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The political history of Uganda’s refugee policies

The political history of Uganda’s refugee policies

Uganda’s ‘self-reliance’ policy for refugees has been widely praised, and described by UNHCR as a model of development-based assistance for other countries to emulate. In contrast to many refugee-hosting countries, Uganda’s ‘self-reliance’ policy allows refugees the right to work and freedom of movement. In 2016, the BBC suggested that Uganda is ‘one of the best places to be a refugee.' While there is evidence to suggest that there are positive outcomes from the 'self-reliance' approach, rarely have these policies been examined in historical or political context. 

Based on archival research and elite interviews, I recently published a piece in African Affairs which explores the political history of Uganda’s ‘self-reliance’ policies. The Ugandan model is celebrated because self-reliance is assumed to offer an alternative to refugee camps and to support opportunities for refugees to be independent of aid. What has received less scrutiny are the complex and sometimes ambivalent politics and historical contingencies that underpins self-reliance.

The article reveals that, despite frequently being represented as novel, there is significant continuity in Uganda’s refugee policies since the country's independence in 1962, and in the politics that underlie them. A striking feature of this history is how ostensibly liberal policies have emerged from illiberal politics. I illustrate this here by demonstrating the important and neglected legacies of colonialism and Idi Amin in shaping the self-reliance model.

Colonialism and Post-Independence 

Colonial rule laid the groundwork for Uganda's 'self-reliance' policies. The British government had used Uganda to host 7,000 Polish refugees during the Second World War. The Nakivale settlement, now Africa’s oldest refugee camp and an exemplar of the country’s rural settlement model, opened in 1958, expanding this model by providing Rwandan Tutsis with access to plots of arable land. Almost immediately after independence in 1962, Uganda received international recognition and reward for its policies. As early as 1964, Uganda’s Foreign Minister was invited to UNHCR’s Executive Committee to showcase projects ‘aimed at making the refugees self-supporting.

By 1967, Uganda hosted nearly a quarter of Africa’s total refugee population, but received half of UNHCR’s Africa programme budget. The country was made one of only six African members of UNHCR’s Executive Committee. In 1968, UNHCR openly praised Uganda for its 'very progressive' approach to allowing refugees to live as what it called 'free-livers', working and residing outside of the settlements. Throughout the 1960s, UNHCR increasingly sought development assistance through the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in order to support and ‘compensate’ Uganda for the ‘burden’ of hosting large numbers of refugees. 

The international community’s motivation for adopting a development-based approach was not entirely altruistic. Faced with a growing Africa Programme budget that was only 60% funded and had doubled to $10m between 1967 and 1968, the High Commissioner for Refugees noted in his address to UNDP: 

Our aim has always been that once refugees have reached the stage of being self-supporting, the settlements which we have helped to establish should be incorporated in a regional development plan carried out under the aegis of the United Nations Development Programme or some other instance concerned with development per se…It is the logical means of ensuring that refugee programmes go beyond the stage of being alien islands of population and achieve true integration within the scope of plans geared to the well-being of an entire area to the benefit of all its residents. 

From the perspective of the Ugandan government, the presence of refugees created few costs. The settlements were in sparsely populated areas with an abundance of arable land.  Promoting the 'self-supporting' agenda conferred benefits upon the newly-independent government. It brought development aid and supported nation-building by bringing resources to peripheral regions of the country such as the south west and West Nile, which had previously been marginalised under the Buganda-centric British Protectorate.  

The Neglected Role of Idi Amin

Idi Amin is generally associated with oppressive refugee policies; he is well-known for his persecution and expulsion of the Ugandan Asians. However, his refugee policies were more nuanced. Of Kakwa origin, and lacking support in central Buganda, he regarded refugees as an opportunity to strengthen his regime. He recruited large numbers of soldiers and senior civil servants from the Sudanese, Rwandan, and Congolese communities. From the Rwandan community, for example, he appointed Justus Byagagire and Raphael Nshekanablo to ministerial positions, and John Bunyenyezi to a military leadership position; from the southern Sudanese community, he promoted Moses Ali, who would later become both refugee minister and deputy prime minister.  Building support within the refugee communities also served a geopolitical function, enabling Amin to destabilise Habyarimana’s Rwanda and Nimeiry’s Sudan, by enabling the settlements to provide sanctuary to rebel groups in exile.

Amin created several of the refugee settlements that endure today in the West Nile and the South West. With international funding, settlements established in the 1960s were upgraded with new facilities, particularly in the South West of the country. He built new settlements for Zaireans in Ibuga in the west and for Sudanese in Karamoja in the east. It was Amin who, in June 1976, oversaw Uganda’s accession to the 1951 Refugee Convention and created the Determination of Refugee Status Committee. 

For all this, he was praised by UNHCR. In 1977, the Voice of Uganda newspaper photographed the UNHCR representative shaking hands with Amin at Cape Town View in Kampala, and reported that '[the representative] said Uganda’s contributions to refugee settlement is more than all the African countries put together.' In 1979, Amin became the first Ugandan head of state to commit to work on a new Refugee Act that would explicitly provide the right to work and freedom of movement.

The Enduring Legacy 

After the fall of Amin’s regime in 1979, his predecessor Milton Obote returned to power in 1980. His support base was almost the inverse of Amin's. This had significant implications for refugees. Obote strengthened the settlement model as a method of population control. Revenge killings were carried out in West Nile. 

Across the south-west, Rwandans were viewed as Amin loyalists. Under Amin, the majority of Rwandan refugees in Uganda had been living in secondary cities in the South West or integrated among the rural host communities; by 1981, only 35-40% actually lived in the settlements. Obote used a major international event held in 1981 in Geneva, the International Conference on Refugees in Africa (ICARA), to request funding for seven settlements in the South West, including the Kyaka II settlement which continues to exist today. Within a year, the government began rounding up Rwandan refugees and forcing them violently into the settlements.  

When Yoweri Museveni assumed the presidency in 1986, his alliances were comparable to Amin’s. Throughout his time as President, he has used the presence of refugees in those regions as a means to attract international money and legitimacy, while also channelling money to the refugee-hosting regions on which he depends for support. To achieve this, Museveni made refugees a development issue, and the international community has backed him through a series of strikingly similar initiatives reframed under different acronyms – the SRS (1999), ReHOPE (2015), the CRRF (2019).

At each juncture, Uganda’s self-reliance model has been presented without reference to history, implicitly represented as novel. Nuances aside, the basis of the ‘model’ had long been present, building upon the legacies of colonialism and illiberalism. Overall, the analysis highlights the need to see refugee policies, including those regarded as ‘progressive’, in political and historical context. But it also gives rise to a critical normative dilemma: how should international humanitarian actors engage with ostensibly liberal policies forged from illiberal politics? 

The banner image shows people in the marketplace at Nakivale refugee settlement, Uganda—originally opened in 1957, though the picture is recent. Detail from an image provided by Refugee Studies Centre, Oxford.

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