Human Cargo by Caroline Moorehead Read Free Book Online Page B

inauspicious beginning, or been born of such inherent paradoxes. Apolitical, UNHCR acts as chief advocate for the refugee cause. Forbidden to challenge governments over their internal affairs, it has a mandate to protect those whom governments persecute. The world it looked out on in 1951 was divided, deeply respectful of the sovereign right of states, and little interested either in refugees or their futures. The United States, from the beginning, was so suspicious of entrusting responsibility to a United Nations body that it immediately set up an International Office for Migration to ensure that its influence remained strong in the world of displacement and the movement of people. What UNHCR had not been given was power. The question was: how far could it get with persuasion?
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    THE FIRST HIGH Commissioner for Refugees was Gerrit Jan van Heuven Goedhart, a shrewd, modest, likable man who was admired for his eloquence and who had spent the war in the Dutch resistance. Goedhart liked to say that he had been a refugee himself. The United States, which had wanted an American commissioner, showed its irritation by marginalizing the agency while he remained in office. The original International Refugee Organization was also annoyed by having its position usurped. Goedhart further alienated some of the donors by his determination to include relief in his mandate, and he had considerable trouble raising the necessary funds until bailed out by the Ford Foundation. Goedhart died suddenly in 1956 of a heart attack, but even his critics reluctantly admitted that he had managed to make much of the Western World aware that it owed a measure of responsibility for refugees.
    The next few years were crucial. The second High Commissioner, Auguste Lindt, was a Swiss diplomat, popular with the Americans and a personal friend of Dag Hammarskjold. He and his successor, another Swiss diplomat called Felix Schnyder, negotiating their way delicately through the minefields of the Hungarian revolution and the Algerian war of independence, cleverly turnedUNHCR into the genuine focal point in the refugee world, while shifting its concerns away from Europe and toward Africa, where one country after another was in postcolonial turmoil. UNHCR, declared Schnyder, needed a “universal character.” This was not quite enough for the nascent African states, however, who complained that UNHCR’s tight definition of a refugee failed to reflect the reality of conditions on their continent. In 1964, the Organization of African Unity appointed a commission that in time drew up its own convention with a more generous definition of the word “refugee,” to take in not solely those fearful of individual persecution, but all who were driven to flee their homes because of war and civil conflict. Wars, violence, ethnic fighting would all now enter the refugee debate, as qualifying people to be recognized as refugees— though not by Europe and North America—when in 1984 ten Central American states signed the Cartagena Declaration on Refugees.
    The fourth High Commissioner was the second son of the hereditary imam of the Ismaili sect of Shiism. Suave and gregarious, Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan had once shared a room with Edward Kennedy at Harvard, where he attended lectures by Henry Kissinger. He spoke perfect French and English, had excellent contacts in the developing world, and was determined to make UNHCR a major international political player. He had not long stepped down, after ten generally well-regarded years, yielding his place to the former Danish prime minister, Poul Hartling, a clergyman with progressive views, when the flight of people from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, which had begun in 1975, sharply intensified. Under Hartling, who ran the agency more democratically than the somewhat cliquish Aga Khan, more than 2 million refugees, the boat people of Indochina, were resettled in the West. It was during Harding’s tenure, too, that