From Responsibility to Response: Assessing National - Brookings

Benchmark 2
Raise National Awareness
of the Problem of Displacement
Benchmark 2 Raise National Awareness of the Problem of Displacement
Does the government (at the highest
executive level, for example, that of
president or prime minister) acknowledge
the existence of internal displacement
and its responsibility to address it as a
national priority?
National authorities have a responsibility to raise awareness
of the fact that people are displaced within their
territory, that the rights of IDPs should be protected,
and that the government itself is taking (or planning
to take) measures to address displacement. Whenever
displacement has occurred, the Framework for National
Responsibility considers acknowledging that fact to be
an important first step in responding to the needs of
those displaced as well as in working toward solutions
to displacement. Statements of concern by high-level
government authorities on the existence of IDPs and
the government’s commitment to address their plight
send a signal to other government officials—at both the
national and municipal levels—that this is an important
issue that needs to be taken seriously. Equally important
is the message that such statements send to IDPs
themselves. Too often, IDPs feel abandoned by their
governments and invisible. Expressions of awareness
and commitment by their governments can reassure
them they have not been forgotten; those expressions
also can be an important way to counteract the stigma
and discrimination that IDPs often experience and instead
promote solidarity with them.
But a government’s acknowledgment of internal displacement
is not necessarily a given. Governments,
especially when they themselves are complicit in or condone
displacement, may ignore or even outright deny
the occurrence of internal displacement. Sometimes,
governments will engage in semantic acrobatics, insisting
on terms such as “migrant” or “homeless” to avoid
the term “internally displaced person” and the notion of
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involuntary displacement that the term, by definition,
conveys. In some cases, only those displaced by the actions
of insurgent forces are considered by the authorities
to be “IDPs,” while those displaced by the actions of
government forces merely have “migrated.”
Moreover, raising awareness of internal displacement—
particularly when it occurs on a large scale—can have
political costs that governments are reluctant to incur.
In cases in which the government is anxious to demonstrate
to its own population and to the international
community that a conflict situation is improving and
that it is in control of the situation, drawing attention
to large-scale internal displacement may undermine the
image that it wishes to project. As discussed below, the
governments of Turkey, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sri
Lanka and Nepal have been reluctant at certain points
to highlight the fact that their military operations had
displaced large numbers of people or that they had been
unable to prevent other armed actors from displacing
people. When a government is engaged in a conflict and
eager to show that it is in control and that the situation
is improving, drawing attention to IDPs can be counterproductive.
Sometimes, as in the case of Myanmar, to
the government does not acknowledge the existence of
conflict-induced displacement. At the same time, there
are cases in which governments highlight the presence
of IDPs as a way of drawing attention to the human
consequences of external aggression, as in Georgia,
where the government has used the existence of IDPs
as evidence of the human harm suffered due to the conflicts
concerning Abkhazia and South Ossetia, in which
Russia also has played a part.
In other cases governments have been reluctant to
acknowledge internal displacement, either because it
was seen as reflecting poorly on their own policies or
because of a reluctance to acknowledge that IDPs have
rights. Thus, the United States government resisted
referring to those displaced by Hurricane Katrina as
IDPs, preferring the terms “homeless” or “evacuees,” 1
1 Chris Kromm and Sue Sturgis, Hurricane Katrina and
the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement: A Global