The UNHCR Branch in Yemen: Has it Gone Astray? The Organization meant for the Good of Refugees Turns out to be to their Harm!!? [Archives:2001/05/Focus]

When an international charitable body, of the volume, vitality and importance of the branch office of the UNHCR in Yemen, swerves its humanitarian mission, the consequences tend to be disastrous for its ‘clients,’ the refugees. It is due to the fact that the emancipatory organization has not achieved a single success for the benefit of the refuge seekers, that those who are living in permanent states of ‘sublime fear’ have given up resorting to the humanitarian organization!
Such a conclusion hasn’t been reached arbitrarily in favor of the emancipatory organization branch. On the contrary, it has been reached by close scrutiny and a painstaking inspection of the inconsistent behavior of the organization’s branch conducted over a number of years.
The first negative result of such demeanor that can be observed at the branch is a lack of discipline, which manifests itself in matters such as the loss of files of some of the applicants for refugee status, and deliberately misguiding some of those applicants about the decisions taken in their cases regarding recognition of their refugee status, and telling them that their cases are pending. Or in the permanent delay in taking decisions in cases which are supposed to be decided with great urgency. Other than that, there is an incredible negligence in the settling of some applicants’ claims, or in ignoring the claims themselves. Besides the high costs of contacting the organization which refugee’s have to bear: it is entirely forbidden to see an officer – let alone his “excellency”, the representative. The deputy representative and the protection officer are not to be seen unless there is a prior appointment, and when you ask them to specify that date, they tell you that it is not possible! – as if all the cases presented before the office need to follow the whole zigzag route, or as if those people, including the representative himself, are not there for the purpose of helping the poor refugees! Nevertheless, even the two reception days have recently been canceled after the well-known “Somali-stone-assault” against the emancipatory branch, nearly two months ago. This goes on while the branch protection unit practices its dubious criteria to evaluate similar cases differently: Very often there have been similar cases judged in a discriminatory manner resulting in improper assessments. Other times, the protection officer, who is a volunteer herself, does not inspect the claims of a given group of applicants as “case by case study”; she would decide plurally on them. e.g., she regards the sum of the Sudanese claims as the same, despite the apparent differences.
But the most miserable situation a candidate at the office can be made to endure is the lack of transparency. And this can vary to take the form of elusion in evading the enquiries of the refugees or withholding the necessary information under the pretext of official secrecy, a thing which is capable of disabling the efforts of any mighty giant.
Numerous cases have been given up while following the crippled and uncertain process because of sheer exhaustion. Many cases have been pending for over a year; other applicants have been left to meet their miserable fates in the hands of their native embassies and consulates (a number of applicants have handed the office a written complaints on the issue), a third group (refugees from Arab countries) were told that the Yemeni government does not accept Arab refugees within its borders and yet, the protection unit did not hesitate to hand many of them letters telling them “they do not meet the UNHCR criterion for resettlement”! And thus applicants give up following up their applications, making the whole matter a sheer waste of time.
Meanwhile, all refuge conventions (the 1951 convention in particular) urge the doner countries to provide their guests with the necessary means to lead a decent life, and to give them priority regarding job opportunities. Neither the UNHCR branch (except for a limited number of Somalis who are granted very little sums of money), nor the Yemeni hosts supply the refugees with the above mentioned facilities. The annual report issued by the office last December states that despite the fact that the Yemeni government has recognized and signed the various refugee treaties, it does not accept political asylum seekers from Arab countries. In the circumstances, all the refugees around the world are totally dependent on what the UNHCR and the hosts offer them.
This happens at a time when the branch office has completely stopped receiving any further applications for protection! And this was a fact that Mr. Dugheish (a former employee at the UNHCR subsidiary organization “PAD” in the managing staff of the RCC) articulated in an interview on the Jazira TV Channel; that the whole affair in the office is messy and mixed up with rampant corruption For whose benefit do such things happen, or why does a UNHCR branch which is essentially founded to comfort and lessen the sufferings of the refuge seekers, turn out to be a means of adding extra burdens onto the already weakened shoulders of these poor refugees? Really, I don’t think that what is going on, in the UNHCR branch office here, can benefit a refuge seeker in any respect.

Hanafi Mohammed Saleh
A Sudanese Refugee in Yemen

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