HOMOSHA, ETHIOPIA - Mohammed Musa, the leader of a small village in western Ethiopia, says hundreds of refugees have crept into his village of 150 mud-and-bamboo huts to steal their goats and chickens. And cut down their trees.

The 33-year-old father of six feels for the thousands of Sudanese who have fled years of fighting in their homeland. But the Ethiopian tradition of opening its arms to African neighbors only extends so far.  

“Regardless of the support from our community, they are very aggressive,” Musa tells Stanford student Devorah West, the two sitting on a rattan mat beneath a mango tree, as donkeys bray and children gather to observe the foreigners.

“They have had such a heavy impact on the environment,” Musa says of the 9,400 refugees, rubbing the deep vertical tribal scars on his cheeks; marks of strength and courage. “They keep extending the camp and taking the land from us.”

And cutting down the trees: coffee, acacia, mango and eucalyptus.

West traveled to the western border of Ethiopia to talk to refugees and villagers on the outskirts of the refugee camps about how the two communities might work and learn together in vocational centers and schools between their camps and villages.

She came away dogged by one word.

“Firewood,” she says. “The bane of every conversation on this trip.”

West, a master’s student in international policy studies, traveled to the camps on a research trip for the Stanford Law School class, “Rethinking Refugee Communities.”

“Our project is aimed at really transforming the perceptions of refugees and trying to highlight the benefits of a shared community,” West says. “And not addressing the conflict over firewood I think could be a real weakness in our project.”

She learned women favor firewood over any other fuel as it complements centuries of traditional home cooking. Men see it as a commodity they don’t want to give away or, if they’re refugees, can’t pay for. The dispute over firewood led to the arrests of refugees outside one of the camps West visited; it has led to the rapes of thousands of women and girls across the continent as they stray from camps to look for wood.

“While the communities did by and large get along, tension was definitely created around the issue of firewood,” she says. “Firewood. Firewood. Firewood. This constantly came up in conversations with refugees, the host community, the local administrations and the Ethiopian government.”

So it’s back to the white boards, West says, where her team would now incorporate the firewood conundrum into the brainstorming about shared places.

Firewood. The bane of every conversation."

Stanford-UN collaboration

West, another second-year IPS student and two computer science undergrads spent 10 days in the Horn of Africa country in March as part of a collaboration between Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

Their class was co-taught by law professor and CISAC co-director Tino Cuéllar and Leslie Witt of the Palo Alto-based global design firm, IDEO. They challenged two-dozen students to explore ideas that might help the UN protect and support the more than 42 million refugees, internally displaced and stateless people worldwide.

West’s team was charged with going outside the camps and thinking about ways the surrounding communities could benefit from the camp infrastructure – schools, health clinics and water treatment systems, for example – while curbing the impact of thousands of foreigners suddenly setting up camp in their back yards.

A similar trip is currently underway with CISAC's Associate Director for Programs, Elizabeth A. Gardner, Stanford management science and engineering graduate student Aparna Surendra, and Ennead architect Jeff Geisinger, whose Tumblr blog follows their journey.  

The students in Ethiopia visited the UN’s Sherkole and Bambasi refugee camps and their surrounding communities along the border with Sudan. Most of the refugees are from the isolated state of Blue Nile, where conflict broke out between the Sudanese military and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North in September 2011, several months after South Sudan seceded. Since then, nearly 300,000 Sudanese have been displaced; 22,000 are sheltered in the two Ethiopian camps.

Open Arms

Ethiopia is extremely proud of its open-door policy toward people fleeing persecution and conflict. During their initial briefings in the capital, Addis Ababa, the students were told repeatedly that the country’s first refugees were followers of Prophet Mohammed in the 7^th century and then, much later, black Jews from Israel and Armenian genocide victims. The country once known as Abyssinia was never colonized and Ethiopia considers itself the beneficent Big Brother of the continent.

“We have centuries-old traditions of receiving refugees; it is part of our culture,” Ato Ayalew, the head of the Ethiopian government’s Administration for Refugee Affairs, told the students. “We provide our land. But our sacrifice is great – because you cannot replace the environmental degradation.”

Kellie Leeson, the deputy program director for the Horn of Africa for the International Rescue Committee, joined the students on their trip. The IRC, which partners with the UN in many of its camps, facilitated the student visit to the camps.

