If we talk about the need to uphold and implement solidarity, refugees, displaced persons and returnees are a typical group in need of special protection and attention. I do not say this simply as the High Commissioner for Refugees, but because those compelled by persecution and violence to leave their homes exemplify the dangers which lie in the exclusion of a particular group. Refugees are especially prone to exclusion. They are by definition excluded from their own societies. They are often perceived as strangers, even intruders, by societies hosting them.
Exclusion frequently becomes rejection, in different degrees and fashions.
Sometimes rejection takes silent but subtly effective psychological forms and refugees are made to feel that they are unwelcome. But what we observe in many countries is that exclusion does not occur only when refugees flee to a host country, but also when they return to their own communities. In such cases, people subjected to forced displacement can become a factor of grave instability both for countries hosting refugees and for those from which they flee, or to which they return. We have observed this pattern, for example, in the Great Lakes region of Central Africa since 1993. The Great Lakes region has been marked by divisive, destructive and prolonged inter-communal conflict.