From Mohajer to Hamwatan: The Reintegration Experiences of Second generation Afghans Returning from Pakistan and Iran

In addition to the traumatic and post-traumatic effects migration has on young refugees, prolonged displacement poses a greater effect. It affects the young refugees’ perception of their selves, homeland and future. Reintegration of young refugees is more difficult as most of them have profound alienated feelings towards their homeland which they feel that they barely know and they often feel intense attachment to the host country in which they grew up. This chapter addresses some gaps to better understand the less visible social and emotional trajectories experienced by young Afghan refugees in the process of reintegration to their homeland. It examines the personal journeys resulting from the respondent’s experiences of Iran and Pakistan, and their return to Afghanistan: their resettlement and their remigration. It highlights the expectations and the meaning of returning and repatriation to the homeland through the perspectives of the young refugees. The first section of the chapter provides a background to the study and the approach for the selection of a target group. The next section discusses the contradictory characteristics of young Afghan refugees who grew up as refugees in Pakistan and Iran, and looks at their perceptions and expectations with regard to Afghanistan. The last sections are devoted to the discussion of the barriers to successful reintegration and the key issues which can provide support to young returning Afghans beyond material assistance.

Introduction: Dawn Chatty and Bill Finlayson

Dispossession and displacement have always afflicted life in the modern history of the Middle East and North Africa. Waves of people have been displaced from their homeland as a result of conflicts and social illnesses. At the end of the nineteenth century, Circassian Muslims and Jewish groups were dispossessed of their homes and lands in Eurasia. This was followed by the displacement of the Armenians and Christian groups in the aftermath of the First World War. They were followed by Palestinians who fled from their homes in the struggle for control over Palestine after the Second World War. In recent times, almost 4 million Iraqis have left their country or have been internally displaced. And in the summer of 2006, Lebanese, Sudanese and Somali refugees fled to neighbouring countries in the hope of finding peace, security and sustainable livelihoods. With the increasing number of refugees, this book presents a discourse on displacement and dispossession. It examines the extent to which forced migration has come to define the feature of life in the Middle East and North Africa. It presents researches on the refugees, particularly on the internally displaced people of Iran and Afghanistan. The eleven chapters in this book deal with the themes of displacement, repatriation, identity in exile and refugee policy. They cover themes such as the future of the Turkish settlers in northern Cyprus; the Hazara migratory networks between Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and the Western countries; the internal displacement among Kurds in Iraq and Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem; the Afghan refugee youth as a ‘burnt generation’ on their post-conflict return; Sahrawi identity in refugee camps; and the expression of the ‘self’ in poetry for Iran refugees and oral history for women Iraqi refugees in Jordan.

The Transnational Turn in Migration Studies and the Afghan Social Networks

Since the 1980s, migration has undergone various developments that have changed the understanding of the concept of migration. The former understanding of migration as the integration of the migrant in the host society or the return of the migrant to the society of origin was proceeded by complex migrations and multiple social relations across boundaries. This migration trend paved the way for the term ‘transnationalism’. This term suggests that sociocultural groups are no longer territorially defined but rather are defined through migrations, and a global ethnography has been created. This chapter illustrates the broad potential of the transnational approach by analysing Afghan refugees and migrants, particularly the Hazaras who originated in the mountainous region of Afghanistan. These refugees were a result of the 1978 communist coup and the 1979 Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. Afghan refugees form the largest displaced population. This exodus of the Afghans was not entirely dictated by war, insecurity and poverty but as well as the nomadic nature of their life where mobility is seen as a planned strategy. In migration and exile, the process of integration and definitive return are seldom achieved as movement and mobility is continuous.

What Visibility Conceals: Re-embedding Refugee Migration from Iraq

Since the Anglo-American invasion and the fall of the Ba’athist regime in 2003, Iraq has been through profound changes. New and heightened levels of human security have led to large numbers of refugees seeking refuge in neighbouring Arab countries such as Syria and Jordan. This has also resulted in internal displacement within the country. This chapter discusses the historical and political context of Iraqi displacement to the northern regions of Iraq and the neighbouring countries of Syria and Jordan. It examines the effect of the international humanitarian aid regime’s designation of ‘unprecedented refugee crisis’ to the forced migrants and to the political actors of the region. The creation of a state-centred approach and the visibility of Iraqi refugees created other invisibilities that concealed and obscured the question of the prevalence of forced migrations and the dynamics of cross-border ties which have spanned for decades. These trends of Iraqi migration have been shaped by successive coercive governments which have fragmented the population along religious, ethnic and ideological orientations and by the nature of the polities from which Iraqis sought security. By analysing the trends and context of Iraqi migration, this chapter sheds light on the true nature of the Iraqi refugee agenda.

The Refugee Factor in Two Protracted Conflicts: Cyprus and Palestine Compared

In the early years of the twenty-first century, two peace processes that were deemed promising came to a halt. In Cyprus, the Annan Plan was rejected by the majority of Greek-Cypriots and in Israel/Palestine, the Oslo Peace Process collapsed in the second intifada. This chapter provides a comparative exploration of the roles the refugees played as individuals and as groups in the eventual failure of various peace processes as well as the political issues that have contributed to such failure. It focuses on the Greek-Cypriot refugees and the Palestinian refugees as the treatment of the rights of these groups of refugees were deemed the most controversial issue in the peace processes. In this chapter, the historical conditions, legal statuses, access to political representations and the geopolitical factors that have influenced the manner with which the conflict and refugees are dealt with are explored and examined. The various sections of the chapter are devoted to the rationale behind the failure of the Annan Plan and the Oslo Peace Process and the role of the refugees in this failure. The chapter concludes with some suggestions about the implications of refugee issues in order to settle long-term conflict.