Leeson asks the Homosha village head whether the Homoshans have benefitted from the camp infrastructure, such as the IRC’s water treatment plant and pumps. Under Ethiopian law, every program targeted for the refugees must have a component that benefits the host community as well, so the IRC’s water distribution for the camp includes pipes to the village. The host community also has access to the new health clinic and school erected on the western edge of the camp.

Musa concedes the water is a plus and some children are attending the camp school.

Still, he says, “The impact outweighs the benefits.”

Musa would like to learn the superior gardening skills from those refugees coming from the Great Lakes region, such as those from Congo. He hastens to add, “But they should not be given any more of our land.”

Outside the other camp about 70 miles south of Sherkole, villagers from Bambasi tell the students how they ran into the dirt road that runs by their thatched huts to greet the more than 12,660 refugees who streamed into the new camp last year.

“The market has brought us together and we hope to have new friendships,” says Romia Abdullah Razak, a 16-year-old girl who ducks into the back of her hut to put on gold earrings before talking to the students. “They seem to be very nice people.”

Nice, until the women came looking for firewood.

The local village militia, paid by the Ethiopian government, rounded up hundreds of refugee women and jailed them when they were caught chopping down trees. They were given warnings and sent back to the camp, but the incident prompted the UNHCR to speed up distribution of kerosene stoves.

Takeaways

West says that beyond the distress over firewood, she is heartened to see projects benefitting both refugee and host communities. The UNHCR is constructing a hospital on the edge of Bambasi, as well as a vocational school where refugees and villagers alike can learn metal work and carpentry.

“The UNHCR is also hoping that providing skills for both the refugees and the host community to help with the economic development of the community and provide refugees with skills they can use when they return home – skills that can help them rebuild their country,” she says. “The challenge, as always, is money and whether they’ll have enough funding for this endeavor.”

She learned that project funding is typically held hostage to annual grant renewals, which undermines critical long-term planning by the UNHCR and leads to a hodgepodge of projects that often go unfinished.

“Shared spaces should be the default for long-term UNHCR planning,” she says.

West, who gets her master’s in this June, is leaning toward a career in corporate social responsibility. She believes companies are part of the solution, through philanthropic work, yes, but also by linking the needs of the refugees with the continued penetration of their products and services.

“I think there’s a really big opportunity for private companies to be thinking about innovation in these camps,” she said. “They have greater funding flexibility, face less of the bureaucratic challenges that are a constant at UNHCR – and they have the ability to really think outside the box.”

The Europe Center, through its Program on Sweden, Scandinavia, and the Baltic Region, has forged partnerships with those who bring visionary solutions to the challenge of diversity and reconciliation in our increasingly globalized world.   “Harbor of Hope:  a special evening celebrating Sweden’s diverse cultures” held on May 6^th is the latest effort by the Europe Center to disseminate this new way of thinking.  The participation of Sweden’s leading documentary filmmaker Magnus Gertten, and Sweden’s cultural entrepreneur Ozan Sunar, resulted in an unprecedented pairing and an evening of motivating insight for a large public audience.  The program included the screening of Gertten’s documentary “Harbour of Hope”, a multi-media presentation by Sunar and an opportunity for the audience to engage in discussion with both of these special guests.

The evening opened with a welcome by the Europe Center’s director, Professor Amir Eshel, who highlighted the support of the Barbro Osher Pro Suecia Foundation for making possible the Europe Center’s Sweden Program and this research.  The center’s Associate Director, Dr. Roland Hsu then framed the thinking behind inviting these particular two guest speakers, Gertten and Sunar.

“This evening”, said Hsu,  “we gather for a special look at the challenge to meet and embrace difference.  In today’s globalized world, market economies, and educational opportunities, but also war and persecution send unprecedented numbers of peoples across borders, away from home cultures, and into new host neighborhoods. 

In the US and in Europe we share the concern and opportunity to learn what drives people far from home.  Tonight, we focus our gaze on the city of Malmo, a city whose neighborhoods contain extraordinary diversity.  Such diversity has a history, which we shall see on film, and it has a future, thanks in large part to the cultural programing we will learn about after the film. 

