The Foreign Service Journal, March 2013

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | MARCH 2013 23 hospitals and inadequate schools that drove them to Libya in the first place. The fortunate exceptions among those who returned from Libya are the 36,000-plus Bangladeshis who benefited from World Bank funding for reintegration assistance, and the approximately 12,000 Chadians who benefited from Swiss- and German-funded capacity building and psychosocial support. A more holistic policy to the crisis, one that included funds for reintegration and training of returnees or livelihood pro- grams, could have contributed to stability and development. Instead, the repatriation of most of these workers merely imposed greater burdens on governments which already had limited capacities to care for their citizens. In most years, IOM returns around 70,000 persons from outside their countries of origin, as well as much larger num- bers of internally displaced persons. The extensive scope for work reinforces the importance of durable solutions: The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimates that up to 50 million people are displaced each year by natural disasters, while the Norwegian Refugee Council put the num- ber of conflict-displaced IDPs at 26.4 million in 2011. Reintegration for returnees in a post-conflict environment is an integral part of peacebuilding. It often requires not just livelihood and shelter assistance, but the settlement of land and property claims, and the reconciliation of groups previ- ously in conflict. The tent-homes of an IDP camp in Haiti following the 2010 earthquake there. © iStockphoto.com/Claudiad