Human Cargo (6 page)

The question now was what to do with those who remained in the camps for displaced people. The fit and healthy were soon recruited for the very labor schemes so condemned by the Russians. In return for volunteering to build roads, or work in the mines, industry, and agriculture in the United States, Canada, and Australia and across Europe, refugees could apply for citizenship in the countries that offered them work. No one, however, wanted the sick or the elderly, and as the Cold War dragged on, 400,000 “hardcore” cases lingered on in the camps. Before finally shutting down its operations—which, at $428.5 million, had proved expensive—IRQ officials warned that what once had seemed a temporary phenomenon would in time turn out to be a very permanent one.

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IT WAS NOW
1950. The United States, having spent many millions of dollars on refugees in Europe, decided that the problem was no longer theirs to deal with, particularly as they were now helping European countries directly through the Marshall Plan, which in turn would, they argued, benefit the refugees as well. What neither they, nor it seems anyone else, envisaged was a world in which refugees would keep on coming, as the IRC) had warned. War, famine, violence, and poverty would send people fleeing across borders, and as fighting broke out in Korea and Palestine and starvation spread across China, it became plain that yet another measure would be needed to counter these new flows of displaced people. In the United Nations, talks began about the setting up of a new body, an Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and a new convention that would spell out their rights. Louis Henkin was a young lawyer at the U.S. State Department, interested in international
law, when he was invited by his boss, Dean Rusk, to sit with the U.S. team negotiating what became the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. With him were delegates from twenty-six countries. Professor Henkin, a courteous, upright man with a bony face and rather large ears, is now in his late eighties and the only member of the committee still alive. He remembers many hours devoted to wrangling over the meaning of the word “refugee,” and a general ill-defined feeling that the topic did not have great significance for the modern world. There was much talk about whether there should be a “right” to asylum, or only the right to “seek” it. The all-important Article 33, about
nonrefoulement
—the not sending back of refugees to countries where they faced persecution—was pushed through by the French, who reminded the others of the fate of the Jews trying to flee the Nazis. The nations of eastern Europe declined to attend the sessions, saying that in their view the refugees left in the camps in Europe were all traitors, and the United States argued strongly that the new organization’s mandate should be one of protection only, not of assistance or relief, and that its budget should be limited. The meetings, Professor Henkin recalls, which took place in Washington and on the shores of Lake Geneva, were on the whole good-tempered, but not without argument, for the British wanted host states to bear responsibility for the refugees on their territory (and had very few) while the French (who had many) wanted other countries to share the burden. Germany, Austria, and Italy, all of which were overwhelmed by the large numbers of refugees still living in camps, had no voice at the table.

The document that emerged—in a surprisingly short space of time, little more than six weeks—was a simple reflection of the immediate postwar world. The terms it came up with remain in use to this day. The definition of a refugee, according to Article 1 of the Convention, revolved around the idea of persecution, “a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.” The phrase “asylum seeker” would apply to someone seeking refugee status. The persecutors, it was tacitly agreed, were the totalitarian
Communist regimes, and the refugees were therefore, by definition, “good.” “Bad” refugees lay well into the future. In the 1950s, “good” refugees were seen to be useful pawns in Cold War diplomacy. “Migrants,” it was spelled out, were people who could go home; “refugees” were those who could not. That there would soon be people fleeing in great numbers from poverty, generalized violence, or lives without bearable futures, was not foreseen. The “durable solutions” to the lives of refugees, which UNHCR undertook to explore, included resettlement in another country, integration nearby, or (only if the refugee wished it) repatriation. In 2004, the Refugee Convention, together with the 1967 Protocol that extended its scope beyond Europe to take in the rest of the world, remains the most important international document on refugee protection. It is the foundation of EU policy toward refugees, and ratification is a condition of European Union membership.

In 1951, however, it reflected the concerns of the day. The decision was taken not to include the 458,000 exiled Palestinians who, for political reasons, were to be assisted by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, with the result that there would be no international organization to protect them. And there was much discussion about what groups UNHCR should concern itself with. “Internally displaced” people—later called IDPs—who had not crossed an international border in their flight, were eventually excluded. Sovereignty was not challenged. While the new agency could assist or at least protect refugees once they had fled over a border, it was not invited to concern itself with what had led them to leave home in the first place. UNHCR, opening its doors for business in Geneva, not far from the Palais des Nations and in the company of a growing number of aid agencies and international organizations now clustering together in Switzerland, was given a very small budget, an emergency fund to be used only in dire necessity, a few rooms, and a handful of staff.

In 2001, UNHCR celebrated its fiftieth birthday. No international organization, argues Gil Loescher, the author of a comprehensive and authoritative evaluation of its achievements, has ever
had such an inauspicious beginning, or been born of such inherent paradoxes. Apolitical, UNHCR acts as chief advocate for the refugee cause. Forbidden to challenge governments over their internal affairs, it has a mandate to protect those whom governments persecute. The world it looked out on in 1951 was divided, deeply respectful of the sovereign right of states, and little interested either in refugees or their futures. The United States, from the beginning, was so suspicious of entrusting responsibility to a United Nations body that it immediately set up an International Office for Migration to ensure that its influence remained strong in the world of displacement and the movement of people. What UNHCR had not been given was power. The question was: how far could it get with persuasion?

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THE FIRST HIGH
Commissioner for Refugees was Gerrit Jan van Heuven Goedhart, a shrewd, modest, likable man who was admired for his eloquence and who had spent the war in the Dutch resistance. Goedhart liked to say that he had been a refugee himself. The United States, which had wanted an American commissioner, showed its irritation by marginalizing the agency while he remained in office. The original International Refugee Organization was also annoyed by having its position usurped. Goedhart further alienated some of the donors by his determination to include relief in his mandate, and he had considerable trouble raising the necessary funds until bailed out by the Ford Foundation. Goedhart died suddenly in 1956 of a heart attack, but even his critics reluctantly admitted that he had managed to make much of the Western World aware that it owed a measure of responsibility for refugees.

