Year2003: In Review VOLUME 4 • NUMBER 133 • 2003 The Most Important Operation THE EDITOR’S DESK Going home... the good news n the mid-1990S, UNHCR cared for August 19 bombing of U.N. headquarters in PHOTO BY ZALMAÏ some 27 million people, more than at any Baghdad in which 22 persons were killed and Iother period in its 53-year history. Since scores wounded underlined that what has been then, the numbers have slowly declined. described as the ‘moral shield’ which protected In 2001, two million refugees and other aid workers, has been seriously compromised persons ‘of concern’ were taken off the agency’s and that field staff, both international and local, rolls. The following year, 2002, the latest for are now seen as potential targets for religious which comprehensive statistics are available, zealots, irregular armies and militias around the overall figure of people in need of help the world. remained relatively stable at around 20.6 In November, that threat came dreadfully million. But that obscured an important and true when UNHCR’s Bettina Goislard, a 29- encouraging trend—far more people were year-old French national working in Ghazni continuing to go home than there were new city south of the Afghan capital of Kabul, was refugees fleeing. coldbloodedly murdered by two gunmen on a In that period, the number of civilians who motorcycle. had returned to their towns and villages but Physical danger in refugee situations will UNHCR was now helping to restart their lives, never be totally eliminated, but the major rose from less than 500,000 to nearly 2.5 challenge for agencies such as UNHCR in the million. In contrast, the number of people coming months will be to devise operational receiving assistance in emergency type strategies to guarantee reasonable safety for situations dropped from 18.3 million to some 16 their staff while allowing them to effectively million. help millions of people in need. The year 2003 was a period of consolidation in this trend. Major movements in areas such as High Commissioner Ruud Lubbers describes the Afghanistan, Angola and Sri Lanka continued, continuing return of civilians to Afghanistan amidst but at a reduced rate. This will likely be economic ruin and a worsening security situation as repeated during the forthcoming 12 months, a “remarkable achievement.” A young Afghan and with hard work and a little luck during photographer, Zalmai, highlights a difficult various peace initiatives currently underway, repatriation in an outstanding photo essay in this several new repatriations may begin back to edition. A worldwide photo exhibition and a photo places such as Sudan. album highlighting Zalmai’s very personal look at The distressing news is that humanitarian his devastated but hauntingly beautiful homeland work is under threat as never before. The will be launched in 2004. REFUGEES 3 Death and destruction at U.N. headquarters in Baghdad. THE WORLD “It feels2003 like a nightmare from which we are hoping to wake. If only it were.” There were solid achievements in 2003, but the bomb in Baghdad overshadowed everything t was the mother of all crises. As war clouds displaced civilians would soon be streaming back to their gathered across the Middle East at the beginning long abandoned homes. of the year, humanitarian agencies mobilized That reverie was almost immediately shattered. On their own legions in anticipation of an impending the bright, clear morning of August 19, an orange flatbed catastrophe which threatened to swamp the entire truck inched down an access road and parked adjacent to Iregion. the United Nations headquarters building in the Iraqi cap- In the wake of the first Gulf War in 1991, an estimat- ital of Baghdad. Moments later, more than 2,000 pounds ed two million people had fled their homes. Determined of high explosive packed into the vehicle erupted in bil- this time not to be overwhelmed by another human lowing flames and thick smoke dealing death and de- tidal wave as they had been in that earlier conflict and struction. Huge sections of the main building at the Canal then in Africa’s Great Lakes in the mid-1990s and in Hotel HQ were demolished. Twenty-two people includ- Kosovo at the end of the decade, aid agencies positioned ing Sergio Vieira de Mello, the head of the U.N. mission in battalions of workers, Iraq, were killed and 150 people wounded. tents and emergency “It feels like a nightmare from which we are hoping to supplies across the Mid- wake,” said U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan. “If only it dle East… and waited. were.” In the event, of course, it was a refugee ALL CHANGE crisis that never hap- In the few dark, shocking moments it took to trigger pened. As American the bomb, the immediate needs of not only millions of • 2003 and coalition armored needy Iraqi civilians, but also the global role of the United columns rolled up Sad- Nations and the shape of future humanitarian