Narrative as Identity: Perspectives from an Iraqi Women Refugees’ Oral History Project

This chapter consists of collected oral histories of Iraqi women refugees in Jordan. It examines the identity of Iraqi women refugees as revealed through their personal narratives. In the Ba’athist regime, the Iraqi identity was reinforced as an Arab identity. During the 35-year rule of this regime, Iraqis watched other Arab nationalities enjoying privileges while they lived in Iran. After the fall of the regime, the new government emphasized Iraqi identity as separate from the Arab identity. The new regime imposed an Iranian identity within the concepts of ethnic and sectarian power sharing. While this new identity posed a dilemma with the manner refugees formed representations of themselves in host countries and with the distribution of privileges they used to enjoy in the former regime, many of the Iraqi women refugees still saw themselves as Arabs and refused the sectarian criteria. All the women interviewed in this chapter expressed the notion that their identity was challenged as their life circumstances demanded them to accommodate the changes they experience.

When the Self Becomes Other: Representations of Gender, Islam, and the Politics of Survival in the Sahrawi Refugee Camps

This chapter examines the ways in which the protracted Sahrawi refugee context has been represented by its political body, the Polisario Front, to its non-Sahrawi ‘audience’ in such a way as to assure continued political and humanitarian support. This chapter builds upon the recognition that the delivery of development aid is generally dependent on the capacity of the recipients to fulfil a set of non-economic conditionalities such as the creation of democratic political structures, the protection of human rights, and the promotion of gender equality. Refugees are expected to conform to the values of their sponsors. Conformity to these imposed values assuages them continued arrival of humanitarian supplies. However, such conditionalities do not necessarily lead to the modification of recipients’ socio-political structures as sponsors may expect. Rather, multiple forms of dependence on external aid and the broader political context have directly impacted the manners with which the recipients market themselves to their sponsors. In this chapter, the efforts of the Polisario Front in developing a particular representation of the Sahrawi ‘Self’ based upon the observations of its own observers form the focus of this chapter. It examines the strategies employed by the Front such as placing the Sahrawi refugee woman and solidarity movements as forefront representations of the refugee camps in order to secure external aid.

Epilogue: Dispossession and Forced Migration in the Twenty-first-century Middle East and North Africa: The Way Forward

The chapters presented in this volume have covered a wide range of case studies; the Sahrawi refugees in Algeria and Spain; the Palestinian refugees in the West Bank and Gaza; the Turkish settlers in Cyprus; the Iraqi refugees in Jordan and the internally displaced Iraqis in the northern Iraq; and the Afghan refugees in Iran. These chapters have opened up areas of research which are important to pursue. They have examined displacement and the impact of generation and gender including the physical and mental stress of refugee situations. They have explored the phenomenon of repatriation and its various forms such as voluntary repatriation and involuntary repatriation such as the case of the Afghan and Iraqi refugees. The chapters also have discussed the Palestinian ‘right of return’ within the context of legal, emotional and cultural expressions. In addition to these, the crisis in identity in exile has been addressed to provide a better understanding of assimilation, integration and alienation. Policies have also been considered to understand the international refugee regime as well as national and regional interpretations. The chapters in this volume hope to prove to be significant contributions to the understanding of the plight of refugees and displaced people and the political and economic universe in which they must operate. Refugees are categories of people who have lost the protection of their government and who thrive at the margins of the global nation-state system. Their struggle to survive depends upon turning their exile or forced migration around; to regain the protection of a government and to become ‘citizens’ once again either in the original homeland or a new nation. It is a quest all should sympathize with and support.

There Go the Neighbourhoods: Policy Effects vis-à-vis Iraqi Forced Migration

This chapter examines the emergence of sectarianism in Iraq. Sectarian identities have long persisted in Iraq. And although they tend to cause violence, sectarian violence did not persist as a social constant; rather, outbreaks of sectarian violence only happened on specific occasions. For some observers, Iraq is divided into three distinct ethno-sectarian regions: the Shi’i Arab in southern Iraq, the Sunni Arab in central Iraq, and the Sunni Kurdish in northern Iraq. These geographic divisions are seen within the tripartite ‘no-fly zone’ borders of 1991 to 2003. While this portrayal does bear some resemblance to reality, it is insufficient in defining Iraqi society. However in the wake of the 2003 Anglo-American invasion, the occupation authorities formed policies which encouraged gradual, progressive and incessant increases in social chaos and a sectarianism that eventually led to the violent geographic consolidation of Iraq’s ethno-sectarianism mapping.

‘Hey, Afghani!’ Identity Contentions among Iranians and Afghan Refugees

This chapter addresses issues of identity and rootlessness as expressed through poetry. It focuses in on the second generation of Afghan refugees who were portrayed as a confused generation subjected to the ‘pains of exile’ and ‘identity crisis’. It explores the representations of Afghans in Iran and examines the ways in which the Iran-educated Afghans responded and defied their marginalization through their own discourse and poetry. By examining the poetry of these second generation Afghan refugees, the social transformations taking place in this group or refugees and the tensions in the Iranian society are illuminated. These poems illustrate the distressing ambivalence experienced by the second-generation Afghan refugees in Iran.