General Assembly
Official Records
Fifty-fourth Session
Supplement No. 1 (A/54/1)
Chapter III
Assisting refugees
211. By the end of 1998, there were 21.4 million refugees and persons of concern to UNHCR compared with 22.3 million in 1997. Just over half (11.4 million) were refugees; the remainder comprised internally displaced persons, returnees, asylum-seekers and stateless people. The vast majority of refugees and persons of concern were in Africa, Asia and Europe.
212. In contrast to previous years, there were no large refugee movements in 1998 or in the beginning of 1999. Though numerous, the emergencies the humanitarian community dealt with were relatively small in size and of low visibility. This pattern changed dramatically in the last week of March 1999. From then, over the next three months, 850,000 Kosovar Albanians were forced from their homes -- one of the largest and most rapid refugee exoduses of modern times. UNHCR and its partners, with the logistical support of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, mounted a huge relief operation to assist those who streamed into Albania, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and Montenegro. More than 90,000 refugees were moved to countries in Europe and beyond under the auspices of the humanitarian evacuation programme. When peace was restored to Kosovo, the refugees returned almost as suddenly and in as large numbers as they had left. In just two weeks, more than 400,000 refugees crossed back into Kosovo.
213. The Kosovo crisis provides a graphic example of the close relationship between human rights abuses, war and refugee flows. The humanitarian and human rights communities both increasingly accept that responses to humanitarian crises must also tackle human rights failings. In Kosovo, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights broke new ground by dispatching envoys to gather information about human rights violations and establishing field offices expressly for this purpose.
214. Africa provides many more tragic examples. The crises in Guinea-Bissau and Sierra Leone forced hundreds of thousands to flee their homes. Renewed fighting in the Democratic Republic of the Congo not only provoked new movements of refugees and displaced persons, but also made it extremely hazardous for humanitarian agencies to continue to provide relief. Late in 1998, the armed conflict between Eritrea and Ethiopia led to a new spate of displacement and mass expulsions in the Horn of Africa, while the internal war in the Republic of the Congo impelled 25,000 Congolese refugees from the Pool region to cross into Bas-Congo in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
215. There was only limited voluntary repatriation in 1998. Ethiopian refugees were able to return from the Sudan; refugees returned from Ethiopia to north-west Somalia, indicating the restoration of some degree of peace and stability to at least parts of the Horn of Africa. In West Africa, the repatriation of Tuareg refugees to Mali and the Niger was completed, while sizeable numbers of Liberians returned home, either spontaneously (160,000 refugees) or with UNHCR assistance (110,000 since 1997). In Central America, long-standing Guatemalan refugee problems moved towards a successful conclusion thanks to a combination of voluntary repatriation and local integration in Mexico.
216. In other situations, however, continuing violence or a breakdown in political negotiations disrupted plans for refugees to return, leading in extreme cases to further exoduses. This was notably the case in Angola, where renewed hostilities caused a new wave of refugees and generated even greater numbers of internally displaced persons, forcing UNHCR to suspend its repatriation programme. Armed conflict in southern Sudan ruled out plans for the voluntary repatriation of some 240,000 refugees from Ethiopia and Uganda; some 124,000 Somali refugees in Kenya were likewise unable to return to their country of origin; around 120,000 Sahrawi refugees continued to live in exile, waiting for a successful conclusion to negotiations on Western Sahara; refugees from Burundi, numbering some 270,000, had to remain in the United Republic of Tanzania, where their presence was a major source of tension between the two States.
217. Solutions proved equally elusive in other parts of the world. In May 1998, internal conflict again broke out in Georgia, prompting 40,000 people to flee from the Gali area. Many were being displaced for the second time. The repatriation of Afghan refugees from Pakistan and the Islamic Republic of Iran was impeded by continuing instability in Afghanistan, where the reintegration and rehabilitation activities of UNHCR came to a virtual halt. The repatriation of hundreds of thousands of Tamil refugees to Sri Lanka from India proved impossible as a result of the intensity of the Sri Lankan civil war. UNHCR urged the Governments of Bangladesh and Myanmar to accelerate the voluntary repatriation of the estimated 20,000 Muslim refugees who remain in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh. The repatriation programme resumed in November 1998.
218. The challenges facing UNHCR in these volatile and often stalemated situations are compounded by the fact that safe refuge in neighbouring States, or in countries further afield, is becoming increasingly difficult to secure for victims of war or human rights abuses. Countries in both the developing and the industrialized world are increasingly reluctant to accept the basic obligations of refugee protection. Poor countries argue that they have had to bear a disproportionate burden of the global refugee problem for too long.
219. Responding to these and other concerns, UNHCR has intensified its efforts under its protection mandate, giving prominence to advocacy activities such as the global campaign to promote States' accession to international instruments for the protection of refugees and to the conventions on statelessness. At the same time, it has taken steps to ensure that protection needs are better integrated into assistance programmes.