UN refugee agency marks its 60th anniversary

BAGHDAD / IraqiNews.com: The head of the UN Refugee Agency, António Guterres, marked today (Tuesday) the 60th anniversary of the organization he heads by appealing for strengthened global impetus in tackling the world’s new and fast-evolving displacement and statelessness problems. Speaking at the agency’s headquarters in Geneva, Guterres warned of multiple new factors that are causing displacement. He said many of these did not exist at the time of UNHCR (UN High Commission for Refugees’s founding or when the major international refugee and statelessness conventions were created. “UNHCR traditionally was supporting refugees, people that would cross a border because of a conflict or persecution,” he said. “But now we see that more and more people are crossing borders because of extreme poverty, because of the impact of climate change, [and] because of their interrelation with conflict. So there are new patterns of forced displacement and the international community needs to be able to tackle those challenges,” Guterres said. The UNHCR was created on 14th December 1950 by the UN General Assembly. Its original purpose was to address the post-World War II refugee situation in Europe, but its work quickly expanded. By 1956 it was facing its first major international emergency with the outpouring of refugees when Soviet forces crushed the Hungarian Revolution. In the 1960s, the decolonization of Africa produced the first of that continent’s numerous refugee crises needing UNHCR intervention. Over the following two decades, UNHCR had to help with displacement crises in Asia and Latin America. Today it deals with major displacement situations around the world. The global population of refugees, internally displaced people, and asylum seekers stands at 43 million people – most of them under UNHCR’s duty of care. In Iraq, UNHCR’s representative Daniel Endres stressed that the country has one of the largest population in displacement in the world, including 1,5 million internally displaced persons. One third of those displaced persons are homeless, living in precarious conditions in settlements and public buildings. At the same time, Iraq has seen one of the largest return movement in the past three years with some 500,000 people returning to their areas of origin from other parts of Iraq or from abroad. UNHCR collaborates with the government of Iraq in supporting the vulnerable IDPs and returnees. In addition to its own internal displaced people, Iraq is also hosting some 40,000 refugees, mainly from neighboring countries. The agency is also advocating for the estimated 130,000 stateless people in Iraq – mainly Faili Kurds and Bedouns – to have their citizenship reinstated or to get Iraqi citizenship. SKH/SR 250