Our challenge is to learn from the experience of families, fathers, brothers, mothers, sisters, and children, displaced from the familiar, and replaced in new settings.  e will look at this challenge through the eyes of two visionary artists who have touched us with their works, and who are bridging divides across competing memories, and across growing diversity of today’s mobile and global West.” 

Hsu’s introduction of Magnus Gertten and Gertten’s documentary film “Harbour of Hope” included a line from a NY Times review of Gertten’s art which he felt echoed throughout the evening’s program:  “it seems as if the past is intruding on and sometimes overwhelming the present.”  “Harbour of Hope” includes footage from the original archival film shot on April 28, 1945, the day that 30,000 survivors of German concentration camps arrived in Malmo, Sweden to begin their lives over again.  This powerful and unforgettable film is about the life stories of 3 of the survivors seen on this footage:  Irene Krausz-Fainman, Ewa Kabacinska Jansson and Joe Rozenberg. 

Following the viewing of “Harbour of Hope”, Hsu introduced the next guest Ozan Sunar by saying “In Mr. Sunar’s cultural programming, we may see not the past overwhelming the present, but instead the present clearing the way for its future.” Sunar, with a long career in the fields of arts, media and integration politics, blazed a path for those seeking new ways to include artistic values from diverse origins into Sweden’s contemporary culture.  He is currently the founding and artistic director of the international cultural house Moriska Paviljongen in Malmo.  Sunar’s presentation and the subsequent discussion on his work uniting heretofore communities in conflict through culture were both inspiring and provocative.

Harbor of Hope:  a special evening celebrating Sweden's diverses cultures; May 6, 2013, Stanford University:

The Europe Center was pleased to host Catherine Ashton, High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs & Security Policy and Vice President of the European Commission (HRVP), at Stanford University on May 7th.  HRVP Ashton’s address to a capacity audience of Stanford senior scholars is part of the Europe Center’s program focused on European and EU regional and global relations.  The event co-sponsors - the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies, the Hoover Institution, and the  - speaks to the esteem and the interest that multiple partners share in engaging the European Union’s highest foreign policy official.

The Europe Center’s director Amir Eshel opened the session, followed by President Gerhard Casper, director and senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, who delivered a formal introduction of Ashton.  HRVP Ashton spoke at length and in considerable detail on the mission of the office of EU High Representative, and addressed a number of the critical foreign policy challenges that we face today. 

Three pillars of EU foreign policy
In her talk, Lady Ashton highlighted three pillars of EU foreign policy:

1. Europe assumes primary responsibility for bringing and safeguarding peace in its “neighborhood”.  Ashton proposed that the European Union – in terms of its status as a foreign policy actor – should be judged by the record of its mission to foster post-conflict resolution, and promote long-term stability and growth throughout its own member states, and in neighboring regions of North Africa, the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East, and Eastern and Baltic regions of former Soviet societies.
2. European Union foreign policy should promote what Ashton termed “Deep Democracy”.  This includes reformed and transparent judiciary, police, and representative governing institutions that safeguard the well-being and individual emancipation of citizens, and women’s and human rights.
3. European Union international relations prioritize effective and long-term cooperative missions with “strategic partners” beginning with the United States, as well as Russia and China.  Ashton emphasized that the EU also prioritizes long-term relations and strategic missions with regional and supra-national institutions beginning with the United Nations, and including the African Union, ASEAN, and the Arab League.

“Deep Democracy”: the long-term challenge
Of special note was Ashton’s significant elaboration on the priority for “deep democracy”.  When asked about the case of Mali, and what the vision was for what comes after the current French and European military intervention, she emphasized the following points of policy and tactics.

• The EU views the military engagement against Jihadist forces in Mali, within a larger regional view of the “Sahel Arc”.  The EU is deeply engaged in the “Arab Awakening” movements – and the attendant security, political, and civil crises in each country of the region, and in terms of displaced populations across borders. 
• In the case of Mali, the office of the EU High Representative invited the country’s leadership to Brussels for close coordination of policy. 
• The EU foreign policy has been set to closely support the Malian government’s own road map for peace, territorial sovereignty, internal cohesion, and development.
• In remote districts of northern Mali, residents have seen little evidence of the value of government.  The EU foreign policy of engagement in Mali includes programs to deliver primary health care (i.e. immunization and women’s reproductive health) and infrastructure (i.e. transportation and employment in local economic initiatives) to demonstrate the efficacy and value of state institutions.
• The decision to commit troops from Europe to foreign soil remains, Ashton emphatically stated, the responsibility of the individual sovereign states, and of their democratically elected representatives who, in making such commitments, are ultimately responsible to their citizens.
• Individual European nations are invited to meet with the governments and civil society leaders of countries undergoing transformations, to tell their distinct histories of democratic development.

