CONTENTS List of Abbreviations xiii 1. The UNHCR at 50: State Pressures and Institutional 1 Autonomy 2. International Recognition of Refugees 21 3. The Cold War Origins of the UNHCR under 50 Gerrit Jan van Heuven Goedhart 4. The Emerging Independence of the UNHCR under 81 Auguste Lindt 5. ‘The Good Offices’ and Expansion into Africa 105 under Felix Schnyder 6. The Global Expansion of the UNHCR under Prince 140 Sadruddin Aga Khan 7. The New Cold War and the UNHCR under Poul 201 Hartling 8. The UNHCR’s ‘New Look’, Financial Crisis, and 247 Collapse of Morale under Jean-Pierre Hocke and Thorvald Stoltenberg 9. The Post-Cold War Era and the UNHCR under 272 Sadako Ogata 10. Towards the Future: the UNHCR in the Twenty-First 348 Century Bibliography 384 Index 411 1 The UNHCR at 50: State Pressures and Institutional Autonomy For the past half century, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has been at the heart of many of the gravest breakdowns of social and political order and tragic human loss in recent history. These events have propelled the Office into the maelstrom of world politics. From the1956 Hungarian Uprising at the height of the Cold War to the mass exodus of Albanians from Kosovo in 1999, the UNHCR has been central to the international debates about human rights and interna- tional responsibility, conflict resolution, preventive diplomacy, and the deliv- ery of humanitarian assistance. From focusing almost exclusively on protection and humanitarian relief for refugees in host countries, the UNHCR has progressively taken on additional responsibilities that involve it in a myriad of activities for refugees and non-refugees alike. Scholars and practitioners of international relations have been slow to recognize either the rationality or significance of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in world politics. Among UN agencies, the UNHCR is unique. It is both an individual, represented in the High Commissioner, and a bureaucracy with its own distinct culture and value system. The High Commissioner has little or no political authority but is vested with considerable moral authority and legitimacy dating back not just the Office’s founding in 1951 but to 1921 when Fridtjof Nansen was appointed as the first High Commissioner for Refugees by the League of Nations. The UNHCR is an organization with its own identity, comprising over 5,000 individuals of different nationalities who share similar values. One cannot fully understand the UNHCR without a knowledge of its organiza- tional culture. There exists no other UN agency where values and principled ideas are so central to the mandate and raison d’être of the institution or where some committed staff members are willing to place their lives in danger to defend the proposition that persecuted individuals need protection. As the UNHCR itself claims, if the Office did not exist, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of refugees would be left unassisted and unprotected. However essential the agency is, it is important not to take the rhetoric and 2 The UNHCR at 50 self-presentation of the UNHCR at face value. While the UNHCR has had many successes over the past 50 years, it has also had many failures. Slow and inadequate responses to refugee emergencies and protection crises have some- times risked the lives of countless numbers of refugees. A number of internal and external constraints inhibit the organization from achieving its full impact. The Office has an organizational culture that makes innovation and institutional change difficult. Some UNHCR senior management are arrogant and insensitive to the real needs of refugees. The UNHCR is confronted with persistent problems of lack of learning and policy effectiveness. The UNHCR also has endemic political problems. The High Commissioner has the almost impossible task of trying to influence states to protect and find solutions for refugees without challenging the prerogative of states to deal independently with their own internal affairs. The UNHCR was created by UN member states to be both a strictly non-political agency and an advocate for refugees.1 From its beginning, it was clear that the agency’s role would be an intensely political one. As defined in the 1951 Refugee Convention, refugees are people who have a well-founded fear of persecution and cannot return to their home countries for fear of placing their lives in jeopardy. The UNHCR’s primary mandate is to protect refugees from government repression. This often requires the Office to directly challenge governments and places the agency in a conflictive relationship with states. However, the UNHCR is not just an advocacy organization; it also exists to facilitate state policies towards refugees. States did not establish the UNHCR from purely altruistic motives, but from a desire to promote regional and international stability and to serve the interests of governments. Governments