Reaching Safety

 

The governments of many of the world’s countries have agreed to grant asylum to refugees. To grant asylum means to offer protection in a safe country to people who are in danger in their own country. One way of ensuring that refugees are protected by their country of asylum, is to assists asylum countries as far as possible in that task, and to ensure that States are aware of, and respect, their obligations to protect refugees and persons seeking asylum and solutions.

 

By virtue of its activities on behalf of refugees and displaced people, UNHCR also promotes the purposes and principles of the United Nations Charter: maintaining international peace and security; developing friendly relations among nations; and encouraging respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms.

 

Under its mandate, UNHCR's work is humanitarian and non-political. Its founding statute entrusts UNHCR with two main and closely related functions – to protect refugees and to seek durable solutions to their problems. The former function – the most important responsibility – is known as "international protection" and is aimed at ensuring basic human rights, particularly that no refugee be returned involuntarily to a country where he or she has reason to fear persecution.

 

Every refugee has the right to safe asylum. However, international protection comprises more than physical safety. Refugees should receive at least the same rights and basic help as any other foreigner who is a legal resident, including certain fundamental entitlements of every individual: basic civil rights, including freedom of thought and of movement, and freedom from torture and degrading treatment. Similarly, economic and social rights apply to refugees as they do to other individuals. Every refugee should have access to medical care. Every adult refugee should have the right to work. No refugee child should be deprived of schooling, or recruited into military service or prostitution.

 

Helping Refugees

 

Protecting, assisting, and seeking lasting solutions for refugees can be done in a variety of ways. One way to carry out the protection function, for example, is to promote adherence to international agreements on refugees and constantly monitor compliance by Governments. Though they may have succeeded in fleeing human rights violations in their homelands, refugees may be subjected to new horrors in their asylum countries. Sexual violence, exploitation and other forms of assault have been a particularly disturbing part of some refugees' experience. International staff work both in capital cities and more often in or near remote camps and border areas, attempting to provide protection and to minimize the threat of physical attack.

 

Emergency assistance provided to refugees may be in the form of food, water, shelter, medicine, blankets, sanitation and equipment such as kitchenware and tools. Tents made from blue plastic sheeting supplied by UNHCR have become an all-too-familiar part of the landscape as such emergencies have multiplied. There are also programs to establish schools and clinics for refugees who are living in camps or other communal groupings. It is important to make every effort to ensure that refugees can become self-sufficient as swiftly as possible – this may require small financial grants and formal income-generating activities or projects to teach new skills.

 

Finally, durable solutions for the problems of refugees are sought through repatriation to their homeland, integration in first countries of asylum or resettlement to third countries.

 

     

  • Seventeen-year-old Fatima, a Somali refugee, was raped while herding goats near the Dadaab refugee camp in eastern Kenya. She was then ostracized by her own community because of the incident. UNHCR provided medical, social and legal counseling to the teenager who was subsequently reintegrated into her community after a six-month mediation process. 

     

  • Rwanda's ethnic violence in 1994 sent hundreds of thousands of children fleeing their homes, many without parents or guardians. UNICEF, in association with KODAK, helped trace many of those children and re-unite them with their parents. Eight-year-old Oliver was one of them. His photo and those of hundreds of others were displayed in billboards in the camp where Oliver lived in Goma, Zaire. When Beatrice, his mother, saw Oliver in April 1995, she asked him, "Do you know who I am?" Oliver had not seen his mother for nine moths. "You are Beatrice, my mother," he said, after a moment’s hesitation, and then disappeared into the outstretched arms of her mother.

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Signs of progress

 

Large numbers of people have been forced to abandon their homes and seek safety elsewhere in recent years. But many displaced people have also been able to go back to their own countries and communities.

 

     

  • Afghanistan: Since 1989, almost 2.6 million Afghan refugees have been assisted to return home from Pakistan and Iran.
  • Africa’s Great Lakes: Beginning in 1994 the UN provided humanitarian aid to over 1.7 million Rwandan refugees during the crisis in the Great Lakes region. In 1996 and 1997, most of these people returned home to Rwanda.
  • Bosnia and Herzegovina: The airlift to Sarajevo was the longest-running humanitarian air bridge in history. The airlift began in July 1992 and ended in January 1996. More than 2.7 million men, women and children were helped.
  • Caucasus: In the newly independent states of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, some 450,000 refugees and asylum seekers and nearly 970,000 internally displaced persons are assisted.
  • Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua: UNHCR and the UNDP assisted a total of 1.9 million internally displaced persons, to return home.
  • Mali and Liberia: The UN is playing a vital role in peace and reconciliation through its reintegration programmes; over half a million refugees returned home.
  • Mozambique: Nearly 400,000 refugees were assisted to return home to Mozambique; the organization also spent an estimated $100 million on development and reintegration programmes to help them restart their lives.
  • Northern Iraq: In 1991, humanitarian assistance was provided to some 500,000 Iraqi Kurds displaced after the Persian Gulf War.
  • Vietnam: Under UNHCR sponsorship 109,000 Vietnamese boat people returned to their country.