The next few years were crucial. The second High Commissioner, Auguste Lindt, was a Swiss diplomat, popular with the Americans and a personal friend of Dag Hammarskjold. He and his successor, another Swiss diplomat called Felix Schnyder, negotiating their way delicately through the minefields of the Hungarian revolution and the Algerian war of independence, cleverly turned
UNHCR into the genuine focal point in the refugee world, while shifting its concerns away from Europe and toward Africa, where one country after another was in postcolonial turmoil. UNHCR, declared Schnyder, needed a “universal character.” This was not quite enough for the nascent African states, however, who complained that UNHCR’s tight definition of a refugee failed to reflect the reality of conditions on their continent. In 1964, the Organization of African Unity appointed a commission that in time drew up its own convention with a more generous definition of the word “refugee,” to take in not solely those fearful of individual persecution, but all who were driven to flee their homes because of war and civil conflict. Wars, violence, ethnic fighting would all now enter the refugee debate, as qualifying people to be recognized as refugees— though not by Europe and North America—when in 1984 ten Central American states signed the Cartagena Declaration on Refugees.

The fourth High Commissioner was the second son of the hereditary imam of the Ismaili sect of Shiism. Suave and gregarious, Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan had once shared a room with Edward Kennedy at Harvard, where he attended lectures by Henry Kissinger. He spoke perfect French and English, had excellent contacts in the developing world, and was determined to make UNHCR a major international political player. He had not long stepped down, after ten generally well-regarded years, yielding his place to the former Danish prime minister, Poul Hartling, a clergyman with progressive views, when the flight of people from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, which had begun in 1975, sharply intensified. Under Hartling, who ran the agency more democratically than the somewhat cliquish Aga Khan, more than 2 million refugees, the boat people of Indochina, were resettled in the West. It was during Harding’s tenure, too, that there was a global surge in refugee numbers. Vast camps were set up in Africa and Asia, later to prove hard to dismantle. “Refugee warriors,” operating from camps across borders, became players in regional struggles for power. During the 1980s, the number of refugees worldwide rose from 10 million to 17 million; contributions from reluctant donors failed to keep up with their needs.

Something else was also happening. As more and more refugees, driven by violence and human rights violations, left their homes in the developing world, they began to travel farther afield, arriving in ever greater numbers in European countries to claim asylum. Until now, requests for asylum had been few and confined to dissident scientists and ballet dancers from the Eastern Bloc whose defections made headlines in national newspapers. The political upheavals across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East produced a surge of arrivals by plane, truck, and boat, people who bypassed normal channels, often with the help of newcomers on the refugee scene: traffickers and smugglers of illegal travelers. The refugees came from Ethiopia, from what was then Rhodesia, from Sri Lanka, Iran, Iraq, and then Somalia. In 1976, 20,000 people had asked for asylum in western Europe; by 1981 the figure had reached 158,500, and UNHCR was beginning to struggle to keep its position as main arbiter over asylum policy.

Right through the 1970s and early 1980s, European bureaucracy coped well with immigration. In the face of the immense numbers of unexpected arrivals, the system crumbled. Waiting times for decisions became longer, and appeals backed up. There were growing doubts about the nature of the asylum claims, questions about the extent to which the newcomers were valid refugees under the 1951 Convention. The idea emerged of the “bad” refugee, a person not so much in flight from persecution but actively in search of work and a better life, using the asylum route as his way into Europe. The phrase “economic migrant” entered the jargon of refugee affairs. UNHCR in Geneva kept urging European governments to be generous, arguing that even if some of the claimants were not, strictly speaking, Convention refugees, there was still too much danger at home for them to risk returning; states responded by drafting ever tighter restrictions. By the mid-1980s, most European countries, agreeing that the best way to stem the flow was to prevent people from arriving in the first place, were drawing up measures to deter them. Soon, with the advent of the European Union, an outer European perimeter was defined and barricaded against newcomers. Financial
support was withdrawn from asylum seekers who were deemed not to meet the criteria; detentions and deportations began. When UNHCR complained, Western governments paid no attention and concentrated on their own refugee policies. No one listened when Harding pleaded that those who sought asylum should be seen as victims, not abusers.

By the late 1980s, UNHCR had reached a low point, excluded from many of the main worldwide refugee debates. In any case, donors seeing the political upheavals and natural disasters of the day wanted to fund relief operations, not refugee protection, particularly when relief kept vast numbers of refugees from arriving at their doors. And, under the next High Commissioner, Jean-Pierre Hocke, they went some way to establish and fund these operations. Hocke had been head of operations for the International Committee of the Red Cross at the time of the Biafra crisis, in 1967; he knew all about the logistics of relief.
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He was decisive, even authoritarian, and he wanted to see an end to the long-term camps that had by now become endemic in the refugee world. These camps, said Hocké, with considerable reason but ahead of his time, crushed “human dignity” and reduced the “human capacity for hope and regeneration;” what the West should be doing was not keeping them afloat, but attacking the root causes for the exoduses. Hocké also longed to revise the 1951 Convention, to bring its definition of a refugee into line with that of the Organization for African Unity, in order to take in all those affected by the wars and civil conflicts now chronic in many places. But Hocké was too dictatorial and his style of leadership offended people. In any case, Cold War politics continued to dominate the regional conflicts of Africa and Asia. Shortly into his second term, in 1989, he resigned, after a bruising scandal over his expenses. Few were sad to see him go.