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Refugees Magazine Issue 132: (Protection) – Protection Officers: Kerosene shortages, property disputes, rape, lost children
It's all in a day's work for a UNHCR protection officer in Pakistan's North West Frontier Province
By Jack Redden
For three relentless hours, refugees from Afghanistan's minority Hazara community bombarded the UNHCR official with complaints about medical services, questions about repatriation and demands for everything from computer lessons to protection against police abuse. Masti Notz was elated.
"This is great, these refugees know their rights," the head of the agency's office in Peshawar replied when a staff member suggested that the refugees of Bassu camp were too demanding. "This is a model camp."
The nearly 5,500 residents in Bassu, sited in a remote bulge of Pakistani territory surrounded on three sides by the sweeping mountains of Afghanistan, built their mud houses last winter in three months by hand. They pooled their resources to buy a generator that powers the light bulbs needed to extend the hours in which they can weave the carpets that provide most of their income.
The meeting with Notz was held on the shaded veranda of their new mosque. Listening to the refugees' concerns, Notz's instinctive reaction was to ensure UNHCR provided as much protection and support as possible. "I am convinced that the whole raison d'être of UNHCR rests on protection of refugees – both legal and physical," said the head of operations in Pakistan's turbulent North West Frontier Province (NWFP).
After spending most of her 10-year career in UNHCR as a protection officer, Notz carried that training to her current post. Protection is as much a mindset as a product of training and in one recent four-day period that became apparent as she confronted virtually every aspect of UNHCR's protection mandate.
She is in an angry mood at the start of a four-hour drive to Kurram, a district on the extreme edge of Pakistan's fiercely independent Tribal Areas. UNHCR had failed for months to provide kerosene to Afghan refugees who fled during the 2001 U.S.-led war that unseated the country's Taliban rulers.
"There has been no kerosene distribution since March so there is no light in the camp," she said. "This is a fundamental protection issue." Without nighttime illumination, women using communal toilets face the danger of rape. Children get lost. Thieves sneak undetected into darkened camps. Refugees seeking a substitute for kerosene scavenge for firewood, straining relations with their Pakistani hosts who also depend on the limited resources.
OTHER VIEWPOINTS
Notz routinely tells UNHCR employees to put themselves in the shoes of refugees and others. It's a practice she displayed for the benefit of the staff themselves at the UNHCR guesthouse in Saddar, a chaotic administrative town amid the rice paddies in the Kurram district. In Pakistan, female staff cannot mix easily with male staff in the evening. Notz authorized the purchase of a second television set and separate phone lines for female staff to keep in touch with their families.
Notz herself was born in Los Angeles, lived until the age of 10 in Iran, speaks fluent English, French, Spanish and Farsi and as "a product of East and West, I see each culture through the other's eyes."
The following day, after a Land Cruiser trip across a largely dry gravel streambed, 4,000 refugees in Old Baghzai camp voiced their concerns. One Afghan cannot return home because he doesn't have a school certificate needed to get work; Notz directed him to an appropriate office in Peshawar. One youth would like to return, but his father is paralysed; she suggested that as a particularly 'vulnerable' family, they might be better to stay in Old Baghzai.
But Notz was also carrying a tough message to the four camps in Kurram and their 'new' 2001 refugees who arrived long after 1.2 million others who have been in exile for as long as 23 years.
In early 2002, UNHCR began helping refugees return to Afghanistan, with the majority coming from Notz's Frontier Province region. A tripartite agreement between the U.N. refugee agency and the governments of Pakistan and Afghanistan covering the operation ends in early 2005, however, after which remaining Afghans could be screened to determine whether they are in need of refugee status or will simply be bracketed as economic migrants.
"You have to think seriously about what you are going to do when this camp closes," Notz warned.
When a refugee from Jalalabad complained he no longer had a home to go back to in that city, Notz urged him to be realistic: UNHCR covers the cost of transportation home, a package of food and other resettlement assistance and shelter for the most vulnerable. But it cannot promise the immediate return of land or property, one of the most contentious issues facing the Afghan government.
Notz and her fellow protection officers in the field must also constantly balance individual needs within a larger framework.
BALANCING ACT
"Empathy is very good in trying to redress some of the small things, but you have to be able to do things evenhandedly," she said. "You cannot have empathy for everybody, you need to have rules and regulations so you can distribute things evenly among people, so that you can treat people in the same way. If you try to have empathy for each person, it just doesn't go far enough."
Notz followed a similar routine in the other camps she visited, delivering warnings, tackling individual problems and levening everything with a touch of humor.
"I'm like a dentist," she told one gathering in the Farsi language, which many Afghans understand. "I only know how to pull out teeth. I don't do surgery and all those other things."
When one woman complained of worms in the distributed food, Notz discovered the supplies were not checked. She ordered an immediate examination of existing and future stocks.
After a man protested that he was given pills rather than a more effective injection, she turned to the side, adjusted the dark glasses she always wears, and quietly advised a doctor never to forget that treating largely illiterate refugees can require a large dose of psychology as well as the medicine itself.
Back in Peshawar, Notz discussed the problems she has uncovered on her field trip with the Commissioner of Afghan Refugees in NWFP, Brigadier Mushtaq Alizai. When she first arrived here just before the September 11 attacks in the United States, relations between UNHCR and the government were tense. Pakistan supported the Taliban and backed up its demands that refugees go home with harassment and arrests.
The situation is far more cordial nowadays. The Commissioner urged 'voluntary pressure' to increase the number of refugees returning, but he also endorsed improved medical services and a distribution of quilts after Notz had asked for an increase in the number of women doctors on call and checks on the quantity and quality of medicine available.
A group of relatives asked her to help in locating a girl, now aged about 19, who was taken to Germany as an orphan for medical care more than a decade ago. Notz promised to look into it, but also underlined that UNHCR both then and now would consider what was in the best interests of a child – a basic principle of protection.
In earlier days at UNHCR, Notz said, protection may have been considered an 'ivory tower' issue with specialists turning out rather academic papers. These experts are still essential, of course – especially in helping governments draft refugee legislation – but in the field, the 1951 Refugee Convention takes on a human face.
"You have to be constantly vigilant," said Notz. "When you have protection glasses on, you see the world in a certain way."
Source: Refugees Magazine Issue 132: "The Changing Face of Protection" (September 2003). Download the complete issue in pdf format: low-resolution (620Kb) here or high-resolution (1.8Mb) here
