Ever since the end of World War II, the ebb and flow of refugees has posed a vast and complicated problem for the United Nations. The UN founded the agency known as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in 1951. (High Commissioner is both the name of the agency and the title of its chief officer, who is nominated by the Secretary-General and elected by the General Assembly). At the time, almost all of the refugees were Eastern Europeans, impelled to flee their homelands by the chaos after World War II. Because the problem seemed temporary, UNHCR was given only a three-year mandate.
When UNHCR came into being, "refugee" was defined in essentially Cold War terms. The 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees stated that a refugee was a person who, "owing to well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable, or owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country."
Over time, however, as floods and famine and other calamities uprooted hundreds of thousands of people throughout the world, it became apparent that this definition was cruelly limited. Thus, in recent years, the UN's Secretary-General and General Assembly have asked UNHCR to assist people like those in the former Yugoslavia, who are living like refugees within their own country.
Over the years, too, the responsibilities of the office of the High Commissioner have been redefined. Originally, its role was limited to helping to coordinate the work of private organizations. The hands-on work of delivering aid was the responsibility of host countries and nongovernmental organizations, with UNHCR providing supervision, technical advice and a limited amount of money. Now, the agency has been pressed into service as a take-charge group that helps to arrange temporary asylum for refugees and to provide food, water and shelter to encampments the size of cities. As a minor concession to the magnitude of UNHCR's never-ending task, its mandate is now renewed every five years instead of every three.
The agency has always operated on a slender budget. Its first High Commissioner, Dutch lawyer Gerrit Jan van Heuven Goedhart, faced with a refugee emergency and finding donors slow to contribute, raised a quick $14,000 by selling a bar of gold left by a League of Nations predecessor organization. It was during Goedhart's term of office, in 1955, that UNHCR won the first of two Nobel Peace Prizes.
In 1956, just as it seemed that Europe's postwar refugee problem had been settled, another wave of refugees spilled over European borders. This time the refugees were hundreds of thousands of Hungarians fleeing their homeland during and after the brutal suppression of a popular uprising against their Soviet masters. In less than three weeks, 35,000 people crossed the border into Austria, whose government promptly turned to the High Commissioner for help. The agency dug into its shallow pockets, came up with $25,000 in emergency funds and then-forcefully and with considerable success-called on UN member nations to contribute real money and provide asylum.
In the 1960s, UNHCR was often called upon to help in Africa, as ethnic hatred forced large numbers of Tutsis in Rwanda to flee to neighboring Burundi and, a few years later, caused Hutus from Burundi to seek refuge in Rwanda. Mozambique, during its protracted war of independence, was the source of another stream of refugees.
During the next decade, the focus was on Southeast Asia. In 1971 nearly 10 million Bengalis fled from what is now Bangladesh to escape fighting between Pakistan and India. They flowed back the following year to the newly established nation of Bangladesh. Later in the 1970s, UNHCR did what it could to ameliorate the condition of hundreds of thousands of Indochinese refugees who fled from Vietnam and Laos into neighboring countries or, with whole families crowded into small fishing boats, ventured into the South China Sea to seek asylum.
"The flood of boat people reached such proportions that, at a certain point, the countries they first came to-the so-called countries of first asylum-didn't want to receive any more of them," recalls Pierre Jambor, who was UNHCR's deputy representative in Thailand from 1977 to 1980 and its representative there from 1988 to 1990. "There were episodes in which people were not being admitted to the shores. There was piracy, a lot of people killed at sea."
This led in 1979 to the first international conference on Indo-Chinese refugees, mainly boat people. The agreement reached at that conference was that countries of first asylum would continue providing asylum on the understanding that other countries-through UNHCR and other agencies-would then financially support these people and give a guarantee that they would eventually be accepted for resettlement elsewhere."
In 1981, UNHCR was honored with a second Nobel Peace Prize for providing assistance to the "tremendous and increasing number of refugees" and for trying to cope with "a veritable flood of human catastrophe and suffering." The agency's chief officer at the time, Poul Hartling, former prime minister of Denmark, characterized the award as a message to the world's refugees that "you are not forgotten."
Throughout the decade, UNHCR continued to answer calls for help-assisting Afghan refugees, Sri Lankans, Ethiopians and Sudanese, all driven from their homelands by civil war.
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.
