Authors: Caroline Moorehead
Hocké’s departure coincided with another event that transformed
the refugee world. With the coming down of the Berlin Wall, the very nature of the refugee question altered. Gone were all the old Cold War certainties about the “good” refugees fleeing communism. In their place came a decade of unprecedented violence, ethnic conflict, environmental disaster, and spreading poverty. The 1990s saw war in Iraq and Chechnya, ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, genocide in Rwanda, the collapse of Sierra Leone and Liberia, the disintegration of Somalia, the transformation of the Great Lakes of Africa into an area of barbarity and anarchy, and the targeting of civilians and later of aid workers. In Rwanda, almost all girls past puberty were raped, and many were then murdered. Of twenty-seven major conflicts in 1992, only two were actually between states. By now, around 90 percent of the casualties of war were civilians. Hocké’s successor, Thorvald Stoltenberg, a Norwegian former minister of defense, stayed in office just a year. He was replaced by Sadako Ogata, a small, determined, elderly Japanese professor of international relations, the first woman and the first Asian to hold the post. Japan was recognized as an important funder and Ogata’s American education and academic background were seen as useful. She was also hardworking, politically astute, and keen to avoid confrontations, arguing that over such prickly matters as asylum policy it was better to be tactful than morally superior. “The real problem,” she announced, “is saving lives. We can’t protect dead people.”
Faced with the killings in Rwanda, Somalia, and the Balkans, watching refugees flowing in rivers across borders, or trapped in desolate no-man’s-lands, hungry, desperate, and confused, Ogata turned to relief operations. Relief, she announced,
is
protection. Bosnia, in 1992, transformed UNHCR into the world’s largest emergency relief agency, at its peak delivering food, tents, and medicines to more than a million and a half “war-affected” people— almost the entire population, along with returnees, the internally displaced, and refugees. Repatriation, long considered a sensitive subject, became another of Ogata’s goals. During her time in office tens of thousands of people went home to Ethiopia, Eritrea, Angola, Cambodia, Mozambique, and Namibia.
Building on Hocké’s logistical skills, Ogata now made the agency into a more broadly based humanitarian organization, helping not only the traditional Convention refugees, who had been able to cross borders, but the internally displaced, who had remained within their own countries. Donors liked Ogata. Giving money to relief was preferable to being forced to address the root causes of the emergencies that drove people into becoming refugees, or to consider too closely the ethics of their increasingly restrictive asylum policies. The media liked her, too. They welcomed her open manner and her obvious desire to attract their attention. Within the UN, UNHCR became the most admired of all the agencies, and, at the height of the Yugoslav refugee crisis, the one with the biggest budget.
Ogata’s interests matched the mood of the times. In 1992, the Secretary General of the UN, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, announced that the “time of absolute and exclusive sovereignty” was over, and that intervention against repressive regimes was a necessary component of international politics. For the first time, collective interventionist policies were seen as a legitimate way to prevent refugee flows. For Ogata, intervention, which she welcomed, would take the form of diplomacy and the pressing of human rights concerns, with a view to making it easier for the victims of war to remain at home. But it was not always easy; moral choices arose, about whether, in effect, to collaborate in ethnic cleansing by helping people leave their countries, or to abandon the defenseless to die. Ogata acted decisively. She would help people survive, whatever the implications. She would even work with the military, if she had to, especially after aid workers began to be targeted. As she had said, she could do nothing for the dead. But neither could she always do much for the living. Rwanda proved a bitter failure for many UN agencies, UNHCR among them. Neither were the
génocidaires
halted as they killed, nor were the camps housing survivors later prevented from being militarized. The question before Ogata and her colleagues was painful: to what extent does relief make things worse by prolonging conflict?
