Charny: looking at the whole system.
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Joel Charny, vice-president for policy of Refugees International, travelled to the Democratic Republic of the Congo on an assessment visit shortly before the Nyiragongo volcano erupted. As he left, he spoke to Ruth Gidley about U.S. public attitudes and economics since the September 11 attacks, the knock-on effects for advocacy work and the challenge of directing attention to Africa.AN: Tell me about your current trip.JC: We're on our way to the eastern Congo, to Goma and Bukavu. It's a long-term commitment for Refugees International. We've been preoccupied with this region since the Rwanda genocide in 1994 and have been trying to raise awareness about the magnitude of the problem in Congo, particularly in the U.S., but also more globally. We're making small progress. The Bush administration's Africa team have put Congo up there with Sudan and the Great Lakes region as an area they were going to focus on, but in the U.S. in the last three months it's been practically impossible to raise any international issue that's not in the context of the "war against terrorism". Now, with the progress that's been made, on the battle front in Afghanistan, we have some sense that it may be possible in the media and in the public mind to begin to talk about other things.AN: Have you come to any conclusions about the wider, long-term implications of September 11 attacks and U.S. response?JC: It's just not clear. In the U.S. NGO community, we're concerned that Afghanistan will take away money from other regions. Initially there was optimism that this would be a supplemental allocation, but now there's concern that, in fact because of budget pressure, that we're in a zero-sum game and the money that's badly needed in Afghanistan will take away from the money that's badly needed elsewhere. That's talking about the U.S. government donations, not the donations of individual citizens to agencies. AN: What about the current economic climate?JC: The U.S. is in a recession for the first time in 10 years. I participated in a discussion in New York in early October and one or two of the larger agencies had already laid off staff. They were experiencing probably their worst private fundraising in quite some time and they weren't expecting a rapid improvement, because of the possible economic consequences of September 11. On the other hand, the U.S. public really does give generously when they see a crisis in front of them. The peak fundraising season is from the first of October until the first of January, and I haven't seen figures yet as to whether people responded well; if they responded only to Afghanistan; did they give more broadly. At Refugees International, which is not an operational agency, we did have some major donors call us out of blue, who hadn't supported us for some time. This is anecdotal evidence that maybe this is a compelling crisis that made people think again about international issues. That's one possibility, but I don't think there's any doubt that Africa's been completely pushed off the map. It's never really on the map, and now it's even further from people's minds. That wouldn't bode well for programmes that depend on earmarked donations for Africa. What tends to happen is that we can be seized by one major international crisis at a time and that crowds everything else out.'t think there's any doubt that Africa's been completely pushed off the map. It's never really on the map, and now it's even further from people's minds. That wouldn't bode well for programmes that depend on earmarked donations for Africa. What tends to happen is that we can be seized by one major international crisis at a time and that crowds everything else out.AN: Have U.S. public attitudes become more hostile towards refugees?JC: Definitely. It's going to be a struggle to maintain the right to asylum. None of the people who committed the attacks on September 11 were refugees but there's a general sense that it's going to be a harder sell to the American public to continue a sort of open-door mentality. On the one hand, we're a nation of immigrants and there's a very strong current that we need to maintain that. You don't throw that out the window because of the attacks on September 11, but certainly forces that want to limit immigration have had their hand strengthened.AN: What effect could that have?JC: Our concern is that refugees -- not immigrants, but people with a legitimate fear of persecution and a need to find asylum -- will be the secondary concern about foreigners' hidden agendas. From a very practical perspective, September 11 was a huge setback in the refugee admissions programme, because the screening process was suspended on security grounds. The Immigration and Naturalisation Service pulled their personnel back from the field, and until very recently, no screening was happening.It's restarted, but the Bush administration for the fiscal year 2002 set a refugee admissions figure of only 70,000. That's down from 200,000 in the early 1980s, from 140,000 in the early 1990s and down from 80,000 or 85,000 in the last year of the Clinton administration. So the trend in terms of slots available for legitimate refugees is going down already. It was hard enough to get screened before September 11 and it's going to be even more difficult now. The security review is going to be really intense and since no one wants to make a mistake, the default option is going to be: "When in doubt, say no." How would you like to be a Somali right now, in a camp in northern Kenya, trying to get access to the U.S.? It's going to be a nightmare.AN: Has it become easier to debate asylum and civil rights issues again now?JC: There's an immediate, passionate reaction for something like September 11, but years of work don't get thrown away because of one incident like that. The refugee asylum advocates are actually cautiously optimistic that they can get reasonable discussion going again. The big concern is around detention without a hearing. The Refugee Act of 1996 gave a lot of discretion to immigration agents at the border to detain people without a hearing and to deny them asylum. There was an effort in the 2001 Congressional session to look at something called the Refugee Protection Acct, which would try to deal with some of the negative consequences of an overreaction since the middle 1990s. The people working on this issue are in touch with their friends in Congress and the feeling is that it might be possible to revive the Refugee Protection Act in 2002.AN: How did you become involved in this work?JC: I was in the Peace Corps in Central Africa in the mid 1970s. When I got back I was in graduate school and I volunteered at Oxfam America in Boston at the time of the Cambodia relief effort, and that led to being sent to Cambodia about a year after the Khmer Rouge were deposed. That, in turn, led to working for Oxfam America for 15 years in Asia and eventually more globally. I was overseas director and then policy director. Then, in the mid 1990s, I worked for four years in Cambodia on a really interesting project of the U.N. Development Programme, doing post-conflict reconstruction in Cambodia.AN: Do you still feel close to Cambodia?JC: Yes. I'll always be interested in Cambodia. Thankfully, the situation there is gradually improving and it's slowly but surely becoming a semi-normal country. Cambodia is, hopefully, a place where you're not going to see another major humanitarian disaster. So much of my work has been in Asia, I'm probably most comfortable working there.AN: Is it rare to have moved from a focus on Africa to Asia?JC: Yes. It is actually quite unusual, because people who get started in Africa find it very compelling. The reason I'm looking forward to this trip to Congo is I don't think I've been in Africa in 10 years.AN: What made you want to work with Refugees International?JC: I was attracted to Refugees International because, like Oxfam America, we don't take government money, we don't take U.N. money. Our advocacy programme is similar in the sense that we take on the tough issues, take the difficult positions, really get out there and analyse issues. We're really involved in looking at the whole system of humanitarian response, which is something that interests me. So there was a good fit there in terms my Cambodia experience, where I'd seen some of the successes and some of the failures in terms of responding to large-scale humanitarian crises. In other words, it's not just about refugee rights, it's also about how the whole U.N. and international community could be much more effective at preventing conflict and responding to conflict when it does occur.
