Word: unhcr
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...thousand miles away, Hasan is sitting on a stained mattress in a wooden hut in the compound of his orphanage near the Javanese city of Bandung. He rages against the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), whose members have been working with parents to locate their offspring and arrange for their return home. Hasan says the children in his charge are now part of his family, and that UNHCR officials "have been lying about me for too long. If the UNHCR comes here, I'll hit them myself," he vows over and over, as he chain-smokes clove cigarettes...
...Hasan acknowledges, he has been informed that Pereira and his wife want their sons back. "More lies," he says. He rejects all claims made on behalf of the boys' parents, alleging that documents produced by the UNHCR to prove their case are forged. Hasan does acknowledge that initial U.N. queries about Jacinto prompted him to relocate the boy to another orphanage administered by Hasan's Lemorai Foundation. A U.N. official says they believe Jacinto was moved to the remote island of Sumbawa to complicate their efforts to secure his return. "I don't understand the game the UNHCR is playing...
...UNHCR is handling requests from 33 parents who want their children back from Hasan's Lemorai Foundation, some of them scattered as far afield as Sumatra and Sulawesi. Reunions, however, are not likely to happen quickly for those in Hasan's care?or for hundreds of other displaced East Timorese children. The U.N. can only make requests. After that it's up to the Indonesian authorities. I. Gusti Wesaka Puja, the official handling the issue at the Foreign Ministry in Jakarta, says the government is doing all it can to help. But "the fact is we have other priorities that...
...Nevertheless, a few do make it home. Two months ago, Hasan's compound in Sumedang received a visit by a team of officials from the West Java provincial authorities, the Foreign Ministry and the UNHCR. Accompanying them was Agustino Pascual, Zachariah's father, very much alive. The father hugged his boy. "He is my only son," said 56-year-old Pascual, who spent three years trying to reclaim his child. "It's just been too long. Praise the Lord, I have him back with...
...many of the struggles around the world, humanitarianism may simply be a Band-Aid and an irrelevance. Rieff quotes Jose-Maria Mendiluce, the UNHCR's first special envoy to the Balkans, as saying, "You don't reply to fascism with relief supplies, and you don't counter ethnic cleansing with reception centers for the displaced." Oxfam called for a cease-fire during the Rwandan genocide, but as an observer pointed out, that would have left half of Rwanda in the hands of those Hutu perpetrating the genocide and thus would have allowed them to finish what they had started...