Not everyone was sad to see Ogata leave. People had liked her personally and found her style of leadership friendly. But she had stayed a little long. By the end of the 1990s, the mood was again changing. Protection for refugees was felt to have suffered during her tenure, when so much emphasis had been placed on relief. In Kosovo, which saw the largest mass refugee movement in Europe since World War II, UNHCR was accused of having been poorly prepared and having acted too slowly. For its part, the agency felt itself to have been sidelined by states and forced to stand by while basic standards were violated and competing actors followed their own agendas. Donors moved away, preferring to invest funds directly or give to nongovernmental organizations. UNHCR was not the only agency to suffer, but between 1992 and 1997, its budget dropped by 21 percent. The principal loser, as ever, was Africa, where by 1999 UNHCR was spending just one tenth of what it spent in the Balkans. And by now Africa, with 12 percent of the world’s population, had nearly half of its displaced people.
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IN JANUARY
2001, Ruud Lubbers, a former Dutch prime minister, became the ninth High Commissioner for Refugees. With political stature and confidence enabling him to meet world leaders on equal terms, Lubbers was perceived as a man able to confront Western governments over their ungenerous asylum policies and their reluctance to honor their refugee commitments; at the same time, he was decisive and clearheaded enough to reform a large and unwieldy office that had grown unaccountable during the years of major relief operations. It was hoped that he would persuade more countries to provide UNHCR’s funds, 94 percent of which still came from the United States, Japan, and the European Union, and which had fallen from $1.25 billion in 1996 to $911.6 million in 1999. In recent years, donors have taken to reneging on their promised contributions. And, what was possibly even more important than all these things, Lubbers was known to be determined to restore to UNHCR its primary function as a protector of refugees,
rather than see that work sunk further in all-consuming relief operations. Hocké’s reign, say the experts, was flawed by his manner and his mistakes, but he had been right in his insistence on protection. Ogata, though admired for the tenacity with which she put the agency at the very front of the humanitarian world and kept it there, had made a fundamental mistake in letting slip the commitment to protection, so that success came to be measured in terms of how much relief could be delivered how quickly. To fill the vacuum, the many nongovernmental organizations now working with refugees had themselves begun to move into protection.
The new millennium contains huge challenges. Though refugee numbers are actually down, from a peak in the early 1990s of 19 million, to around 12 million today, and though the number of asylum claims in Europe has dropped to its lowest point in four years, global attitudes toward refugees have degenerated into chaos and panic
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Governments, having allowed asylum seekers to become scapegoats, have effectively marginalized them and made it harder for them to integrate. Though refugee protection, drawing on many different strands of international law, is now embedded in a broad field of human rights and humanitarian treaties and agreements, restriction, not generosity, has become the order of the day. The talk is all of “humanitarian pragmatism.” Refugees, accused of using scarce resources at times of high unemployment, have been exploited by xenophobic politicians. International humanitarian action to prevent mass exoduses has never seemed so severely limited by lack of political will or money.
About half of the world’s refugees today are under the age of eighteen, and almost 5 percent of these are unaccompanied minors, traveling the world on their own. Like adults, they are obliged to prove that they can meet the definition of a refugee under the 1951 Convention, whose adult-centered approach to asylum fails to take
into account the fact that some abuses of our times are aimed specifically at children. Child soldiers have no special claims. Child refugees are to be found in prisons and detention centers in many parts of the world, including Australia and the United States.
As Jeff Crisp, an Englishman who for a while ran UNHCR’s evaluation and policy unit, sees it, UNHCR itself has become “profoundly dysfunctional,” failing to provide protection to all those most in need of it and condoning discriminatory practices that ensure that only people with access to considerable amounts of money can hope to escape from unstable countries (by paying smugglers). Large sums are spent on keeping small numbers of refugees out, and small sums on protecting large numbers of refugees in distant camps. Never, Crisp believes, has there been so much hypocrisy. Countries happy to profess their support for the 1951 Convention at meetings at home do all they can to obstruct the arrival of the asylum seekers whose rights they have just upheld. UNHCR, once regarded as a teacher and keeper of refugee standards, has lost much of its former credibility. There has been some talk about the need for UNHCR to be more accountable, and much debate across the aid world generally about how to incorporate the protection of human rights into the wide sweep of humanitarian work. The Refugee Convention is in the odd position of being the only major human rights treaty that is not externally supervised; all other key UN human rights accords have some mechanism to ensure that states are held accountable for what they have agreed to.
