From Responsibility to Response: Assessing National - Brookings

CHAPTER 2 Case Studies: Georgia, Kenya, Afghanistan and Sri Lanka
exile did little to discourage those rumours. At the same
time, the authorities resisted allowing international aid
and development agencies and donors to help IDPs shift
from a state of dependency to self-reliance by providing
support for livelihoods. While some IDP children
attended regular schools, several “parallel” schools for
IDP children were set up and run by the Abkhaz government
in exile, which, in anticipation of eventual return,
sought to recreate and maintain children’s educational
experience in their area of origin, even by organizing
classes for IDPs with the same teacher and classmates
as they had in their place of origin. In addition to being
obstructed from meaningful participation in the socioeconomic
and political life of the local communities,
almost half of IDPs have lived since the early 1990s in
dilapidated and overcrowded “collective centers,” which
were established in schools, dormitories, factories and
even functioning hospitals and intended only to serve
as temporary emergency shelter. 181 Already in 1999, the
buildings were assessed to be in very poor or poor condition,
and by 2003, 70 percent of units were found not
to meet minimum shelter standards. In 2005, during his
first mission to the country, RSG Walter Kälin observed
that he was “shocked by the misery in which thousands
of IDPs are still living, more than a decade after the violent
fighting that caused them to flee their homes.” 182
The international community—in particular humanitarian
agencies and NGOs in Georgia as well as both
RSG Deng following his mission to Georgia in 2000 and
RSG Kälin following his first mission to the country in
2005—long had advocated that the government change
181 UN Commission on Human Rights, Report of the
Representative of the Secretary-General on Internally
Displaced Persons, Mr. Francis Deng—Addendum: Profiles
in Displacement: Georgia, 2001, paras. 25–69.
182 International Federation of the Red Cross (IFRC),
Survey of Collective Centers Accommodating Internally
Displaced Persons, 1999 (Tbilisi: 2000); UN Office for the
Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), Georgia
Humanitarian Situation Strategy 2004 (November 2003)
(http://reliefweb.int/node/138045); Walter Kälin, “Georgia
Must Act on Promises to End Displacement Crisis,” 2006
(www.brookings.edu/articles/2006/0531georgia_kalin.
aspx?rssid=georgia).
216
its approach to solutions for IDPs. In particular, they
wanted the government to stop viewing the right of IDPs
to return and their right to live in dignified conditions
in their place of displacement as mutually exclusive;
instead, both were rights that should be respected in
parallel and that even could be mutually reinforcing. 183
While fledgling steps were taken by the government,
at international urging, to move in this direction, most
notably with the “New Approach” to IDP assistance
promoted by the international community beginning
in 2000, the policy and practices of the government did
not fundamentally change. 184
However, new opportunities opened up following the
Rose Revolution of 2003, which brought into power the
government of President Saakashvili. While maintaining
the policy of promoting the right of IDPs and refugees
to return, the new administration began to modify
its absolutist approach of impeding alternative, or at
least interim, solutions for IDPs in their place of displacement.
This significant policy shift was formalized
with the government’s adoption in February 2007 of
the State Strategy for Internally Displaced Persons (see
Benchmark 6). The strategy articulates two main goals
for government policy: to create conditions for the dignified
and safe return of IDPs; and to support dignified
living conditions, in terms of both housing and overall
socioeconomic conditions, for IDPs in their current
places of residence. The strategy marked the government’s
first-ever recognition that solutions other than
return, specifically local integration, were a legitimate
183 See UN Commission on Human Rights, Report of the
Representative of the Secretary-General on Internally
Displaced persons, Mr. Francis Deng—Addendum: Profiles
in Displacement: Georgia, 2001, paras. 105–111, 128 and
130(xii); UN Commission on Human Rights, Report of the
Representative of the Secretary-General on the Human Rights
of Internally Displaced persons, Walter Kälin—Mission to
Georgia (21 to 24 December 2005), 2006, para. 15.
184 UN Commission on Human Rights, Report of the
Representative of the Secretary-General on Internally
Displaced Persons, Mr. Francis Deng—Addendum: Profiles
in Displacement: Georgia, 2001, paras. 108–128 and 130.