The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) is one such organisation. Based in Geneva and part of the United Nations, the UNHCR is the pre-eminent multi-lateral body devoted to looking after refugees.

The statutes and conventions upon which the UNHCR was founded make give it responsibility for people who, because of a well-founded fear of persecution in their home country, flee their homeland, thus becoming refugees. With a total annual budget of just under US$1 billion, the UNHCR is responsible for some 20 million people who come under its care. Sri Lankan Tamils are just one of the refugee populations that the organisation comes into regular contact with.

Tamils come under the ambit of the UNHCR usually because of one of three reasons: they are refugees who have left Sri Lanka and now live overseas, they are refugees who have returned to Sri Lanka from overseas because of forced or voluntary repatriation, or because they are internally displaced people (IDPs) within the borders of Sri Lanka.

While the work of UNHCR, especially under its current leadership, has been praised around the world, there are instances when not all is well. Sri Lanka is a good case in point and a recent article by Andrew Bruce Kendle highlights some of the problems with the operations of the UNHCR there.

Kendle's experience in Sri Lanka was gained when he worked there with another international organisation, Peace Brigades International (PBI), over two stints in 1994 and 1995/6. PBI itself had been involved in several projects in Sri Lanka but has recently cut its own activities there. Kendle's criticisms of the UNHCR's activities in Sri Lanka fall into three broad themes, each associated with a different phase in the interests and operations of the organisation.

UNHCR became involved in Sri Lanka in 1987. ‘UNHCR – whose protection mandate is based on ensuring that refugees are not repatriated to any country where they will likely face persecution – agreed to help implement the section of the Indo-Lanka Peace Accord dealing with the repatriation of Tamil refugees from India to Sri Lanka.’

UNHCR’s decision to become involved in Sri Lanka was seen by some as being unusual and a break from its traditional role. Kendle, however, notes that the move was not an anomaly. Instead, he argues, it ‘was a clear indicator that the organization had entered a period of slow but steady change during which it had been transmogrified (mainly via pressure from the West) from the international community’s lead agency for protecting refugees, into its spearhead for containing or reversing refugee flows.’

Kendle criticises the decision to proceed with repatriation of refugees from India for several reasons. First, he argues, the resumption of fighting in Sri Lanka in October 1987 did not prevent the UNHCR from carrying on with the repatriation programme despite the initial assumption that repatriation would only go ahead if there was peace. Indeed, there was little guarantee that the repatriated refugees would be any safer than when they left the country.

Second, contrary to its own operating principles, the UNHCR is said to have allowed the repatriation programme to proceed despite there being strong evidence that the India government was forcing Tamil refugees to return to Sri Lanka. Indeed, the UNHCR is required to have its own representatives present to ensure that refugees freely expressed their desire to be repatriated. With only an indirect involvement, it could be argued that rubber stamp in this case simply added legitimacy to the Sri Lankan and Indian government's plan to repatriate tens of thousands of refugees.

The second broad theme in Kendle's criticisms of the UNHCR in Sri Lanka is in relation to the operation of

Open Relief Centres (ORCs) in Sri Lanka for sometime after mid 1990. The two main ORCs were set up on Mannar island and in Madhu. Here displaced people could be supplied with much needed food, shelter, health care and security. IDPs could come and go as they pleased, without registration and were offered protection, directly while they were in the camps and indirectly in neighbouring areas.

In short, UNHCR’s activities in Sri Lanka during the early 1990s are seen by many within the organisation as innovative, relatively successful and cost effective measures aimed at easing the suffering of IDPs in Sri Lanka. Kendle sees he situation differently. He argues that the failure of the UNHCR's attempts to implement successful repatriation and its growing need to go into damage control' mode, led it to enter new operational grounds.

In 1990, with the political backing of the Indian government (which was worried by new waves of refugee flows) and the material support of the Sri Lankan government, the UNHCR began to set up its ORCs. While dealing with IDPs in this manner usually falls to other NGOs such as the Red Cross, Kendle contends that this was an opportunity for the UNHCR to save face, placate the Indian Government and extend the realm of its own competency.

He sees the ORCs as simply an attempt to contain refugee flows, aimed at protecting the interests of potential host countries over the interests of those fleeing. In the broader context, Kendle sees the Sri Lankan 'test case' as the first step in the UNHCR's move from protector of refugees to proxy for the host countries (usually also its financial donors).

This leads to the third theme in his criticisms, the involvement of the UNHCR in the 1994 Tripartite Agreement between it and the Sri Lankan and Swiss governments on the repatriation of refugees from Switzerland. Here the UNHCR argued that its involvement would again provide some extra safe guards to returnees. But, as Kendle argues, the UNHCR once again compromised its own principles by failing to safeguard the human rights of returnees or even respect their status as refugees, with a right to non-repatriation.

Kendle's analysis of the UNHCR’s activities in Sri Lanka provide a sober counter account to the official UNHCR line that its activities in Sri Lanka were innovative and effective for their context. Each instance deals with a different time frame (1987, 1990 and 1994), each of which posed different challenges to anyone involved with relief in Sri Lanka. Each instance also deals with three different main refugee related problems - refugees, IDPs and returnees respectively.

However, all three sets of criticisms reveal a common tension in the way that the UNHCR has attempted to manage its responsibilities to the displaced and its obligations to its host/donor countries. The case of Sri Lanka is perhaps a good example of the contradictions and complexities of putting into practice global refugee policies when there is very little global consensus.

It is also perhaps an example of an organisation that is struggling to come to terms with burgeoning and increasingly complex refugee problems with relatively limited resources. From the Tamil perspective, Kendle's work highlights the complexities of the role played by foreign NGOs in the conflict situation.

A paranoid view would see the UNHCR as yet another organisation that is serving the interests of the Sri Lankan and other states in containing the 'Tamil problem' without seeking a lasting peace with justice.

However, things are not that simple and one cannot be only negative about the role of outside organisations such as UNHCR. Foreign NGOs do manage to do valuable work and their limited (and now decreasing) presence in the North and East of Sri Lanka has important repercussions. Apart from the direct humanitarian work being done, indirect monitoring and observation becomes all the more important in the context of a virtual press blackout.

Kendle's work asks 'protecting whom?' in the case of the UNHCR. It may be just as valid to ask a similar question more generally of all foreign organisations in Sri Lanka - 'what for and for whom?' Attempting to discover, as Kendle does, in whose interest NGOs work is vital.