Massive emergencies, large-scale reparations confront UNHCR.

• Position: UN High Commissionon for Refugees

The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) had been confronted with the dual challenge of massive emergencies and large-scale repatriations during 1994, High Commissioner Sadako Ogata reported to the General Assembly's Third Committee (Social, Humanitarian and Cultural) on 9 November.

Nowhere had the challenges been more evident than in Rwanda, the High Commissioner said. Despite international efforts, the human toll had been very high. The emergency preparedness and response capacity of UNHCR was demonstrated in April, when some 260,000 Rwandese fled in just over 24 hours to the United Republic of Tanzania. However, the influx of more than 1 million people in one week into Goma, Zaire had been overwhelming, and the UNHCR had been compelled to devise innovative emergency assistance "packages", using donor governments' personnel and facilities, including the military.

Parts of West Africa, as well as Somalia, "continue to present an uneasy contrast of crises and fragile hope, of sudden exodus paralleled by spontaneous returns", she stated. In the former Yugoslavia, UNHCR had continued its humanitarian activities on behalf of some 4 million refugees, internally displaced and besieged civilians, the "largest single group of persons in need of international protection worldwide",

"Based on our experience in the former Yugoslavia and Zaire, we are now actively examining the limited use of military support, while retaining the civilian control and multinational character of our humanitarian operations", High Commissioner Ogata stated.

The total population of concern to the agency had reached 23 million worldwide, including some 16.4 million refugees, according to a 31 August report of the UNHCR (A/49/12). The cost of meeting their needs was estimated to be more than $1 billion.

While there had been some agreements reached for large-scale voluntary repatriation movements in 1993 and 1994, the deterioration of a number of other situations had led to new refugee flows.

Repatriation efforts

Voluntary repatriation efforts had met with notable success in Cambodia, to which 365,000 persons had returned till the first quarter of 1994, the UNHCR report stated. More than 60,000 of the nearly 200,000 refugees from Myanmar, who had sought refuge in Bangladesh, had been voluntarily repatriated, thanks to the signing of two memoranda of understanding.

As a result of the implementation of a comprehensive peace agreement, some 1.5 million...