Refugees and
Accommodation; the project ran from February 2009 to
July 2010.
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voiced concern about discrepancies in the data and in
the methodology used by the CRA. 42 The information
collected by the CRA on the “new” IDPs eventually was
integrated into a new, comprehensive database developed
by the MRA beginning in May 2009.
Yet the MRA has been slow to grant official IDP status,
as provided for under the Law on Forcibly Displaced
Persons–Persecuted Persons, to all of the “new” IDPs
who were unable to return to their home areas in the
weeks and months immediately following the end of
hostilities and who, factually speaking, remain IDPs. By
law IDPs are to be registered within ten days of presenting
their application. 43 While the government did begin
granting IDP status to those cases in the second half of
2009, specific groups of IDPs from 2008, namely those
from territories outside the control of the government
of Georgia, have been left out of the process (for further
discussion of this issue, see Benchmark 5). It therefore is
important to note that government figures for the 2008
caseload refer only to IDPs who have been granted IDP
status; thus, while the government reports 17,916 “new”
IDPs, other observers—including the Public Defender
of Georgia (see Benchmark 8), UNHCR, and other international
actors—report 22,000 IDPs remaining from
the August 2008 conflict.
According to the most recent official data, dated May
2011 and based on the ministry’s database of persons
registered as having IDP status, currently there are
256,103 IDPs (88,834 households) in Georgia. 44 Data are
broken down according to whether individuals are “old”
or “new” IDPs. The vast majority, 238,187 persons, are
IDPs (and their descendants) as a result of the hostilities
in South Ossetia and Abkhazia in the early 1990s—the
42 Interviews by author and Guy Hovey with officials of the
MRA, February-March 2009.
43 Government of Georgia, Law of Georgia on Forcibly
Displaced–Persecuted Persons, Article 2, para. 9.
44 E-mail correspondence with the MRA in June and July
2011. Note that these figures received from the MRA,
based on its IDP registration database, differ slightly from
the statistics (undated) that were posted at the time on the
MRA website (http://mra.gov.ge/main/ENG#section/50).