Preventive Action for Refugee Producing Situations

60 Chapter 2
* lack of systematic collection of information from refugees, who are
themselves the best sources for reporting about the conditions that led
them to cross the border;
* lack of systematic reporting between UNHCR field staff and headquarters,
which may be partly due to the absence of confidential channels;
* use of incorrect or irrelevant models in collecting and interpreting information;
* mistimizing of early warning messages to UNHCR headquarters
causing them to be ignored or reprimanded, to the discouragement of future
efforts;
* dilution or delay by supervisors of messages from field workers to
headquarters, thus greatly inhibiting htir effectiveness. 105
During the 1987 UNHCR Emergency Training Programmes, the RPG
developed material on early warning for seminars to be held on Emergency
Planning Skills. 106 For the future Emergency Training Workshops,
the RPG has begun to collect basic information about all major refugee
flows since 1977, doing more detailed studies of a smaller sampler of
them. 107 This cutoff date was selected in such a manner as to include such
major refugee flows as Afghans into Pakistan, Ethiopians into Somalia,
Cambodians into Thalland, and Vietnamese boat people into various
countries in Southeast and East China. 108
The RPG's information-collecting activity is a pilot project, which is
still dependent on the availability of funding. It plans to gather information
about refugee inflows in the past decade, to complete ten in-depth
case studies, to monitor early warning signs across a region of Africa,
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105 Lance Clark, "Selected Constraints on Early Warning Actions by UNHCR
(And What To Do About Them)," (Washington, D.C.: Refugee Policy
Group, 1988), pp. 1-7.
106 UNHCR Emergency Management Training Programmes (EMTP), for
1987, (Geneva: UNHCR, 1987).
107 Lance Clark, "Early Warning of Refugee Mass Influx Emergencies,"
UNHCR Emergency Training Seminar at the University of Wisconsin,
1985, (Washington, D.C.: Refugee Policy Group, n.d.), p. 1.
108 Report of the Refugee Policy Group Study of Early Warning, n.d., p.8.
Empirical Examination 61
and to establish a quick response team for conducting field visits to
countries that would potentially produce and receive new refugee flows. 1 «»
On 30 November 1988 Lance Clark of the RPG made a presentation, at
an Emergency Management Workshop on his most recent findings about
UNHCR's possibilities early information collecting and reporting. Although
the information system studied here is still designed primarily for the
purpose of emergency planning for refugee emergencies once they have
developed, the RPG's recommendations may in due course benefit
UNHCR's ability to continue moving further into the terrain of preventive
action. 110
2.2.2. Office of Research and the Collection of Information (ORCI)
In a first attempt to improve information gathering on incipient refugee
flows within the UN system, the Secretary-General requested the UN
agencies in a letter of 23 November 1983 to inform him on an urgent basis
of any situation which could give rise to a major humanitarian refugee crisis.
All agencies were to report through the UN Centre for Human Rights in
Geneva, which the Secretary-General had designated for carrying out the
task of centralizing the information thus gathered. Some agencies, including
UNHCR, responded that their nonpolitical mandate prevented them from
cooperating in such an the effort, and so this initia tive could never produce
the results hoped for.
During the following two years, the climate changed in two significant
ways: the UN itself underwent a financial crisis, and member states who had
been acting as resettlement and donor countries began to experience
"compassion fatigue" in accepting new refugees.
Prompted by the threat of losing a large percentage of operating funds, in
1986 a Group of 18 High-level Intergovernmental Experts reviewed the
structure and the functioning of the U.N. Secretariat Among other
suggestions, the Group recommended eliminating duplication and increasing
productivity, reducing fragmentation and undue complexity,
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109 Lance Clark, Letter to Philip Sargisson, 6 February 1986, pp. 1-2.
110 Personal interview with Lance Clark on November 16, 1988 in Cambridge.
Also see "Training with UNHCR," No. 1 (April 1988), Summary of UNHCR
Training Courses for 1988.