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New Priorities in Refugee Care
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# : |
18676 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1991 |
2,590 Words |
| Author
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W.R. Smyser
W.R. Smyser was formerly UN deputy high commissioner for
refugees and director of the State Department's Refugee
Program Bureau. He is now a senior associate of the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace and president of USA for
UNHCR. |
When the armed forces of the United States and its allies entered Iraq in April 1991 to take care of Kurdish refugees and displaced persons, they may not have realized that they were reversing the pattern of refugee care and protection that had existed since World War II. But that, indeed, was what they were doing. They were also reflecting a new and rapidly spreading wish to keep refugees where they are.
By helping refugees who had not yet left their own country and had not, therefore, become true refugees, those forces were establishing new principles and setting new standards. So were the UN forces who took over from them a month later. Although there had been some minor instances in which refugees were taken care of in their own country, this was the first time that such a major group had been supported within their own borders since the UN refugee system was established 40 years ago.
What happened in Iraq and Kurdistan is not an isolated case. It is part of a broad pattern under which countries are increasingly attempting to stop refugee flows before they start. As another example of this, Western European states have been consulting with the Soviet Union and with Eastern European governments for the past several years about ways to help potential refugees within the Soviet Union itself so as to prevent refugees from leaving Soviet territory for the West.
The European states are not planning to send troops into the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and there are no designated special zones for refugees in the Soviet Union, as there have been in Iraq and Kurdistan. But the Europeans have been meeting to try to prepare for possible civil strife and economic collapse to their east, and one of the main purposes of those meetings has been to find ways to keep people from leaving the Soviet Union.
In Europe as in Iraq, states are trying to find ways to stop refugee movements before they begin or, at least, to channel them and perhaps to limit them. They also want to coordinate with the country of origin on how best to take care of refugees before they take flight.
These new measures and consultations may serve some useful purposes if they can help refugees and also save them the long stays in camps that have all too often become the norm for the displaced of recent decades. But they also contain some real dangers and have to be handled with
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