by Jesuit Refugee Service
In the 1980s, the plight of the boat people in the Asia Pacific region, which had inspired the founding of JRS, only worsened as the decade drew on. The number of refugees fleeing Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia grew enormously, causing JRS to expand its work in camps on the Thai-Cambodia border to refugee camps in Malaysia, Hong Kong, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Most of the work initially involved education, technical training, and health care, but as the repatriation of Vietnamese back to Vietnam began in 1989, JRS established legal advice units as well as psychosocial support programmes for potential returnees. By 1983, JRS had also started projects in African countries such as Ethiopia, Sudan, Tanzania, Zaire, and Kenya. It ran 28 schools for Ugandan refugees in southern Sudan, served 35,000 Burundian refugees in one camp in Tanzania, and provided legal assistance, cash assistance, and food aid to urban refugees in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi. By the end of the decade JRS was also supporting Mozambican refugees in Malawi and Angolan refugees in Zambia, and was working in Liberia and Angola with internally displaced people and returnees. In Latin America JRS started large-scale projects to assist refugees from the civil war in El Salvador who were dispersed across the region. It also accompanied Guatemalan refugees in Mexico.
The massive expansion of JRS work in the 1990s was in response to the flight of more than two million refugees from Burundi and Rwanda. It worked with survivors of massacres in those countries, and also accompanied large numbers of refugees who had fled to Tanzania and Zaire. Uganda became a significant locus of JRS education projects because of the Sudanese refugees who had fled to Adjumani in the north of that country, and it also began to work with Sudanese refugees in Kakuma camp in northern Kenya, which soon became the largest camp in the world with the influx of Somalis and Ethiopians fleeing regime collapse in their countries. The major development in Latin America in the 1990s was the repatriation of Salvadoran refugees: JRS provided education, livelihoods training, and health care for returnees, and also created community development programmes. In Asia, JRS focused its work on the Thai-Burma border, supporting refugees who had fled the military regime in Burma, and also did significant work with Bhutanese refugees in Nepal, internally displaced people in East Timor, and refugees in West Timor. JRS had started working in India with Tamil refugees from Sri Lanka in the 1980s, but in 1990 the surge in the numbers of Sri Lankan refugees arriving in India resulted in the setting up of 133 refugee camps India. JRS expanded its work to provide formal and technical education in many of those camps. In Cambodia JRS worked with landmine survivors, and became a major partner in the International Campaign to Ban Landmines. When the Campaign was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997, a JRS worker, Tun Channareth, himself a landmine survivor, received the award on its behalf.
By the mid-2000s, JRS was serving over 450,000 refugees worldwide, with direct services being provided in more than 50 countries. Conflict in Africa continued to be a major drive of forced displacement, and JRS established new projects in countries such as Guinea, Liberia, and Ivory Coast. While JRS had traditionally worked in refugee camps, it now saw more and more of its services being needed in cities where large numbers of refugees in protracted situations of exile were now moving in search of work and shelter. In southeast Europe JRS continued to work with large numbers of refugees from the Balkan conflict. The decade also witnessed greater antagonism towards refugees entering Europe, and JRS rapidly expanded its work in European countries, offering shelter and food to new arrivals, and visiting asylum seekers in detention centres in places such as the UK. Another development was the increase in the internally displaced population around the world, often because of conflict and famine, but also due to natural and environmental disaster. The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami displaced two million people, and JRS responded by rapidly expanding its operations in Indonesia and Sri Lanka.
JRS has developed a distinctive style of service to refugees which it calls “accompaniment”. Fr Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, the former superior general of the Jesuit order, described the accompaniment provided by JRS as “friendship, trust, and understanding” that “give refugees hope in their struggle against overwhelming odds”. In the training of JRS staff, from the beginning of the organisation to the present day, it is emphasised that our “being with” refugees and other forcibly displaced people is more important than our “doing for” them. JRS strives for excellence in the services we provide, these days particularly in the areas of social cohesion and reconciliation, education, and livelihoods training, but the impulse to do its best for refugees is born out of the organisation’s emphasis on accompaniment, which is to “pay extreme attention to” – which is just another way to say “to love” - the individual refugees whom JRS staff encounter. Accompaniment also has very practical effects. JRS had staff with US citizenship volunteer to live with refugees in El Salvador because the military knew that if they used US-supplied weapons to kill US citizens, military and other aid to the dictatorship would cease: accompaniment helped protect human rights there. Regular visits to asylum seekers in detention centres help to ensure that they are not mistreated: accompaniment is a means of witnessing. Listening to the stories of refugees in Thailand and Cambodia maimed by landmines taught JRS about the importance of getting rid of such devices: accompaniment impelled JRS to join the coalition to ban landmines. The phenomenon of protracted refugee.