Ten years ago we marked June 20th for a first time as a special day, dedicated to the millions of people pushed out of their homes by conflicts or disasters. In my travels around the world: in Haiti, Sudan, Kyrgyzstan, Yemen, Thailand, Japan, Tunisia, the occupied Palestinian territories, I have witnessed the daily struggles of men and women, children and grandparents to rebuild their lives away from home. As I write this blog I see their faces and hear their stories again. It is a good decision to have a World Refugee Day, to honour them and to lift up attention to their suffering and their aspirations.
The world first dealt with the rights of refugees because of massive displacements in Europe caused by World War II. It was for that reason the UNHCR was born and in this post-war context the first refugee convention with binding international standards for the treatment of refugees was signed 60 years ago.
When in 1951 the UN General Assembly established the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees it gave it only a three year mandate – an optimistic outlook to a problem that was meant to disappear. Today we know better – or worse – as we watch the number of refugees grow. According to the Norwegian Refugee Council, in 2010 over 42 million people were displaced by natural disasters alone – six times more than the population of my own country, Bulgaria. Add those that are uprooted by conflicts and the number grows much higher. As we pause to recognize this year’s World Refugee Day a new flight to safety originates from Syria, adding thousands of refugees to the ones from Libya, Sudan, and so many other places where conflicts or changing climate sends the rate of displacement to new heights.
So what does the future hold? Most likely the world tomorrow will be financially richer, but also more fragile because of climate change, expanding population and complexities of our societies. We will have the means to help each other in this more fragile world, but we will have to master the will to do so. We, Europeans, who so many times were the refugees ourselves, have led the world in commitment to humanity. In today’s harsh economic environment, worried about our domestic problems, we risk to lose sight of this commitment. Today, on World Refugee Day, it is a good moment to look back and remember the past and to look forward and work for a better future.