operations dam Hussein’s army everywhere were called into question as rarely before. within a matter of The carnage and resultant uncertainty in Baghdad weeks, the bulk of Iraq’s cast a dark cloud over other humanitarian developments, population sat tight in both good and bad, in 2003. their towns and villages On the positive side, hundreds of thousands of civil- UNHCR/M. NADAR FARHAD/DP/AFG and only a few thousand ians continued to go back to their towns and villages in sought safety outside the Afghanistan during the year, though the rate of return UNHCR’s country’s borders. dropped significantly compared with the previous twelve Bettina Goislard: With the shooting war seemingly over and crisis avoid- months. Floods of other people across the globe—in Sri killed in ed, attention turned… briefly… to positive projects to help Lanka, Eritrea, Angola and other regions—also began try- the line hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who had been internally ing to stitch their lives together again, often after years or of duty. exiled from their homes by the old regime and to coax decades of exile. IMAGES back some of the millions of civilians who had fled the A transitional government was installed in the Demo- country entirely and settled abroad. cratic Republic of Congo following what was described as Perhaps a turning point in one of the world’s oldest hu- “the deadliest documented conflict in African history” in manitarian crises had at last been reached and millions of which an estimated 3.3 million perished. Talks inched SABAH ARAR/AFP/GETTY REFUGEES 5 AP/SUZANNE PLUNKETT Women helping forward to end the civil war in Sudan in which another PROBLEMS AHEAD to rebuild two million people have been killed and four million To be sure, there were also major problems. The num- Afghanistan. homeless people continue to roam the northern desert ber of people forced to flee their homes in Colombia wastes and southern savannah grasslands of Africa’s dropped significantly last year compared with 2002, but as largest country. Liberia’s despotic ruler Charles Taylor many as three million people have been uprooted in less was forced to step down and a tenuous peace was re- than two decades. Many people flooded into Bogotá, the established in neighboring Côte d’Ivoire which had been capital, their numbers increasing by 140 percent in 2002. ripped apart by internal conflict. The ongoing multi-sided civil conflict remained the worst High Commissioner Ruud Lubbers reported that after humanitarian disaster in the Western Hemisphere. several lean years, funding for UNHCR’s operations im- Hundreds of thousands of longtime Burundi and So- proved and several initiatives to strengthen the global mali refugees were caught in long-term limbo because of refugee protection regime had been welcomed by the the fragile military and political situations in their re- broader international community (interview page 8). The spective areas. There was little progress in resolving the U.N. General Assembly extended Lubbers term as High futures of more than 534,000 uprooted peoples living in Commissioner for two more years through the end of 2005. Serbia and Montenegro in southern Europe, or the The agency conducted the first ever global survey on 112,000 refugees from Bhutan squatting for more than a the plight of an estimated nine million stateless persons— decade in camps in neighboring Nepal. The situation in people who do not have a country they can officially call Chechnya was similarly intractable. home—and the information will be used to help states An estimated 25 million people, nearly six million of tackle a little understood and little publicized problem. them assisted by UNHCR, remained uprooted within their This generally upbeat scenario, particularly the ongo- own countries as so-called internally displaced persons. ing returns home, was reflected in the latest global statis- On an almost daily basis, dozens of people trying to tics. While the overall number of people the U.N. refugee reach a safer environment continued to lose their lives in agency was caring for at the start of the year remained drowning incidents on the high seas between Africa and relatively stable at 20.6 million—the emphasis between Europe, the Horn of Africa and Yemen and other places. specific groups changed significantly. UNHCR’s protection officers expressed concerns that The number of newly created refugees and other in the new era of a global war on terrorism with govern- groups receiving emergency or life sustaining support ments fixated on their own domestic security concerns, dropped from around 18.3 million in 2001 to 16 million at there was little focus on the security needs of refugees, the start of 2003, while at the other and more positive end who are among the world’s most vulnerable people, or of the operational scale, the number of people being helped the aid officials trying to help them.