Refugees and Forced Migration
Migration has been studied in Geography and the act of migration has been around for many years. There is even evidence that the early pre-agricultural humans migrated out of Africa to populate areas all over the world. (Norton, 146). Therefore, I believe that it would be safe to say that the migration of all living things has happened throughout history. The word migration, simply defined is "a particular kind of mobility that involves a spatial movement of residence" (Norton, 146). However, there is much more complex definition of migration. For one to interpret migration one must find the source or reason for migration. There are many reasons for migration, but all have a common theme. William Norton stated that: " People move from one location to another because they consider the new location to be more favourable, in some crusial respect, than the old location" (Norton, 146). The common idea is that people migrate to be in a better situation in one form or another. In some extreme circumstances people may be forced to leave a country. When people have no alternative but to move out of the country, it is usually due to political conflict (Norton, 150). The situation is commonly referred to as forced migration. The reasons fo
Finally, another source of insecurity may have come when free speech and free press were legislated. This caused many people, who never were informed of the conflict in Rwanda, to become more aware of the happenings in the country and the government's actions. This caused radical change in political views on the country (Olson, 219). This may have caused oppressed people to take a stance on change. These stances sometimes would have to revert to violence towards others. The violence and murders of others will always be an insecurity, which may produce the out come of forced migration. The tragedy, which happened in 1994, can be traced all the way back to the colonization of the country of Rwanda. But this can not be the central blame for this contasterfy, there were many other events which had to happened before any kind of war took place. The perfect metaphor for this situation is that of a janga game. All of the negative events leading up to genocide were blocks from the middle, because of the continuous negative events, eventually the tower has to fall. If the country and outsiders could have seen this happening they could have stopped the game. Now, the country has to pick up the pieces start to build back up. Hopefully the pieces, which get moved, if any, can be stopped before another cotasterpy happens. Furthermore, the Belgians forced the different tribes to be categorized into different groups. This was only the beginning of an ethnic conflict, which began to develop an issue of who was better. Accordingly, there became a clear hierarchy between the Belgians and each of the other tribes. (Uvin, 8) This lead to the first event of forced migration. As stated in the article Tragedy in Rwanda: The political Ecology of Conflict: "... a few Hutu educated at Catholic schools after World War II overthrew the Tutsi oligarchy in coup refereed to as the 'Social Revolution'". As the conflict progressed, the Hutu, who had more people then the Tutsi, ended up murdering thousands, while hundreds of thousands more fled the country (Uvin, 8). This greed for power and authority created insecurity for many in the country of Rwanda. www.unhcr.ch. October 3, 2002. 'United Nations official UNHCR site'. Through the facts and opinions presented in this essay, it is easy to see that there is not one specific source of insecurity behind the refugees of Rwanda. Rather, a collaboration of many events, caused forced migration in the country. It is safe to say that most people fled the country because of the violence and fear for their life. However, it is also important to look at the reasons why this violence occurred. Most of the blame though, can be put on the Government. The mistakes, which have been made throughout the years, were never corrected. It is up to society as a whole to look at problems of the third world, as well as any other country, who presently have refugees. By doing this we may f
Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1966
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page double spaced)
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