Refugee Voices to be Archived
The Panos London unit of the Panos Institute will soon upload "Moving Stories", an online archive of English translations of the oral testimonies of displaced people in Africa and Asia.
According to Siobhan Warrington, Moving Stories director, the project
over the last five years, has supported partner organizations in six
countries in Africa and Asia to collect oral testimonies from those who
have experienced development-induced displacement.
Warrington further said testimonies from Africa are those of highlanders displaced by the Mohale reservoir in Lesotho and the San in Botswana. Also included are testimonies by the Tonga who are displaced by the Kariba Dam in Zimbabwe and Zambia and the Borana and Orma in Kenya.
From Asia, the voices are those of tribal communities displaced by coal mining in Bihar, India, and those displaced by the Tarbela dam in Pakistan.
The oral testimonies are recorded free-ranging interviews, drawn on personal experience and memory.
Local people were trained as interviewers and interviewees were
empowered to speak out in their own words rather than having their
needs and priorities interpreted by outsiders,
Warrington explained.
Panos has supported the sharing of the testimonies to local and national audiences. Through Moving Stories, the translations of these testimonies will be shared with an international audience. The online archive will be developed together with Forced Migration Online, part of Oxford University's Refugee Studies Center.
We anticipate Moving Stories will help to meet an acknowledged
need for more information on the social and cultural impacts of
resettlement by providing a channel for the displaced themselves to
communicate their experiences of the resettlement process and its
aftermath,
he said.