H.E. Ambassador Bomina N soni Longange, Ambassador of Zaire and Chairman of the OAU Commission of 20 on Refugees, at the launching of the 1995 State of the World Refugees in Addis Ababa on November 15. Longange added that the time when Africa was courted by one block or another during the cold war era was over. Today Africa had to wake up and tackle its problems by itself. Refugees report adds that the international community should pursue a much more dynamic and far-sighted approach if the recent spate of refugee crises are to be solved and new ones prevented. People flee because there are governments that persecute them for reasons of political, ethnic and religious causes.
People flee because there are internal wars and they are fleeing for their safety.
In 1969, when the OAU Convention on Refugees in Africa was signed, there were less than 1 million refugees. Today, the number of refugees on the continenet has risen to some 6.75 million, not including another 20 million internally displaced people in refugee-like situation. The refugee situation in the post-Cold War era is in many sense a contradictory one. Since the end of the Cold War, the international community has started to adopt a new approach to refugee problems. States are wearying of the social, economic and environmental burdens imposed by refugee populations and are increasingly reluctant to open their doors to people displaced by violence.