There are currently over 20 million people ‘of concern’ to the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Just over half of those are internally displaced or stateless, with 8 million having fled across an international border. Established in 1950, unhcr was charged by the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees with the protection of their interests: full political and economic rights in the country of asylum, with the hope of eventual voluntary repatriation. As a brutal testament to its contemporary failure, at least 3.5 million of those refugees currently struggle for survival in sprawling camps in Africa and Asia. Fleeing from genocide, imperial aggression and civil war, only to be herded into camps or sent back to the country they were escaping, these asylum-seekers and returnees are part of a seemingly endless human tragedy. If it was originally a guarantor of refugee rights, unhcr has since mutated into a patron of these prisons of the stateless: a network of huge camps that can never meet any plausible ‘humanitarian’ standard, and yet somehow justify international funding for the agency.

Like many of the un’s specialized agencies—the World Food Programme, the un Development Programme and others—unhcr functions independently of the General Assembly. Most of these bodies have their own assemblies and compete with each other for their portfolio, prestige and funds.footnote¹Responsibility for the 4 million Palestinian refugees remains with the un Relief and Works Agency but, partly through its support for both refugee camps and repatriation, unhcr has successfully encroached on the territory of the development organizations. Financed by donations and periodic appeals, rather than as a structural part of the United Nations, it has always been constrained by the interests of the rich ‘donor nations’, and its level of funding largely depends on how it sells emergency relief operations to the West. During the 1980s the United States criticized unhcr for being too ‘legalistic’, and concerned with protecting refugees in America and Europe: it wanted a focus on relief operations in the South. Jean-Pierre Hocké—a Swiss car-salesman turned Red Cross official—was appointed in 1986 to reform the agency. He began to focus the organization on the mass return of refugees, at one point provoking a staff revolt by cutting food rations to Ethiopians who declined ‘voluntary repatriation’, and failing to condemn the forcible repatriation of the Vietnamese boat people. When Hocké was pushed out of office in 1989 by financial crises and allegations of corruption, the Norwegian Thorvald Stoltenberg briefly held the fort before the appointment of Sadako Ogata as High Commissioner at the end of 1990. The agency that Hocké and Stoltenberg left behind was demoralized and unsure of its post-Cold War purpose. By the time Ogata left in 2000, its mandate would have been transformed. The publication of her memoir provides an opportunity to track unhcr’s evolution during that ‘turbulent decade’, and assess its changing responsibility for the camps and their inhabitants.footnote²

Ogata took up her post during the whirlwind of Operation Desert Storm. Within months, the reassuringly-named Operation Provide Comfort was launched, with un and unhcr support, in order to corral hundreds of thousands of desperate Kurds back into Iraq. Presented to the media as an emergency relief campaign, it signalled the beginning of a successful reform of unhcr’s mandate and methods, in the direction originally charted by Hocké. During the 1990s, Ogata—soon with the help of Kofi Annan—was to retool this apparently outdated agency as an instrument for the new age of humanitarian warfare. The free world could no longer score political points by opening its doors to the oppressed, and the nationalist and ethnic rivalries stoked by Western intervention in the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans led to refugee movements that the donor countries were no longer willing to accommodate. The often bloody compromise that Ogata brokered began with a shifting network of ‘safe havens’ and refugee camps, in war zones or near contested borders, guarded either by international troops or local militia. As soon as possible, the survivors would then be sent back to the territory they had tried to escape. The goal of repatriation—still the preserve of the far right in Europe and the us—had become the stated aim of the unhcr: a ‘humanitarian’ medicine well suited to the new disease of humanitarian war.

Ogata is a scion of Japan’s political elite. Her maternal great-grandfather was Inukai Tsuyoshi, Prime Minister until his assassination in 1932, shortly after Japan’s invasion of China. Her academic career focused on this period, with a doctorate from Berkeley on Japanese foreign policy and the League of Nations. Ogata’s schooling in the language and bureaucracy of the un began in 1968 on the Japanese delegation to the General Assembly, and later continued at the Permanent Mission of Japan in New York. In 1979 Ogata led the Japanese plan for providing assistance to Cambodian refugees, and then during the early 80s she was Japan’s representative on the un Commission on Human Rights. Presumably it was her un background in the increasingly ubiquitous, and promisingly flexible, language of human rights that recommended her to Boutros-Ghali’s office in New York.

The Turbulent Decade is billed as an opportunity to reflect on the large changes in both the unhcr and its war-torn environment, whilst free from the pressures of office. None of the power-brokers of the period need fear any indiscretions, however: Ogata remains the consummate bureaucrat, firmly adhering to the accepted international narrative of un and nato heroism in tackling the post-Cold War world of ethnic rivalry, failed states and tinpot dictators. War is humanitarian throughout, havens remain safe even under fire, new and old nations are liberated by nato, and at one point Ogata even says that the war on Afghanistan was carried out on ‘reconstructional’ grounds. No direct terminology is risked when a euphemism lies easily to hand. The book tracks the development of four major refugee crises, selected for their scale and unhcr involvement, and as episodes that helped to reshape the way that the agency works: the first Gulf War and the Kurdish crisis, the Balkan wars from Bosnia to Kosovo, the Great Lakes region in Africa, and Afghanistan. Much of it seems to be compiled from Ogata’s diaries: uncomfortably interspersed with the unfolding human tragedies are name-checks of every airport landed in and functionary met, and a record of gifts from grateful recipients of unhcr largesse. Ogata’s conclusion, followed by her farewell speech and final briefing to the unsc, veers from lavishly praising every bureaucrat involved in this string of invasions, massacres and disasters to meekly requesting further unhcr powers and more resolute un action. If there were failings during this whole period, the remedy appears to be more troops, more of the time, with further powers to deploy police and other authorities regardless of sovereign boundaries.

For Ogata, the 1991 Gulf War was a resolute un action that unfortunately left Saddam Hussein still able to crush the Shia and Kurdish revolts that followed: no mention is made of the us role in encouraging these, or the empty promises of assistance. Tehran opened its borders and provided funds to assist the refugees, but even as their numbers swelled to 1.3 million, ‘coalition countries were loath to assist Iran’. The half a million Kurds fleeing towards Turkey faced a worse fate, as Ankara closed the border. They remained trapped on high mountain passes, without food and water in freezing weather. Ogata notes understandingly that Turkey faced a Kurdish insurrection within its own borders; therefore ‘the coalition member states, committed to maintaining the use of Turkish air bases for nato, were mute in response to Turkey’s refusal to grant asylum’. President Ozal pressed instead for ‘safe havens’ to be set up in the lowlands of Northern Iraq, backed by the us, uk and France. Resolution 688 was passed by the unsc to authorize Coalition access into Iraq to set up the camps, before handing them over to the un. The un appealed for funds for the operation, and Ogata was now thoroughly boxed in: ‘a bit perplexed by the complex setup of the un operational structure’, and further confused to find herself agreeing to look after ‘refugees’ still within their country of origin. This ‘severely tested unhcr’s protection mandate’:

Should we follow the legal dictate of not exercising our mandate inside the border and thereby refrain from helping those prevented from crossing, or should we stand on more realistic humanitarian grounds and extend whatever support we could?footnote³