The establishment of UNHCR in 1951 coincided with the onset of the Cold War. Initially, the agency's main stage of operations was Western Europe, which received refugees fleeing communist regimes. At its inception, UNHCR's work was limited to legal issues, helping governments to adopt laws and procedures to implement the 1951 UN Refugee Convention. Its first major challenge was responding to the exodus of some 200,000 refugees from Hungary in 1956, following the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian uprising.[2]

During the 1960s, as decolonization in Africa gained momentum, UNHCR grew into a refugee agency with a global mandate. The process began when it assisted Algerians who had fled their country's war of independence and sought refuge in neighbouring Tunisia and Morocco and helped them to repatriate at the end of the conflict. The Algerian crisis marked UNHCR's first involvement in Africa. Subsequently UNHCR was exposed to many new challenges and dangers in providing assistance and protection to Rwandan refugees in the Great Lakes region of Africa. By 1969, about two-thirds of UNHCR's global programme funds were being spent in African countries.[3]

Decolonization and post-independence civil conflicts ranged across much of Africa and Asia in the 1970s and 1980s. The 1971 Bangladesh crisis marked UNHCR's first large-scale involvement in South Asia. As on numerous occasions thereafter, the UN Secretary-General called on UNHCR to play the role of 'focal point' for the overall relief operation. Involving about 10 million refugees, the Bangladesh crisis saw the largest single displacement of people in the second half of the twentieth century. This period was also characterized by the involvement of the Cold War superpowers in internal wars – in the Horn of Africa, Latin America, and Asia – which generated large flows of refugees. UNHCR grew rapidly as it tried to respond to emergencies on three continents.[4]

In the 1990s new conflicts of a different nature arose, and with them came shifts in perceptions about refugees. Western countries in particular began to see refugees as a burden, and turned their efforts to trying to contain them within their region of origin. Consequently, UNHCR became more involved in situations of ongoing armed conflict, necessitating greater cooperation with military forces. This was illustrated by UNHCR's major operation when Kurds fled northern Iraq at the end of the first Gulf War in 1991. Another major and long-term emergency operation started the same year when the violent break-up of the former Yugoslavia led to the largest refugee crisis in Europe since the Second World War.

Other crises in the 1990s which were characterized by large-scale human displacement included those in the Great Lakes region of Africa, West Africa, Southeast Asia and the Horn of Africa. But as the interest of the major donors waned, many crisis areas virtually disappeared from the international political and media maps; at the beginning of the twenty-first century several forgotten refugee situations continued to fester.[5] In Africa in particular, the major powers were reluctant to get involved unless their strategic interests were at stake.

Since 2000, several new or intensified emergencies have made significant demands on humanitarian agencies. These have occurred in Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan and the countries affected by the tsunami of December 2004.

Introduction

Preparedness capacity

Notes

2. UNHCR, The State of the World's Refugees. Fifty Years of Humanitarian Action, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000, p. 5.

3. Ibid., p. 37.

4. Ibid., p. 7.

5. G. Loescher, The UNHCR and World Politics: A Perilous Path, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2001, p. 13.