“A Refugee is…” – The Refugee Dictionary

         

UK for UNHCR Trustee Mevan Babakar, who was a refugee from the Gulf war in the 1990s

 

What does the word “refugee” mean to you? 

 

For Maya Ghazal, a Syrian refugee and a pilot, “A refugee is a human being with hopes and dreams like everyone else. A refugee can be anyone, like a pilot flying your plane – a pilot like me!”

 

And for actor David Morrissey, UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador, ”A refugee is “a boy who had to give up his childhood to provide for his family.”

 

What is it for you? 

To mark the 70th anniversary of the 1951 UN Refugee Convention, on 28 July, UK for UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency’s UK charity, is asking Britons to help compile a dictionary that will define only one word – “refugee” – but in thousands of different personal, emotive and thought-provoking ways. 

 The (physical) dictionary with its 1000s definitions of the term “refugee” will be unveiled on 28 July, the day, 70 years ago, when the convention first legally defined the term ‘refugee’ in universal terms and outlined the rights and obligations of women, men and children fleeing the horrors of war and persecutions to seek safety in another country.

Since then, the word refugee has taken on countless personal meanings, so “The Refugee Dictionary” aims to remind us of the rich tapestry of stories and futures made possible because of this significant human rights convention - and celebrate and encourage the UK’s proud tradition of giving refuge by inviting the public to join in.

 

It is hoped the project will bring thousands of new meanings to the word and highlight that refugees aren’t confined or defined by one word, but are individuals with myriad rich stories, hopes and lives.

 

UK for UNHCR is encouraging everyone to take part, from those who have sought refuge in the UK or people whose family members were refugees, to those who simply want to celebrate the positive role of refugees in their communities and to the country.

 

You can enter your definition until July 12^th here. 

 

Translating Global Refugee Movement to song

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Listen to this unusual, fascinating and deeply moving experiment: four decades of global refugee movement translated into a three-minute music video. 

Brian Foo, a New York City-based programmer and visual artist who calls himself a 'data-driven DJ,' has generated this song using refugee data from the United Nations from 1975 to 2012. 

"The quantity, length, and pitch of the song's instruments are controlled by the volume of refugee movement and distance traveled between their countries of origin and asylum," Foo writes in a blog post, explaining the methodology behind the video. 

“The song composition is entirely algorithmic and is composed of the following building blocks: 
• Each year between 1975 and 2012 correlates to a 4-second segment in the song. 
• The annual global aggregate volume of refugee migration controls the quantity of instruments playing. The higher the volume of refugee migration, the more instruments are added to the song. 
• The annual average distance of refugee migration controls the duration and pitch of the instruments. Longer distances yield instruments that play longer and lower-pitch notes (e.g. long distances: , short distances: ). 
• The annual amount of countries with 1000+ refugees control the variety of instruments playing, where the more countries with 1000+ refugees, the more variety of instruments are playing in the song.” 

Foo decided to limit the song to these four components and not add additional context, such as the reasons for displacement, civil wars, invasions, coups, elections, as he believed it would add too much complexity. He wanted “the listener to intuitively and viscerally experience the sheer volume of displaced populations and the distance they travel from their home country.” And you can really feel this: the song starts gently, then sweeps you along and makes you dizzy as the numbers of refugees grow.

Four seconds in the song correlate to one historical year. In 1975, which is the first year of Foo's visualization, there are about 1.6 million world refugees. Fifteen years later, the number of world refugees has increased by 900 percent and the refugee movement has become truly global. 

 His song was largely inspired by The Refugee Project, an interactive web project and map of refugee migrations since 1975. For more context behind some of the numbers for each year, go to The Refugee Project website and click through their interactive temporal map. And for more information on Foo’s song, click here. 

Syria’s war creates biggest rise in global refugees since 1994

Syrian boys walk shoulder to shoulder in the rain at the Boynuyogun refugee camp on the Turkish-Syrian border in Hatay province February 8, 2012. REUTERS/Murad Sezer

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Syria's war has contributed to the biggest rise in global refugee numbers since 1994, the year of the Rwandan genocide and the height of conflict in the Balkans, according to the U.N.refugee agency (UNHCR)’s annual report. 

By the end of 2012, more than 45.2 million people worldwide were refugees, seeking asylum or displaced in their own country -- and the number increased on average by one every 4.1 seconds.

There are as many refugees who fled Syria since January 1 as the total number of refugees who fled all over the world during 2012, said U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres.   This year, the total number of refugees stands at 1.65 million, but UNHCR predicts the number will more than double by the end of this year, reaching 3.45 million. 

Syria also has about 4.25 million internally displaced people (IDPs) - people forced from their homes by the spiralling violence who are displaced within Syria itself - a number the United Nations expects to remain constant for the rest of the year.

“IDPs have often been the invisible and forgotten victims of this brutal conflict that has raged since 2011, out of the media spotlight and largely sidelined by the political wrangling between all parties to the conflict and their international backers,” said Donatella Rovera, Amnesty International’s Senior Crisis Response Adviser.

Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey and Iraq are shouldering most of the refugee burden, with help from foreign aid donors such as the European Union, Kuwait, the United States and Japan.

There was no alternative strategy to hoping for an end to the fighting or accepting the risk of an explosion in the Middle East, Guterres said.  "Either this conflict stops, sooner rather than later, or the humanitarian consequences become out of proportion with anything we have known in the recent past."

Aside from Syria, recent refugee black spots include Mali, Democratic Republic of Congo and Sudan, but Guterres said there were signs of hope in Somalia, which is emerging from two decades of war.