In the 1950s, the world's refugees numbered around one million. By 1974, their number had grown to 2.4 million. By 1984, the figure had swelled to 10.5 million. Ten years later the number had more than doubled, to exceed 23 million.
"It's a very bad sign when our business is booming," observes Pierre Jambor. There was reason to hope that UNHCR could consider closing up shop when the last decade of the 20th century began. Cold War enemies were now friends. East and West were no longer walled off from one another. People spoke of a peace dividend.
And then, incredibly, war broke out again in Europe as Yugoslavia split apart in 1991. A year later, ethnic hatred fanned by demagogues led to a conflagration that has yet to be put out. Once again, civilians were massacred and prisoners starved and tortured; once again, the dead were buried in mass graves.
The conflict in the former Yugoslavia caused the largest mass movement of refugees and displaced people in Europe since World War II. In April 1993, High Commissioner Sadako Ogata noted with alarm that nearly 3 million people in Bosnia and Herzegovina depended on the United Nations for rations. In an appeal to the leaders of the aid-giving countries, she spoke of her "deep alarm" at the shortage of food supplies, adding that there had been no response to her appeal a month earlier for $817 million to fund relief efforts in the former Yugoslavia for the rest of the year.
For months the staff of UNHCR, nongovernmental organizations and others had been risking their lives to deliver humanitarian aid. But the rival armies failed to honor their commitment to let convoys of food and medicine go through to those for whom the aid meant survival. In February 1993, in an attempt to pressure the opposing political leaders into letting the convoys pass, Ogata suspended most relief operations. After several days, UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali rescinded her order. For many, the act seemed to symbolize the world body's confusion over how to deal with a maddeningly complex problem.
UNHCR's special envoy to the former Yugoslavia, Jose Maria Mendiluce of Spain, directed relief operations in Bosnia-Herzegovina from the beginning of the war, in April 1992, until his departure in May 1993. Mendiluce viewed the war from a different perspective. He witnessed and endured the shelling of Sarajevo.
"It was a nightmare," Mendiluce recalls. "We didn't believe that sort of massive shelling against a civilian town, the capital of an independent country, would last long. But things got worse and worse, and some days we were totally under siege. Many times they were shooting at us. We witnessed people killed in the streets. We would try to bring wounded children into our car. We would take someone by the arms. We would end up only with the arms, which were separated from the body because the person was already destroyed.
"It was difficult to accept the fact that the siege and the shelling aroused no significant reaction from the international community. Like the people of Sarajevo, we felt abandoned. We felt this killing, this atrocity, was not going to be accepted, but it was accepted by the international community, by the UN, with only resolutions and declarations being issued to cover our conscience and convince public opinion that we were doing something.
"We realized from the beginning that the only argument criminals understand is force, and the criminals knew the Western world was not ready to use force against them." While Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali and High Commissioner Ogata differed on how to make the rival armies honor their commitment to let humanitarian supplies reach suffering civilians, and while European countries balked at providing asylum to those fleeing from the war, Mendiluce strove to honor UNHCR's mandate.
In April 1992, shortly after the start of the war, Mendiluce was traveling by car from Belgrade to Sarajevo. The only way open led through the town of Zvornik, where a Serbian offensive was under way to "ethnically cleanse" the town of Muslims.
"I found myself in the middle of Zvornik, where I saw the shooting, the way they were putting bodies of children and elderly people in trucks," he recalls. "There was so much blood that our car was slipping in blood. I was stopped by a group of nervous and drunk militiamen who had realized what I had just witnessed."
Fearing that he and his driver would be killed, Mendiluce tried to contact the nearest UNHCR office by car radio. But the radio wasn't working, so he pretended to make contact, first with UNHCR, then with Serbian leaders in Belgrade. He is convinced that the ploy saved his life and that of his driver. "They moved barricades and allowed us to leave," he says. "For the first 500 meters I was concerned about my future. There was an enormous number of Serbians behind me, and it would have been easy for them to shoot me and accuse the Muslims."
But no shots rang out. Eventually, out in the countryside, Mendiluce came upon a group of Muslims. They told him that, up ahead, he would find thousands of survivors of the Zvornik massacre who were trying to escape through the mountains. They pleaded with him to help them.
"So," Mendiluce says, "instead of continuing on to Sarajevo, I decided to go and see what I could do. I found 6,000 survivors, many of them wounded, desperate, terrified. Finally, I succeeded in establishing contact with Sarajevo. I declared all these people under my protection and asked my people to evacuate these survivors to a town under the control of Bosnia.
"At that moment, UNHCR's involvement was decided. It proved that sometimes, if you are there and if you make the decision to do something, you can save many, many lives."
By: Shiela Rule, (excerpt from Securing Relief and Refuge), from: A Global Affair: An Inside Look at The United Nations, published by Jones and Janello, copyright 1995, all rights reserved.