Not the least of Lubbers’s challenges is what to do about all those who have fled their homes but not crossed international borders, either because they have not been able to or because they do not want to. There have always been people displaced within their own countries by war, disaster, and poverty. But they came late to international attention, and it was not until 1992 that the UN Secretary General appointed a former Sudanese diplomat, Francis Deng, as his representative on internally displaced persons (IDPs). In 1998, Deng presented the UN with a definition—someone forced to flee on account of armed conflict, violence, violation of human rights, or
natural or manmade disasters, but who has not crossed a recognized state border—and a set of guiding principles. But there is still no treaty on IDPs, and though UNHCR is not mandated to take responsibility for them, no other agency has been willing to step forward, so in practice it frequently falls to UNHCR to fill the gap. In January 2000, the then U.S. ambassador to the UN, Richard Holbrooke, declared that to use initials to talk about any one group of people was unhealthy, and urged the world to stop distinguishing between victims in such an arbitrary way; in 2001 the UN set up a special unit to better coordinate assistance, but the internally displaced remain the poor relations of the refugee world.
According to the Global IDP Database, run by the Norwegian Refugee Council in Geneva, there are 25 million IDPs in the world today, scattered across fifty countries. Over half of them—some 13 million people—are to be found in Africa, in camps, on the edges of cities, in shantytowns and condemned buildings; here they have become indistinguishable from the urban poor, victims of violence and civil conflict, of floods and tropical storms, droughts, famines, and deforestation, epidemics of measles and cholera and AIDS.
Though funds have not actually grown under Lubbers, they have at least stabilized. He has proved good at attracting small new sources: in 2003, Russia gave $1 million, its first donation, and Kuwait $2 million. However, refugee crises today attract a huge, uncoordinated mixture of multilateral, national, and nongovernmental initiatives and organizations, each raising money separately, and large sums are spent every year both on special units to address specific groups and concerns—women, children, or the environment—and on UNHCR itself. Refugee emergencies and long-term camps continue to eat most available money, making it hard for the High Commissioner to practice the ideal of protection he has consistently championed since his arrival. Few people inside UNHCR today question the need for more staff and better training in protection matters and human rights education, or for the kind of programs that will reduce the need for people to flee. But UNHCR is under constant pressure from governments, from its executive committee,
and from the UN itself, and its position is being seriously weakened by a growing perception that refugees are a threatening and destabilizing force. The whole notion of security, once seen as a matter of keeping refugees safe—during flight, in camps, while waiting for the outcome of their asylum applications—has shifted. Now it is the refugees themselves who are seen to pose the danger, particularly in the wake of September 11. Since those attacks, human smuggling routes are increasingly referred to as routes for international terrorists.
Nowhere, however, is the challenge to UNHCR’s authority more visible than over current asylum policy. Asylum has always posed difficulties—not least of definition—but while numbers were small and posed little threat, and the asylum seekers were “good” refugees fleeing communism, the issue assumed little importance. But as requests for asylum in Europe, North America, Australia, and Japan rose through the 1980s—to reach around 700,000 in the European Union in 1992, the same year UNHCR recorded a peak of 19 million refugees throughout the world—so Western states intensified their efforts to prevent the refugees from arriving, investing millions in complicated entry rules, which in turn led to backlogs. Pressure grew to make asylum unattractive. Barriers that had been erected to keep out those in search of work—the so-called economic migrants—became barriers to those fleeing persecution. As states fought to appear in control of their borders, visa requirements were introduced, then made stricter. Airlines transporting illegal immigrants became liable for fines. The industrialized world, country by country, closed its doors to asylum seekers, leaving no legal way for them to enter. Migrants and asylum seekers alike were now using the same routes, so that stories arose about “bogus” refugees and hostility to all refugees grew, whatever their origins and whatever their reasons for flight.