Word: unhcr
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...land - though many are in settlements within 20 km of their home. "It's a situation where many feel that they are in limbo... and there are mixed feelings about whether the LRA leadership should be tried by traditional justice," says Harry Leefe, head of the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR's office in Gulu. Because of this unique situation, Mao says: "Our focus is not on punishment, our focus is on restoring social harmony." Perhaps, without justice...
...every time you have new refugees, no matter what the number, it raises the Palestinian question," says Stephane Jaquemet, the U.N. High Commission for Refugees representative in Lebanon. Still, the U.N. has worked out an agreement with the Lebanese government whereby any Iraqi given official refugee status by the UNHCR can stay in the country for a renewable one-year period. (UNHCR now automatically grants refugee status to anyone from central and southern Iraq.) But most Iraqi refugees aren't legally allowed to work in Lebanon, and those who do usually take menial under-the-table jobs such as washing...
...professions. It takes good connections and lots of money - $8,000 to $15,000 - to get to Stockholm from Baghdad, but now it is not just the élite who are willing to pay the price. "At first we saw the really wealthy people arrive here," says Paal Aarsaether, unhcr spokesman in Stockholm. "But over the last year we're seeing a lot of middle-class people as well." Having granted asylum to 2,330 Iraqis in 2005, Sweden received nearly four times that many last year, and officials say they are bracing for a possible 35,000 this year...
...Inside his air-conditioned office, looking out on the street where the drama plays out, Arafat Jamal, the senior regional officer for the UNHCR, tells me that in one week, 400,000 people in Lebanon - 10% of the country's population - have been displaced. The people in the street below him will not be taken out of the country, he said, but instead moved to "safe havens" in schools in the mountains and near Tripoli in the north. He looks tired, and he should be; he's incredibly short-staffed at the moment because the Lebanese employees of the UNHCR...
...unhcr last week reported that refugee numbers - around 9 million people worldwide - are the smallest in 25 years. But many European governments have watched Australia's offshore processing experiment "with considerable interest," says Christopher McDowell, director of the London-based Information Centre about Asylum and Refugees. When the Pacific Solution was first unveiled, McDowell says, European officials were "clamoring to meet" then Immigration Minister Ruddock "to glean as much as they could about the proposals...