created the Office to help them resolve prob- lems related to refugees who were perceived to create domestic instability, to generate interstate tensions, and to threaten international security. The UNHCR is an intergovernmental organization and part of the UN system and therefore cannot always act in a strictly neutral fashion. Thus the UNHCR often walks a tightrope, maintaining a perilous balance between the protection of refugees and the sovereign prerogatives and interests of states. The UNHCR and Refugee Crises at the beginning of the Twenty-First Century As the UNHCR celebrates its fiftieth anniversary, refugee crises around the world continue to create instability, demonstrating the inadequacy of current approaches to dealing with all kinds of international conflict. During the last year of the twentieth century, a series of humanitarian and political disasters shocked most observers and gave the world a foretaste of what is likely to be in store for the international community at the beginning of this century. In The UNHCR at 50 3 Kosovo, over 850,000 people were driven out of the country in a massive and brutal ethnic cleansing the like of which Europe had not experienced since World War II. In Indonesia, gangs of armed thugs, with the active support of the military and police, waged a campaign of terror against the East Timorese people and against UN staff who were stationed there to monitor the refer- endum that would confirm East Timor’s independence. Thousands of people were killed and as many as half of East Timor’s 800,000 population fled their homes. The strategies of the respective authorities in both East Timor and Kosovo were to lay waste to the countries, depopulate them, and let the inter- national community deal with the consequences. One and a half years later, despite large-scale international involvement in both countries, Kosovo and East Timor remained highly unstable. While these examples happened to be the ones attracting the most head- lines at the end of the twentieth century, they were far from the only human- itarian disasters. According to the World Refugee Survey, 35 million people—including refugees and internally displaced people—remained displaced worldwide at the end of the century.2 Conflict and systematic human rights violations were the root cause of most displacements. Many of these displacements attracted little or no international attention. For exam- ple, during the past decade, the number of people killed in Colombia was four times the number killed in the Balkans and the number of internally displaced was at least 2 million people. The Russian army’s brutal assault on Chechnya, which forced hundreds of thousands of people into exile, gener- ated only muted Western complaints. Similarly, until recently, the interna- tional community ignored the violence, atrocities, and massive displacement occurring in Sierra Leone. As all-out conflict returned to Angola in 1999, 1.6 million people were displaced, with 950,000 civilians having been made refugees during the year. In the war between Ethiopia and Eritrea, over 50,000 people were killed and several hundred thousand were made homeless. Four million people in Sudan remained displaced after 16 years of endless fighting. Indeed, the future is likely to represent a period of massive displacement in which most regions of the world will experience forced population move- ments. Armed conflict is no longer always identified with the clash of armies across borders but often with the assault by a government and its military on its own population or by rebel forces terrorizing their own society. While the crises with which the world has had to deal in recent years are not new,3 conflict does seem to be increasingly brutal, endangering more civilians and aid workers than ever before. Widespread availability of high-powered arms has affected the intensity and duration of today’s conflicts. Currently over 90 per cent of the casualties of armed conflicts are civilians. Wherever there is conflict, the most fundamental tenets of humanitarian law are being flagrantly abused and violated on a daily basis. In such conflicts, interna- tional conventions on the laws of war mean very little to the perpetrators of 4 The UNHCR at 50 atrocities. Children and women are particularly vulnerable in these circum- stances. In Sierra Leone, rebels cut off the hands of teenaged boys and other children, routinely raped teenaged girls, and trapped families in their houses and torched them. A report by the Fondation de France on the 1994 genocide in Rwanda suggested that almost all women and girls past puberty who had not been massacred had been raped by the militias. In late 1998, the Special Representative to the UN Secretary-General on Children in Armed Conflict, Olara Otunnu, reported that some 9 million children were killed, injured, orphaned, or separated from their parents during such conflicts in the past decade.