op 18 front pages-converted - The Watson Institute for International ...

sons forced to flee intolerable circumstances. Created in 1951,
UNHCR became custodian of the Refugee Convention of that
year and of a later 1967 Protocol. The organization’s two
primary functions were “the protection of refugees and the
seeking of durable solutions to their problems.”
Throughout its history, UNHCR’s focus had been on
persons who, for reasons of well-founded fear of persecution,
had crossed international borders. More recently, UNHCR
also had been called upon to assist persons displaced within
their own countries of origin. In the current crisis, its constituency
included refugees of all ethnic backgrounds who had fled
the former Yugoslavia across newly drawn borders as well as
persons in refugee-like situations displaced within those borders.
As it charted its course between international revulsion
against ethnic cleansing and the rights of persons to seek
asylum, UNHCR was caught in a vice. Governments that
traditionally had provided refugees with asylum conveyed
their unwillingness to play their accustomed roles, while
governments in the region were pressing for U.N. support of
their own special agendas. One aid official recalls a conversation
with a senior Croatian government representative during
a period of heavy Muslim refugee influx who wanted U.N.
help to remove from Croatia the entire Muslim refugee population.
UNHCR initially sought to discourage ethnic cleansing by
protecting and assisting people where they were. In a paper
for an international meeting in July 1992, UNHCR emphasized
the need “to prevent and contain displacement.” A
strategy of preventive protection was recommended, entailing
“such activities as monitoring of the treatment of ethnic
minority groups, mediation between parties, exposure of the
practice of forced relocation and other measures to improve
respect for human rights and humanitarian law.”
Meanwhile, an internal UNHCR Working Group was
reviewing challenges, in the former Yugoslavia and elsewhere,
to the traditional protection concept. Its report affirmed
asylum as a fundamental principle of refugee protection
and urged UNHCR to “continue to promote the right of all
refugees to seek and enjoy asylum, at least on a temporary
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