Word: unhcr
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...many Iraqi refugees to put off plans to return to the country. A series of bombings across Iraq in April killed more than 200, the highest monthly body count in roughly a year. Andrew Harper, head of the Iraq Support Unit created by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), told TIME that the rate of refugee return slowed dramatically in April. And a "significant number" of returnees have turned around and fled the country again...
...Iraqi government says fewer than 1% of the refugees have returned home. (The International Organization for Migration estimates that 18% of the 1.6 million internally displaced Iraqis have returned to their original homes.) Few refugees have signed up for the UNHCR's own programs offering financial assistance and subsidized transportation for those wanting to return. Many of those who do go back don't inform the U.N. unit, for fear of being taken off its refugee register. "They want to keep options open," Harper says. (See pictures of the Iraqi man whose job is to bury Baghdad's unclaimed dead...
...some options may soon disappear. The UNHCR this week announced that since the overall level of violence in Iraq had waned, it is no longer recommending that most Iraqis get automatic refugee status abroad. Instead, they should be individually interviewed to determine their status, the Geneva-based agency said...
...Army's screening of civilians, for example, in which suspected LTTE fighters are weeded out of the civilian exodus, happens in a sort of no man's land just outside the combat zone, between the areas served by the Red Cross and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). That means there is no monitoring of how interrogations are being conducted, or how suspected LTTE fighters are being treated. "We still don't have access to the screening process," says Amin Awad, head of UNHCR operations in Sri Lanka. "It is very important; it is part of our mandate...
...UNICEF and the U.N.'s refugee agency, UNHCR, are airlifting emergency supplies to the island nation over the weekend. The U.S. and France have pledged field hospitals while the European Union has committed $22 million in assistance. But the U.N. last week warned that the response to its emergency appeal in February for $155 million for Sri Lanka had brought in less than a third of that amount by the time thousands of civilians began flooding into refugee camps last week...