It is great for me to be here with you, especially today as we are celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I think that is very befitting for us working for refugees, for UNHCR, as in this Universal Declaration of Human Rights is inscribed a safe haven for refugees. It is very important and I am very pleased to be able to celebrate that with you today. Another important event took place today in Oslo: the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Judy Williams and the anti-land mines groups. Again, this is extremely important to us because throughout the world thousands of refugees and children get maimed and killed by these land mines. So, again, to have that important event today pleases me very much.

But there is more going on during these months. Two weeks ago you celebrated Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving for you is giving thanks for safe arrival and receiving hospitality for what one could almost call the first boat people arriving in the United States. In two weeks, we have other major religious holidays and again, within most religions, refugees and displaced persons play a very important part. The walk through the desert in order to flee oppression 2000 years ago, the provision of shelter to internally displaced persons—those are things found in religion, as well. Yet, we see that these principles are being questioned somehow. The right of refugees, the right to basic human dignity, that is what we are going to talk about. The irony which we face today is that with the end of the Cold War and the subsequent decrease of wars, instead of seeing a better world coming out of that, we see that, in fact, for many of the people in the world, it is more difficult. It is more dangerous. We see the rift between the rich nations and the poor nations, we see that disparity is almost doubling between the haves and the have-nots. In the poorest states, we see economic stagnation, environmental degradation, and impoverishment.

At the same time, we see the almost doubling of states who are having a government through competitive elections, through democracies. This is a very good thing, this is something we would very much like to see happening. But a democracy is not that self-evident; you have to gain it. You have to learn how to live in a democracy, and what we see in many of the newest democracies is a lot of human rights abuses. We see a lot of internal turmoil and increasing problems. It is sad to say that today there are thirty-five civil wars going on at this very moment around the globe, creating tremendous problems for many of the poor people. In fact, today we are dealing with 22 million refugees, 70 to 80 percent of whom are women and children.

But all is not bad, either. We see also a reduction in the number of refugees. One year ago, I would have told you that the number of people we were dealing with was 17 million. Today, there are thirteen million. So there is a positive aspect. But on the other hand, we see [the number of] internally displaced people going up, and I will explain to you later why this phenomenon is happening. We are faced today more with mass population movement. We see that the new warfare taking place in countries calls for total destruction of social and economic infrastructure, not just to gain territory, not just to gain power, but it goes out towards total destruction. We see ethnic cleansing. A couple of years ago, I did not even know what that meant. Now, after what we have seen in former Yugoslavia, after what we have seen in Rwanda, it has become a household word. That is a very sad reflection of the state we are in and the state of the world today. With the end of the bipolar system, we see that the ideological imperatives were removed and [the result] is that doors are shut and eyes are closed. Refugee rights are at risk.

Having lived through many refugee situations since 1975, I sometimes look back at the Cold War as the good times. Everything was so easy, black or white, and now we are in a world where everything is grey. We see that denial of asylum is becoming a rampant phenomenon. We see that the physical safety, the human security of refugees, even in refugee camps, is threatened. Something which we had not witnessed before and which we now see occurring is that refugee camps are being attacked by military. We see tremendous increase in sexual violence in and around refugee camps. We see forced conscription of very young children, nine and ten years old. This is a very worrying development which we must stand up together to do something about.

But what we see happening today is that the rich industrialized world, the European countries, your own country, they are closing their doors. They are erecting legal barriers at their borders against asylum-seekers trying to enter. And it is somewhat ironic that the same states who were absolutely instrumental in the refugee convention adopted in 1951, who have been promoting refugee rights until very recently, all of a sudden are abandoning the cause. They are abandoning it for domestic reasons, for so-called security reasons. It is not that we are asking or that we are expecting that a country like the United States or the European countries to take all the refugees in the world—that is absolutely not what we would like to see happening. At the moment, as we look at the people who are being admitted to European countries, who are the people being admitted into the United States, we see that these people would total less than one percent of the total refugee population of the world. It is a very small group of people. In this country, a tough immigration reform bill was adopted last year which has a segment on asylum- seekers, which makes it very difficult for asylum-seekers to come into this country. It is not impossible, but it is so difficult.

