© 1997 by Oxford University Press
The Treatment of Somali Refugees in Ethiopia under Ethiopian and International Law
* Assistant Legal Expert, Ethiopian Privatization Agency
Today, as the refugee problem is growing, it is the developing world that is bearing by far the greatest and disproportionate burden of its consequences. Being home to 6.7 million refugees, Africa particularly continues to be the heart of exodus and the heart of refuge. Environmental degradation, famine and armed conflicts have tormented the continent's population and have resulted in enormous forced population movements. Refugee flows have for long besieged the Horn of Africa, with the Somali refugee crisis clearly being the centre of this situation for the last nearly 20 years. Devastated by political instability, total collapse of government and clan warfare, Somalia has at present around half a million of its citizens seeking refuge in neighbouring countries. In Ethiopia alone, there are 285,000 refugees, constituting more than three-quarters of the refugee population in the country, who are now seriously challenging their host country's tolerance. Eastern Ethiopia, for centuries inhabited by people of Somali descent, is now accommodating the great majority of these refugees in the eight camps along the Ethio-Somali border. To protect its rather scarce natural resources and infrastructure from the pressure of this overwhelming influx, Ethiopia has confined the refugees in camps and has limited their rights pertaining to movement, education and work opportunities. Against this background, the Somalis have been met by a virtually non-existent framework of municipal refugee law in Ethiopia. Measures affecting refugees in Ethiopia hardly have any clear legal basis in national law but, nonetheless, have cumulatively amounted to national standards of treatment. In this article, an attempt is made to demonstrate the gap between the standards set in international refugee law and those on a national level, and to what legal and practical constraints this gap can be attributed. An overview of the international refugee instruments ratified by Ethiopia—the 1951 Convention, the 1967 Protocol and the 1969 OAU Convention—precedes the discussion on the challenges that are to be met in the treatment of the Somali refugees in Ethiopia. Finally, the author shows that it is rather futile to try to eliminate refugee problems without paying due attention to their causes, while the difficulties in the search for durable solutions to crises like the Somali refugee problem, unparalleled by prevention, are also discussed.