Conditions that Force People to Flee

The conditions that drive people to leave Burma, Zimbabwe, and North Korea combine political and economic factors, but political persecution and deprivation of basic rights are prevalent. In Burma, the government continues to exploit its people through forced labor and conscription, excessive taxation, physical and sexual abuse, and restrictions on political, economic, and religious freedom. Especially relevant in the Burma case are the on-going warfare against ethnic-based insurgent movements in the east, in which persecution based on ethnicity is widespread, and the recent severe crackdown on the demonstrations by monks and civilians protesting economic hardship and the suppression of the democracy movement.

In Zimbabwe, government acts of repression against the political opposition include physical attacks, torture, and arbitrary arrest and imprisonment. Zimbabwe currently suffers from a lack of basic goods, such as food, petrol, soap, and paraffin, and the domestic economy is near total collapse due to government mismanagement.

In the mid-90s, North Korea experienced famine in which more than one million people died and the survivors in the poorest parts of the country have never fully recovered. Access to public goods, like food, education, health care, shelter, and employment, is determined based on the class status of the family, which derives from alleged political allegiances during the revolutionary period in the 1930s and 40s and is immutable. Members of the “hostile” class, which constitutes more than a quarter of the population, are the last to receive entitlements, which proved disastrous when the comprehensive welfare regime collapsed in the early 1990s. North Korea operates an extensive internal system of secret political prisons and severely punishes people who are caught trying to leave the country or are arrested and deported from China.

Challenges to Protection

Asylum seekers that are part of mixed flows present challenges to the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and non-governmental organizations that may wish to assist them. As UNHCR itself points out, asylum seekers often have no choice but to use the same illegal means of entry as economic migrants. They are therefore prey to people smuggling networks that may extort funds or sell them into forced labor or sexual slavery.

Assuming they make it to an international border, asylum seekers confront a hostile environment. In addition to their vulnerability to forced labor and trafficking, they face arrest and deportation by border guards and local police on the lookout for any and all border crossers, whom they assume are illegal migrants. Furthermore, the protection potentially offered by UNHCR, such as the provision of temporary shelter while its staff conducts refugee status determination procedures or of an initial document recognizing the person’s status as an asylum seeker, is frequently absent, as countries that insist on controlling illegal economic migration restrict the agency’s access to asylum seekers. UNHCR does not always place priority on this aspect of protection and in some cases lacks the human resources to do so.

China goes so far as to completely prevent UNHCR staff from accessing the border province where North Koreans seek asylum, even though China is a states party to the Refugee Convention and a member of the UNHCR Executive Committee. More frequently, countries may allow UNHCR staff to travel to the region where the migration is taking place but prevent the agency from actually determining if any asylum seekers qualify for refugee status. Thailand, which is not a signatory of the Refugee Convention, takes this approach in the case of Burmese crossing the border, limiting the UNHCR role to observing a deeply flawed review process by government Provincial Admissions Boards. South Africa and Botswana, both of which are states parties to the Refugee Convention, impose similar restrictions.

Once they cross the border, asylum seekers in these situations are difficult for UNHCR and non-governmental organizations to reach. While the scale of the overall movement over time is enormous, at any given moment the exodus may be a matter of a few individuals. With no welcoming presence on the other side of the border, as experienced during mass movements monitored and responded to by humanitarian agencies, asylum seekers have to scatter and go into hiding just to avoid arrest and deportation.

Safe places are few and far between. There are refugee camps for Burmese in Thailand, but the Thai government restricts access to them based on narrow criteria to qualify for refugee status and the ethnic background of the individuals. Members of a major ethnic minority group in Burma, the Shan, are denied permission to reside in the camps. In the case of Zimbabweans in southern Africa, the situation varies by country; South African churches run a few shelters while the Zambians are more flexible and allow Zimbabweans to live openly and move back and forth across the border. Botswana is the most severe, with a policy of placing asylum seekers in detention facilities while processing their cases, then placing them immediately in camps if the appeal is granted. In China, North Koreans have almost no options. Women marry Chinese men just to have access to food and a place to live while others try to locate shelters run by church groups. However, the authorities consider these shelters illegal, forcing their staff and the refugees into a furtive existence to escape arrest and deportation.

Another challenge in these settings is paradoxical: as vulnerable as they are, many asylum seekers prefer not to be in camps, which are normally where international agencies care for refugees. People prefer to work and if possible provide support to family members that may have been left behind. In the current case of Zimbabweans in southern Africa, for example, RI found that asylum seekers were depriving themselves to accumulate enough cash to buy goods for their relatives back home. Buses loaded with privately-purchased essentials are a frequent sight on routes leading into Zimbabwe. Along the China-North Korea border in 2003 and 2004, few refugees expressed a desire to move on to South Korea, as this would have meant an irrevocable break with their remaining relatives back home. Humanitarian work consisted not only of providing food and shelter to asylum seekers but also equipping North Koreans with food and medicines to take home periodically to their families. These journeys were costly and dangerous, but the supplies provided were a lifeline for many deprived people.