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The Environmental Causes and Consequences of

Migration: A Search for the Meaning of "Environmental
Refugees"
By Keane, David
Publication: Georgetown International Environmental Law Review
Date: Thursday, January 1 2004

You are viewing page 4

constitute only one of the many causes of environmental migration, the development of appropriate policy
priorities depends on the quantification and classification of the broader problem of environmental
displacement.17

B. INDUSTRIAL ACCIDENTS

There are many examples of industrial accidents causing large numbers of persons to be displaced. In 1984, in
Bhopal, India, a chemical accident killed over 1,000 people and displaced 200,000 people. A nuclear accident
at Three Mile Island in the United States displaced 10,000 people. In Seveso, Italy, an explosion at a chemical
factory caused chemical products similar to the defoliants used in Vietnam to be released into the atmosphere.
However, the nuclear accident at Chernobyl is the most infamous example. The Soviet government evacuated
thousands of people following the accident.18 Overall, up to 100,000 people were displaced. A thirty-mile zone
around Chernobyl remains uninhabited. Radiation contamination has a half-life of 25,000 years, so the area will
be effectively contaminated forever.19

An important point in relation to industrial accidents is that, in general, those displaced will seek refuge within
the borders of the country in which the accident occurred. The residents around Chernobyl were displaced
within the borders of the Soviet Union. They would fall under the category of internally displaced persons, and
not refugees, as defined in the Refugee Convention.

C. ARMEDCONFLICTS

War is often at the center of environmental destruction. There are two reasons for this: environmental
destruction can be used as a weapon of war; and the origin of conflict is often a dispute over the possession of
land and natural resources. The first point can be illustrated using the example of the war in Vietnam, and the
deliberate destruction of the environment as a military tactic employed by the United States.20 The operation
sought to empty the countryside and force the population to migrate towards the cities. Furthermore, there
was a massive campaign of deforestation resulting in the use of millions of tons of herbicides and the
bombardment of agricultural zones.21 There are other examples of this tactic. In El Salvador, in the early
1980s, the government used the same method of destruction of the ecosystem in order to eradicate guerrilla
bases in the forests.22 At the end of the civil war, thousands of displaced persons could not return home
because the reserves of water in some regions had disappeared due to the erosion of soil caused by the
policy of deforestation.23 In the 1991 Gulf War, the oil fires and spillages in Kuwait can be cited as an
example of ecocide.24 The fires followed an earlier decision by the Iraqi government to open the pipelines to
the oil terminals in the Gulf, releasing millions of gallons of crude oil into the sea to frustrate a seaborne allied
invasion of Kuwait city. The Iraqi troops also destroyed the desalination plants that fed water to
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