Ashton delivered her insights in response to questions from the audience on a number of topics, including the growing magnitude of displaced regional refugees, EU-US military cooperation, and the support and criticism of the EU within European nations.  

Please visit the European Union website to learn more about HRVP Catherine Ashton.

Ahmad Homidi's unassuming manner belies the turmoil he lived through as a child. He and his family fled the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, forcing his parents to start from scratch as refugees in the United States. He joined CISAC in 2011 as the administrative manager, after navigating the 2007 housing crash as the broker of a real estate firm.

His story is a study in fresh starts.

Homidi was a child in Afghanistan when the Soviet Union invaded his homeland. His parents were faced with a hard choice: His father could join the military and fight the invasion or the family could leave the country. Or his parents – already refugees from their native Uzbekistan – could once again look for a better life in another country.

"Fleeing the country meant you couldn't just walk into a bank and empty out your account," said Homidi. "It meant carrying whatever you could, physically, and leaving that night. Whatever mattress money my father had saved up, he took with him."

Homidi, at the time 4 years old, along with his parents, older brother and little sister, hid in military vehicles and tractors. Their father bribed officials to smuggle them across the border into Pakistan. Once there, they faced discrimination for their refugee status and his father had trouble finding work. After a year living in a Karachi apartment shared by several families, Homidi's father put out a lifeline to an old colleague in the United States.

"Fleeing the country meant you couldn't just walk into a bank and empty out your account. It meant carrying whatever you could, physically, and leaving that night."

His father remembered a professor with whom he had worked at a university in Beirut.

"With his funds depleted, he just wrote a letter addressed to 'Dr. Jerry Nielsen, Montana,’ and he put a stamp on it and he hoped and prayed that it actually reached him at Montana State University," Homidi said. "Lo and behold, it did.”

Dr. Nielsen sponsored the Homidi family for entry into the United States in 1982. They lived in Montana for several months before moving to the Bay Area, where a large Afghan expat community helped the Homidis get settled in Fremont. Homidi's father soon realized his foreign master's degree in agriculture and his former life as a professor and executive didn’t go far in America.

"At that point, he had the option to say, 'Things aren't going to work out here. We'll just have a meager existence,' or he could say, 'I have to rebuild myself,'" Homidi said of his father. "He chose to rebuild himself."

Homidi's father worked three jobs while putting himself through school, and successfully pulled his family into the American middle class. Homidi credits his own strong work ethic to his father's unwavering determination to earn his way in America.

Homidi's father had the option to say, "'Things aren't going to work out here. We'll just have a meager existence.' He chose to rebuild himself."

Homidi had ambition and wanted a fulfilling job in a competitive environment. This led him to his first career in real estate.

"The allure of working on commission was something I thought made sense: the harder you work and the smarter you work, the more money you can make,” he said. “So in 1999 I got into real estate while supporting myself through college."

After graduating from San Jose State University with a business degree, Homidi joined another real estate firm as office manager. Over the next five years, he helped grow the company from one Bay Area office with 45 agents to six offices across California with more than 200 agents. He rose within the company and, when the firm was sold, took over one office as head broker.

Homidi was leading that firm when the housing market collapsed in 2007. In 2010, when he found that most of his new business was from the very banks foreclosing on homes, he knew it was time to get out. He decided to scale back the firm when he saw his employees struggling to sell houses, and did his best to help them find other jobs.

"I saw myself as helping families achieve their dreams of homeownership and prosperity. That was one of the main rewards of the business," he said of the pre-crash years. "Never did I imagine I would one day be kicking people out of their homes. I knew right then and there that this was no longer what I wanted to do."

With his interest in international affairs, sparked by his family background, he jumped at the opportunity to join CISAC in 2011 as a fixed-term staffer.

"I'm struck by what we do, and the scale that we do it at," he said. "I am very fortunate to work in such an amazing environment, to be around the people that we're working with and collaborating with in different ways, it's pretty amazing."