Preventive Action for Refugee Producing Situations

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office. The Under Secretary-General responsible has already
undertaken several missions using the political authority of the
Secretary-General for mediating between countries of origin of new
massive refugee situations such as Burma/ Bangladesh and the Horn of
Africa.
The creation of this new Department and the strengthening of
UNHCRs role in country of origin information and preventive
protection has gone hand in hand.
Early warning information seemed, even at the time of writing
four years ago, a task falling totally outside UNHCR's activities. Now
it is well recognized to be an important tool for identifying developing
refugee situation emergencies, not only for preparedness but also for
prevention through mediation and conflict resolution. In 1989/1990, I
was responsible for coordinating the drawing up of the initial elements
to warn the Office about possible refugee flows so that appropriate
measures could be taken, which were integrated into UNHCR's
Refugee Emergency Alert System (REAS). Simultaneously
preparations were made for UNHCR to start cooperating within an
inter-agency framework on developing a UN early warning
mechanism. Around the same time the internal UNHCR Task Force on
Early Warning was set up, which is now chaired by the Deputy High
Commissioner.
In an evaluation of UNHCR's protection, an internal working
group suggested that, in view of the importance of early warning for
the development of preventive strategies, UNHCR should strengthen
its capacity for early warning and devote adequate resources for this
purpose. It also recommended that the UNHCR Task Force on Early
Warning should examine how the current reporting system and
organizational structure of the Office could be better used for the
collection, analysis, and dissemination of country of origin information
by UNHCR on potential refugee flows as well as on internal
displacement. The group added that UNHCR should continue to
promote the development of an appropriate early warning mechanism
for refugee flows within the UN System.
I am happy to report that the realization of the policy propositions
go beyond what I had projected as feasible four years ago. Of course,
it is too early to make an evaluation of the long-term effectiveness of
these new approaches. Nevertheless, these are some initial new models
of interaction and intervention with regard to refugee-producing
situations. I have rewritten Chapter 4 entirely in order to reflect the
slowly emerging cooperative mechanisms between peace-keeping,
peacemaking, political and humanitarian endeavours for preventing
new and treating existing
conflict and refugee situations.
Chapter 5 with the legal justification remained the same. In this
chapter, I confronted the often incredibly misused concept of state
sovereignty with the protection of human rights and refugees. The
legal analysis of the international community's capacity to intervene
for preventing new refugee situations documents the erosion since
World War II of domestic jurisdiction over human rights abuses. The
use of peace-keeping forces for protecting humanitarian operations,
such as in former Yugoslavia and Somalia, a new approach, which is
discussed in
chapter 4.
The message of the book remains unchanged. The international
community should move forcefully now, while almost global
cooperation is possible, since the vanishing of the East-West Conflict,
to institutionalize new preventive and interventionist approaches to
save human lives, prevent future abuses and forced population
displacement. The Cold War may have ended. But wars, internal and
crossborder, are
still very much alive.
For 1993 I plan to write a new book, which will focus on Europe
and new approaches for refugee policies and preventive action.
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