UNHCR exhibit shows plight of urban refugees

Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The annual “Dialogue” meeting at UNHCR (UN High Commissioner for Refugees), 9-10 December, focuses on the relatively new phenomenon of urban refugees.
Children play in front of Eliécer Baron’s home in Cartagena. The community leader organized neighbours to build a school for displaced children and they are now looking for computers to equip it.

The high-level meetings were accompanied by the opening of a photo exhibit at the United Nations building in Geneva Wednesday evening. “A struggle for rights”, by Geneva-based photographer Zalmai, shows some of the people, urban refugees, who often live unnoticed by their neighbours in three cities in three countries: Colombia, Malaysia, and South Africa.

The exhibit is open to the public.

The photographs were shot during five months, and show the stark reality, in black and white, of refugees and displaced persons in three cities not immediately associated with massive dislocations of people. Zalmai spent time among the internally displaced in Cartagena, on Colombia’s Caribbean coast, already poor country people who were uprooted by the simmering conflict over the drugs trade in the country.

In South Africa, the photographer depicts the plight of the human flotsam from three or four countries of Africa who have sought refuge in the country in recent years, the most recent being refugees from Zimbabwe fleeing that country’s economic implosion and ongoing violence.

Many of those captured on film by Zalmai lost everything a second time during the outbreak of xenophobia that engulfed South Africa in 2008, leaving more than 60 dead and hundreds of thousands in search of safety again.

The refugees from Afghanistan or Myanmar/Burma living in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia are among those who suffer the most from being invisible. Usually undocumented, therefore unable to get work legally, often ignored by the authorities, and only helped by local NGOs (non-governmental organizations) and Malaysian volunteers, these people live a parallel existence in one of the developing world’s richer cities.

Zaldai told GenevaLunch that the immediacy of his photos is due to the intimacy he shares with his subjects. He spends days with them, and although he plays it down, his own experience as an Afghan refugee creates bonds. “These people welcomed me into their lives. For a few days I shared their experiences, their lives.”

The organizers of the exhibit are exploring ways to show it in other parts of Geneva and in Zurich in 2010.

Exhibit: UN headquarters, the Palais des Nations, until early January 2010

Background:”Half of world’s refugees in cities, says UNHCR“, 07 December 2009, GenevaLunch