Refugees

The term refugee is generally used to indicate a person escaping unbearable circumstances. The expression tends to be especially referred to individuals fleeing particular situations in which their lives, personal integrity or basic rights are being oppressed or at least seriously endangered. Possible causes of the aforementioned conditions range from specific discrimination based on political or religious belief or ethnic belonging to more generalised perilous situations determined by armed conflict or natural disaster.

The international agency mainly devoted to bringing humanitarian relief and social assistance to refugees is the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). The organisation, created in 1950 at the end of a long and largely disputed compromise, had a well circumscribed two-fold task: to provide international protection to refugees and to seek permanent solutions by assisting governments in processes of repatriation, resettlement or eventual integration of the displaced within their national communities.

UNHCR: refugees and internally displaced persons
The activity of UNHCR is - for expressed statutory provision - directed to the general category of �refugees� (ex article 6 of the 1950 Statute) as defined, for the purposes of international law, by Article 1(A).2 of the 1951 Convention on the State of the Refugees.
The text restricted the possibility of inclusion in the category - and, therefore, the recipients of international protection and relief - only to persons �outside� the country of nationality. This limited approach found its rationale in the necessity of respecting national sovereignty � although often used as an excuse by domestic authorities for impeding �external intrusion� in what they claimed to constitute internal conflicts.

The emergence of humanitarian crises of a different nature from the one predicted by the drafters of the 1950 Statute has necessitated an enlargement of the objectives originally targeted by UNHCR and a widened understanding of the concept of �refugees of concern to the international community� inclusive of internally displaced persons. The development of the operational area of UNHCR has been substantially spurred by the active role played by the two organs namely entrusted with the policy direction of the High Commissioner activity: the United Nations General Assembly and the Economic and Social Council. The Economic and Social Council in 1972 used the broad wording �refugees and displaced persons of concern� to indicate that the rehabilitation and assistance activities directed to the repatriated refugees of Sudan would have been also on behalf of the �persons displaced within the country�. The use of the expression �displaced persons� was renewed in the provision regarding UNHCR activities of humanitarian aid to be carried out inside Laos and Vietnam contained in the 1975 General Assembly Resolution 3455 (XXX).

But who really are internally displaced persons (IDPs)? We may say they are those persons in refugee-like situations, but still remaining within the borders of their countries of origin.
Protection of IDPs remains a task of primary responsibility of the Government of the concerned State. However, major complications spring from the fact that IDPs� displacement is often provoked by internal aggression carried out by State actors that rarely reaches the attention of the international community and that is often dealt with as an issue of exclusive internal concern.

A renewed emphasis on the need to find solutions involving instruments available at an international level to problems previously considered pertinent to the sole competence of the State has broadened the chances for international engagement in internal crises.
The most recent international approach to humanitarian assistance, in fact, reveals an increasing tendency not to consider the consent of the host State as a necessary prerequisite to intervention. Aid provision in Somalia and, partially, intervention in North Iraq are to be considered exemplary cases.

Refugees Protection and Assistance in the Balkans
An analysis of international assistance and relief to displaced persons in the Balkans cannot underestimate the intricacy of a situation in which refugees and IDPs substantially shared a common fate and represented a single emergency to be addressed in a unified effort.
UNHCR presence on the field had been favoured to accomplish a presumable task of protection in zones of on-going conflict. Yet international relief agencies� experience in Bosnia and Herzegovina has made void lots of the efforts carried out in this sense.

In the events that led to the disintegration of the former Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, displacement had not constituted a mere effect of the war, but its authentic purpose. After three years of conflict, the number of people uprooted had already exceeded four and a half million � the majority of which still remained within the frontiers of the �newly independent republics� of Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina.
On 24 November 1991, the Secretary General asked UNHCR to bring �relief to needy internationally displaced persons affected by the conflict�, as described in the Report on Human Rights in Yugoslavia realised by Special Rapporteur Tadeusz Mazowiecki. Until the newly created republics obtained the formal recognition of the achieved independence, all displaced persons from any of the ex-Yugoslav republics were considered as �internally displaced�. The engagement was justified by the agency by making reference to its �good offices�: the concept served as an ideal cover under which providing aid to persons outside its competence with the task of containing eventual refugee movements that could result in outflows into neighbouring countries.

The disastrous performance of UNHCR in the midst of the conflict of former Yugoslavia naturally impose us to question the convenience of its intervention in the countries where internal displacement is in act.
A primary issue of interest is whether pursuing containment of further cross-border displacement does not potentially undermine the internally displaced persons� right to seek asylum. This question, in fact, leads to a broader consideration: western authorities deemed cross-border mass fluxes politically �inappropriate� and showed largely unwilling to share the burden of humanitarian crises.

A decade of international assistance
Ten years after the beginning of the conflict in former Yugoslavia and 6 years after the signing of the Dayton Peace Agreement one and half million people still result uprooted from their areas of origin. Nationalist hindrances, major destructions (followed only by scattered and slow reconstruction), persisting ethnic-based discriminations are among the causes of the state of affairs.
Refugees and IDPs�s future prospects remain largely dependant on the elusive efforts of the international community that still shows great limits in its capability to overcome return-related obstacles.

One of the evident demerits of the international community � that has since the early days of the conflict determined the inadequacy of its effort and, ultimately, the weakness of its impact on the crisis - has been the failure to understand the real causes of the war.
Among the lessons learned from the Balkans� experience is that humanitarian aid can easily end up being manipulated by parties in conflict and sort out the unwanted result of strengthening nationalist authorities directly responsible for the crisis itself. Badly targeted or misconducted humanitarian aid has often fed war economies and sustained the conflict instead of reaching the originally conceived beneficiaries.