Massive emergencies, large-scale reparations confront UNHCR.

The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) had been confronted with the dual challenge of massive emergencies and large-scale repatriations during 1994, High Commissioner Sadako Ogata reported to the General Assembly's Third Committee (Social, Humanitarian and Cultural) on 9 November.

Nowhere had the challenges been more evident than in Rwanda, the High Commissioner said. Despite international efforts, the human toll had been very high. The emergency preparedness and response capacity of UNHCR was demonstrated in April, when some 260,000 Rwandese fled in just over 24 hours to the United Republic of Tanzania. However, the influx of more than 1 million people in one week into Goma, Zaire had been overwhelming, and the UNHCR had been compelled to devise innovative emergency assistance "packages", using donor governments' personnel and facilities, including the military.

Parts of West Africa, as well as Somalia, "continue to present an uneasy contrast of crises and fragile hope, of sudden exodus paralleled by spontaneous returns", she stated. In the former Yugoslavia, UNHCR had continued its humanitarian activities on behalf of some 4 million refugees, internally displaced and besieged civilians, the "largest single group of persons in need of international protection worldwide",

"Based on our experience in the former Yugoslavia and Zaire, we are now actively examining the limited use of military support, while retaining the civilian control and multinational character of our humanitarian operations", High Commissioner Ogata stated.

The total population of concern to the agency had reached 23 million worldwide, including some 16.4 million refugees, according to a 31 August report of the UNHCR (A/49/12). The cost of meeting their needs was estimated to be more than $1 billion.

While there had been some agreements reached for large-scale voluntary repatriation movements in 1993 and 1994, the deterioration of a number of other situations had led to new refugee flows.

Repatriation efforts

Voluntary repatriation efforts had met with notable success in Cambodia, to which 365,000 persons had returned till the first quarter of 1994, the UNHCR report stated. More than 60,000 of the nearly 200,000 refugees from Myanmar, who had sought refuge in Bangladesh, had been voluntarily repatriated, thanks to the signing of two memoranda of understanding.

As a result of the implementation of a comprehensive peace agreement, some 1.5 million Mozambican refugees from six neighbouring countries had been repatriated by the end of 1994.

However, even with successful repatriations in recent months, Africa continued to "be plagued by the problems of refugees and forced population displacements", with 7.2 million refugees and 20 million internally displaced persons, according to a 26 October report (A/49/578). Internal conflicts, human rights violations, and breakdowns of law and order, combined with the negative effects of poverty, drought and famine, continued to create "unprecedented levels of hardship and suffering" in many parts of Africa, it stated.

Another report of 13 September (A/49/380) on the consequences of the six-year conflict over Nagorny Karabakh--an Armenian-populated enclave in Azerbaijan--stated that the conflict had generated some 250,000 refugees, mostly from Armenia, along with an additional 658,000 people who were internally displaced. "Thus, close to a million refugees and displaced persons are now crammed into the houses of relatives, schools, collective farms, tents and thousands of makeshift shelters across Azerbaijan", the report stated.

The five-year process of the International Conference on Central American Refugees (CIREFCA) had been formally concluded in June, according to a 19 October report on that matter (A/49/534). CIREFCA had facilitated the voluntary repatriation of 70,000 Nicaraguans, 30,000 Salvadorians and 16,000 Guatemalans, shut down refugee camps, and promoted the adoption of specific measures to regularize the situation of refugees and returnees, the report added.

PELATED ARTICLE: Assembly acts on refugees

In adopting on 23 December five resolutions on refugees, the Assembly, among other things: deplored the fact that, in certain situations, refugees and returnees and other persons of concern to UNHCR had been subjected to armed attack, murder, rape and other violations of or threats to their personal security and other fundamental rights, and that incidents of refoulement and denial of access to safety had occurred (49/169); condemned all acts of exploitation of unaccompanied refugee minors, including their use as human shields in armed conflict (49/172); and called upon the UN system and the international community to strengthen the emergency response capacity of the UNHCR on the basis of its experience in Rwanda (49/174).