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

war in which human displacement was the aim and not just a
consequence, explained one protection officer, “the application
of our traditional mandate is impossible and the protection
we are able to provide is minimal.” Yet even the policy
articulated above by van Hövell, which was conveyed in an
October 1993 letter to the team, allowed varying interpretations.
By contrast, the ICRC, seeking to implement its own
protection mandate in the same war zones, benefited from a
much clearer policy. That policy, explained senior officials in
Geneva, was to evacuate former detainees and other individuals
under death threat. Overall, the ICRC was less concerned
than UNHCR about being charged with complicity. As a
precaution against being used by authorities committed to
ethnic cleansing, ICRC action focused on individuals rather
than groups or communities. Even that focus required discerning
judgments about whether individual death threats
were credible. It also meant that the ICRC did not generally
evacuate groups of imperiled persons.
In stark contrast with 25 UNHCR protection officers, the
ICRC had more than one hundred expatriates (plus local
officers and support staff) engaged in visiting detainees, supervising
the release and transfer of prisoners, and tracing
missing persons. Backstopping their work was a team of a
dozen Geneva-based protection staff, on call for emergencies
and able to be dispatched at short notice.
In UNHCR’s case, a higher priority to protection activities
was needed. Additional resources and staff invested in these
activities would have equipped UNHCR better to answer the
criticism that, unwilling to help people to safety, it also had
been unable to protect them where they were. UNHCR protection
staff also needed safeguards against administering relief
programs and, in several instances, unloading grain bags. In
the absence of a critical mass of protection activities in the
field, a policy of preventive protection that provided little real
protection began to look like a policy of preventing flight,
more keyed to donor than to refugee interests.
Distinctions were also needed between helping people to
flee, helping people once they had fled, and helping people
who had moved into communities vacated by ethnic cleans-
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