Word: unhcr
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Nguyen Phuong Thuy is not alone. According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), women on 81 % of the boats reaching Thailand in the first nine months of 1981 were raped, most of them many times over. A total of 552 were attacked in front of their relatives; another 200 were carried off to other fishing vessels. The attackers, many of them carriers of venereal diseases, often left the women infected as well as brutalized. Many victims became pregnant. A report to the relief agency CARE by a doctor who worked at the Songkhla camp...
...prestige attached to the $180,000 Peace Prize may make it easier for the UNHCR, which also won the award in 1954, to raise funds for the refugees. Still, it is scarcely likely to persuade a country like Thailand, awash with 300,000 Indochinese, to accept more refugees. Similarly, the award will not dispose the U.S. to take additional Haitians and Cubans. "No country welcomes refugees today," says one high-level refugee aide. "The situation for them is as bad as it was for Jews fleeing from Nazi Germany in the 1930s." As a result of the increasingly hostile reaction...
Ironically, the UNHCR received its highest accolade at a time when several donor countries were questioning its management methods. The agency's executive committee convened at its Geneva headquarters last week partly to look into widespread criticism of UNHCR inefficiency and poor morale. Though few UNHCR staffers and other relief aides criticize the motivation of High Commissioner Hartling, 67, a former Danish Prime Minister who has held the top post at the agency since 1978, some believe he lacks the leadership qualities needed to cope with a far-flung and slow-moving U.N. bureaucracy...
Quarreling among top agency officials sometimes slows down operations. As a result, the UNHCR'S chief of mission in Pakistan, Roman Kohaut, is retiring in disgust. "I'm fed up with the mess in Geneva," Kohaut told TIME'S Wibo Vandelinde last month. "UNHCR resembles a delicatessen that has grown into a huge supermarket but has never adapted its management. Geneva refuses to listen to urgent advice from the field...
Perhaps more serious is the criticism by some independent relief agencies that UNHCR is not aggressive enough in protecting refugees in the countries to which they have fled. "UNHCR is the hostage of the host countries," says one top relief official. "The agency is much too timid about protecting, let alone acting upon flagrant violations of the refugees' rights." Among such violations: Thailand's return of 60,000 Cambodians to famine-struck Kampuchea in 1979, though most flooded back within days, and Hong Kong's repatriation of 10,000 Chinese who escaped from mainland China...