     

 

Tamaz Biblia’s story

 

When Georgia gained independence following the break-up of the Soviet Union, Abkhazia tried to break away. This led to a conflict that killed over ten thousand people. Hundreds of thousands were displaced.

 

Thousands came to the city of Zugudidi, among them, Tamaz Biblia who arrived penniless but four years later, thanks to UNHCR and the voluntary organization, International Rescue Committee (IRC), Tamaz has become a businessman selling second-hand clothes.

 

Tamaz attended an IRC small business development training in 1997. The programe is sponsored by UNHCR. He had the idea of selling second-han clothes and obtained from the programme a loan of $820.

 

Tamaz’s business has become an enormous success. He already has three employees working for him, all of whom like him are displaced from Abkhazia. He proudly told a visiting UN team that he was planning to open a new store in a few days.

 

"I’ve got a new line of credit and, thanks to this new loan, I will be able to provide employment to three more persons," he said.

 

Adapted from "UN in Action", a United Nations video

 

 

Areas in need of attention

 

During 1999, conflicts in Kosovo and East Timor gave rise to dramatic and massive refugee crises, and in both cases, the international community eventually responded. In other instances, the international response is much slower, timid and piecemeal. This is particularly true in Africa.

 

In the last few years, the pattern of refugee crises in Africa has undergone significant changes. Refugees continue to flee violence and conflict – almost invariably compounded by poverty – and to seek asylum in safer countries. Others – and increasingly so – seek refuge as internally displaced people in safer parts of their own countries.

 

     

  • In Angola, almost 20 per cent of the population has fled – both outside and inside the borders of the country.

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Dealing with the internally displaced is often more arduous than with refugees who cross borders. The difficulty of having access to large numbers of people in insecure and isolated areas is compounded by the complexity of assisting civilians in their own country – where their own state authorities, or rebel forces in control, are frequently the very cause of their predicament. Hundreds of thousands of people at risk in war areas such as southern Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Burundi, Angola and Sierra Leone – a majority of them internally displaced – are presently not accessible to humanitarian agencies. And where such access is possible, it is often very dangerous. Therefore, it is particularly worrying that insufficient resources are provided by the international community, increasing the risk of exposing the Africa continent to fresh catastrophes – like the exodus of Rwandans, or the massacres and mutilations of civilians in Sierra Leone.

 

BOX: Looking Into the Face of Human Suffering

 

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan on 19 and 20 May 1999 visited refugee camps in Albania and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, where he, in his own words, spent "two heart-rending days" with the victims of Kosovo, who by the end of May numbered nearly 800,000. On returning to New York, Mr. Annan wrote the following first-person account of his visit

 

"At the Blace border crossing with Kosovo, I held the hand of a 100-year-old woman who asked me with tears in her eyes, "How could this be happening to me at this time in my life?" I spoke to a young mother who only three weeks before had given birth to a child while hiding in the mountains.

 

A woman holding a 3-year-old boy told me that her last memory of her husband was when he was arrested and taken away. She has not heard from him since. In the Stenkovac camp in Macedonia, I listened to an old man whose entire village had been in flight for two months, seeking refuge wherever possible and finding it only now. In Albania, in the Kukes camp, I visited a young woman in a field hospital who had been shot in the leg as she fled her home with her newborn baby.

 

On the border between Albania and Kosovo, I visited a small family in a tent who, with extraordinary dignity and quiet courage, welcomed me and asked only that they be allowed to return to their homeland. I could only tell them that it is what we want, too. Indeed, that is what the world demands. And as I was leaving the camp I was deeply moved by a small expression of the generosity and strength of the Kosovar people. I was approached by an aid worker who handed me a small UNICEF pin, explaining that it was a gift from a 9-year-old girl who asked that it be given to their friend from the United Nations."