stabilized. In India, refugees were accommodated in transit camps, which were run by provincial governments with financial help from the central government. In Pakistan, where the situation was more urgent (one in ten people was a refugee), the new administration had less state infrastructure and experience than its Indian counterpart to deal with the refugee crisis. The Pakistani government did not come up with a coherent strategy to deal with refugee settlement until late September 1947. At that point, refugee camps were set up in West Punjab and an Emergency Committee of the Cabinet was created to manage the distribution of food and emergency aid to refugees, in conjunction with the Joint Refugee Council.12
The rising number of refugees in transit and refugee camps signaled that the situation was unsustainable and that more needed to be done to rehabilitate and integrate refugee populations. In India, the Ministry for Relief and Rehabilitation was renamed the Ministry of Rehabilitation in 1948 and took on the mission of preparing the refugees to be resettled in newly constructed townships. Refugees were relocated to more permanent camps, where they were provided with vocational and technical training; some were given remunerative employment,13 and were then gradually dispersed into the new townships.
In its resettlement strategy, the Pakistani government was more draconian: in August 1948, it declared a state of emergency that gave it the right to resettle refugees from Punjab in other provinces. There, provisions were made to provide housing for urban refugees and loans for agricultural land and inputs for the rural refugees. However, Pakistan tended to be more generous to the relatively more prosperous—and thus influential—Punjabis than to the Bengalis, most of whom were poor farmers.
In the eastern part, given the lesser hostility between Hindus and Muslims, the two countries’ strategy was to prevent major population movements across the border through bilateral negotiations of rights for religious minorities. In the 1948 Inter-Dominion Conference, the two governments agreed that both would be responsible for protecting the religious minorities who resided in their respective states.
In 1950 the two countries negotiated to remove administrative burdens for those seeking citizenship, and provide guarantees for the rights of religious minorities in their chosen residence. These negotiations culminated in the Nehru-Liaquat Pact, which provided religious minorities in both India and Pakistan “with complete equality of citizenship irrespective of religion; a full sense of security in respect of life, culture, property and personal honor and also guaranteed fundamental human rights of the minorities, such as freedom of movement, speech, occupation and worship.”14 Both countries subsequently established minority commissions to implement the pact.15
However, these agreements and negotiations were not enough to prevent some sporadic migration, and the governments had to respond accordingly. For example, as the result of unrest in late 1949, the Indian government was forced to set up refugee camps in West Bengal. It used the same model applied in the Punjab, but because the refugees were mostly rural, the government arranged for loans or grants to enable them to purchase land. Yet the steady stream of refugees arriving from Pakistan was putting more pressure on land, and starting in 1955 the government of India actively sought, albeit unsuccessfully, gradually to close the camps in West Bengal.16
Assessment and Possible Lessons
Several important lessons emerge from the India-Pakistan partition:
The case underscores the importance of educating the most affected local communities about the implications of a partition or secession before it happens and giving them plenty of time to digest the new borders. Neither happened in this case, creating fear and panic.
When tensions between different groups are high before partition, it is important to have key institutions, especially law enforcement, in place and functioning well in order to be able to maintain order if tensions escalate. In India and Pakistan, these institutions were barely functional at partition; had they been, many deaths and displacements could have been avoided.
In a secession, the parties can fashion joint solutions to help evacuate refugee populations even if relations between the two states are acrimonious. The establishment of MEO is a good example.
An assessment of the refugees’ intentions can help countries carve more coherent and long-term strategies to quickly integrate them if they so wish. Both India and Pakistan simply assumed initially that most of the refugees were there only temporarily and so came late to the need for resettlement.
Transparency in resettlement benefits is key, as the Pakistani case showed. Indeed, by favoring Punjabi refugees over Bengali ones, the government fueled the tensions between these two groups.
The Breakup of the Soviet Union and the Russian Diaspora
Issue and Outcome
When the Soviet Union (hereafter referred to as “former Soviet Union,” or FSU) was disbanded in 1991,17 fifteen new republics were formed and, consequently, an estimated 43.4 million people living outside of their “ethnic homelands” instantly became foreigners in their countries of residence.18 Russians constituted the majority of this group, with 25.3 million of them living outside the Russian Federation. In the years that followed the disbanding of the FSU, many in this new Russian diaspora immigrated back to Russia: 3.3 million Russians who had previously lived in a different FSU state moved to Russia between 1989 and 2002.19
In general, Russians living in the other NIS were not the targets of violence, and thus were not forced to leave. Technically, then, they cannot be considered “forced migrants” or “refugees.” Nevertheless, because Russians had acquired dominant positions in the non-Russian states under the Soviet regime, at independence they were in some cases seen as “occupiers” and representatives of the “former colonial power,” and their positions were sometimes threatened by the new government policies implemented by the other NIS. Moreover, rising nationalism in some of the NIS made ethnic Russians feel less at home, particularly in the non-Slavic states.20
In essence, the Russian migrants were “ethno-migrants,” who left their homes in the non-Russian states for various reasons, including anxiety about their future and economic well-being outside Russia. The context of this anxiety was rising violence, even if not directed at them, or of the new states trying to establish a national identity separate from that of the FSU or Russia.21 The pull of economics also attracted some of the migration: Russia’s economy was twice the size of those of all the FSU states combined and was more prosperous than any of them except that of Estonia. Probably for economic reasons, fewer Russians emigrated from the more nationalist (but richer) Baltic states than from other NIS that were formally more welcoming but poorer.
While the Russian federal government set up the Federal Migration Service (FMS), and a number of local governments followed suit with their respective regional organizations, very little state support was accorded to the settlers beyond a small emergency payment. As a result, many of the returnees were confronted with difficulties in finding housing and employment commensurate with their professional qualifications. This resulted in widespread dissatisfaction among them and a sense of instability, as well as a loss of confidence in the state institutions that were supposed to provide them with resettlement support.
The international community, through the UNHCR, IOM, and several NGOs, played a key role in the resettlement process by assisting Russia along two lines. First, the UNHCR and the IOM, in particular, helped the Russian government set up the institutional and legislative framework for dealing with migration. Second, they provided support to the migrants in integrating themselves in Russia, in the forms of both direct assistance and individual capacity building.22
Course of the Dispute
Although Russian settlements in non-Russian states on the periphery date back to the sixteenth century, the migration accelerated under more systematic sponsorship of the Soviet region. In a number of these states, the Russian population increased rapidly; by 1989, Russians on average made up 18 percent of the population in non-Russian states and 27 percent in their urban areas. Moreover, a number of ethnically non-Russian Soviets, known as “Russophones,” identified themselves with Russia in terms of culture and language.23 The