Human Cargo Read online

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  THE FIRST HIGH Commissioner for Refugees was Gerrit Jan van Heuven Goedhart, a shrewd, modest, likable man who was admired for his eloquence and who had spent the war in the Dutch resistance. Goedhart liked to say that he had been a refugee himself. The United States, which had wanted an American commissioner, showed its irritation by marginalizing the agency while he remained in office. The original International Refugee Organization was also annoyed by having its position usurped. Goedhart further alienated some of the donors by his determination to include relief in his mandate, and he had considerable trouble raising the necessary funds until bailed out by the Ford Foundation. Goedhart died suddenly in 1956 of a heart attack, but even his critics reluctantly admitted that he had managed to make much of the Western World aware that it owed a measure of responsibility for refugees.

  The next few years were crucial. The second High Commissioner, Auguste Lindt, was a Swiss diplomat, popular with the Americans and a personal friend of Dag Hammarskjold. He and his successor, another Swiss diplomat called Felix Schnyder, negotiating their way delicately through the minefields of the Hungarian revolution and the Algerian war of independence, cleverly turned UNHCR into the genuine focal point in the refugee world, while shifting its concerns away from Europe and toward Africa, where one country after another was in postcolonial turmoil. UNHCR, declared Schnyder, needed a “universal character.” This was not quite enough for the nascent African states, however, who complained that UNHCR’s tight definition of a refugee failed to reflect the reality of conditions on their continent. In 1964, the Organization of African Unity appointed a commission that in time drew up its own convention with a more generous definition of the word “refugee,” to take in not solely those fearful of individual persecution, but all who were driven to flee their homes because of war and civil conflict. Wars, violence, ethnic fighting would all now enter the refugee debate, as qualifying people to be recognized as refugees— though not by Europe and North America—when in 1984 ten Central American states signed the Cartagena Declaration on Refugees.

  The fourth High Commissioner was the second son of the hereditary imam of the Ismaili sect of Shiism. Suave and gregarious, Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan had once shared a room with Edward Kennedy at Harvard, where he attended lectures by Henry Kissinger. He spoke perfect French and English, had excellent contacts in the developing world, and was determined to make UNHCR a major international political player. He had not long stepped down, after ten generally well-regarded years, yielding his place to the former Danish prime minister, Poul Hartling, a clergyman with progressive views, when the flight of people from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, which had begun in 1975, sharply intensified. Under Hartling, who ran the agency more democratically than the somewhat cliquish Aga Khan, more than 2 million refugees, the boat people of Indochina, were resettled in the West. It was during Harding’s tenure, too, that there was a global surge in refugee numbers. Vast camps were set up in Africa and Asia, later to prove hard to dismantle. “Refugee warriors,” operating from camps across borders, became players in regional struggles for power. During the 1980s, the number of refugees worldwide rose from 10 million to 17 million; contributions from reluctant donors failed to keep up with their needs.

  Something else was also happening. As more and more refugees, driven by violence and human rights violations, left their homes in the developing world, they began to travel farther afield, arriving in ever greater numbers in European countries to claim asylum. Until now, requests for asylum had been few and confined to dissident scientists and ballet dancers from the Eastern Bloc whose defections made headlines in national newspapers. The political upheavals across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East produced a surge of arrivals by plane, truck, and boat, people who bypassed normal channels, often with the help of newcomers on the refugee scene: traffickers and smugglers of illegal travelers. The refugees came from Ethiopia, from what was then Rhodesia, from Sri Lanka, Iran, Iraq, and then Somalia. In 1976, 20,000 people had asked for asylum in western Europe; by 1981 the figure had reached 158,500, and UNHCR was beginning to struggle to keep its position as main arbiter over asylum policy.

  Right through the 1970s and early 1980s, European bureaucracy coped well with immigration. In the face of the immense numbers of unexpected arrivals, the system crumbled. Waiting times for decisions became longer, and appeals backed up. There were growing doubts about the nature of the asylum claims, questions about the extent to which the newcomers were valid refugees under the 1951 Convention. The idea emerged of the “bad” refugee, a person not so much in flight from persecution but actively in search of work and a better life, using the asylum route as his way into Europe. The phrase “economic migrant” entered the jargon of refugee affairs. UNHCR in Geneva kept urging European governments to be generous, arguing that even if some of the claimants were not, strictly speaking, Convention refugees, there was still too much danger at home for them to risk returning; states responded by drafting ever tighter restrictions. By the mid-1980s, most European countries, agreeing that the best way to stem the flow was to prevent people from arriving in the first place, were drawing up measures to deter them. Soon, with the advent of the European Union, an outer European perimeter was defined and barricaded against newcomers. Financial support was withdrawn from asylum seekers who were deemed not to meet the criteria; detentions and deportations began. When UNHCR complained, Western governments paid no attention and concentrated on their own refugee policies. No one listened when Harding pleaded that those who sought asylum should be seen as victims, not abusers.

  By the late 1980s, UNHCR had reached a low point, excluded from many of the main worldwide refugee debates. In any case, donors seeing the political upheavals and natural disasters of the day wanted to fund relief operations, not refugee protection, particularly when relief kept vast numbers of refugees from arriving at their doors. And, under the next High Commissioner, Jean-Pierre Hocke, they went some way to establish and fund these operations. Hocke had been head of operations for the International Committee of the Red Cross at the time of the Biafra crisis, in 1967; he knew all about the logistics of relief.* He was decisive, even authoritarian, and he wanted to see an end to the long-term camps that had by now become endemic in the refugee world. These camps, said Hocké, with considerable reason but ahead of his time, crushed “human dignity” and reduced the “human capacity for hope and regeneration;” what the West should be doing was not keeping them afloat, but attacking the root causes for the exoduses. Hocké also longed to revise the 1951 Convention, to bring its definition of a refugee into line with that of the Organization for African Unity, in order to take in all those affected by the wars and civil conflicts now chronic in many places. But Hocké was too dictatorial and his style of leadership offended people. In any case, Cold War politics continued to dominate the regional conflicts of Africa and Asia. Shortly into his second term, in 1989, he resigned, after a bruising scandal over his expenses. Few were sad to see him go.

  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, determi
ned, 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* 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 debat
e 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.