I would say that, to an extent, due process is being watered down. What does that do to the poor countries, who are having to take the other 99 percent of the refugees? They see the rich countries closing their doors. What are they supposed to do? What we see happening is that the poor countries are simply copying what the rich countries are doing—they say, "if [the big countries] don't want to do it then why should we?" So we see a phenomenon of the closing of borders all around the world. We have seen this very recently in Central Africa. A country like Tanzania, traditionally one of the most liberal countries in Africa, which twenty years ago would accept refugees, would even allow them to take up nationality—this country is closing its doors, it is sending refugees back by force. This is an enormous, worrying movement and this is why we see that internally displaced persons are on the rise. So while I said that is it wonderful that refugees are going down, it is a false picture.

What we see happening is that the internally displaced are going up, and today, one assumes that there are something like twenty-five to thirty million people who are internally displaced in their countries. What does that mean? When we talk about a refugee, [we refer to] a person who crosses an international border. Then there is an organization such as the UNHCR who assists governments in assisting those poor people who flee violence and conflict in order to have temporary asylum until such time as the situation in their country gets better and hopefully they can return. But once they get across, there is at least some system of assistance.

An internally displaced person does not have that. There is not a single agency with a mandate to take care of internally displaced people. They are in their own country, they are fleeing from their own government, they do not feel protected by their own people anymore. But they remain in an area where that government is sovereign. So it is even very difficult for international organizations, for NGOs, to come in and assist unless the government has made that request. Otherwise, you would be interfering with the internal affairs of the state. There are no international legal instruments taking care of these people. So this is a very, very serious development for which there is no solution.

At the moment, within UNHCR, we are dealing with approximately five million internally displaced people in areas where they are mixed with refugees. For instance, Bosnia: we always dealt with the internally displaced because we were allowed, we were requested by the Secretary General of the United Nations to go into Bosnia to assist the population. We even expanded our role there not just to the internally displaced, but we helped the war-affected people who had never moved but were in a similar situation as the internally displaced and needed as much assistance as anyone else. This is a very serious problem. One talks about governments promoting the idea of internally displaced people because then they will not come to [the country's] borders. One talks about safe havens: can't one have a safe haven within the country where those people can be protected? Unfortunately, from what we have seen so far in recent history, safe havens have not been very successful. I just need to remind you of the former Yugoslavia and Bosnia, where the safe havens were totally unviable and which ended, unfortunately, in total disaster. This is a serious problem.

Again, let us not be totally negative. There are good things happening. When I talk about return—people returning to their country of origin, to their homes—in the last six years, we have seen over ten million people who have returned voluntarily to their homes because the situation has become better in their countries. I am thinking about Mozambique, Cambodia (although things are not so easy at the moment, at the time it worked very well), Afghanistan. We had 1½ million people return to Afghanistan in the past two or three years. Again, it is not a rosy picture in Afghanistan, but still those people have come back and are still back home. It is a fairly complex situation. We have seen people going back to Ethiopia: over one million people have recently returned to Ethiopia. We have seen people going back recently to Guatemala after a long war and the whole situation in Central America. [The refugees] have all now returned home to their respective countries. We have seen further in Africa, in Togo, we had some 300,000 people outside who have recently gone back. So everything is not that desperate.

What I was talking about was voluntary return, but what we do see happening, another new phenomenon, is that more and more refugees are returning to their countries in not-so-much of a voluntary manner. The situation is being made so difficult for them in the country in which they are staying, that they have but one choice: to go home. You have read about the desperate situation of a couple of hundred thousand Rwandese who were lost in the forests in Zaire. Many of them died from disease or were killed and were just fleeing for their lives. We have been able to get quite a number of them back to Rwanda, not because we felt that it was a good thing to go back, but it was what we call the "least-worst situation." It is pretty sad reflection if we must talk not of the best possible options, but the least-worst options. Even my colleagues refused to talk about repatriation; they said, this is evacuation, this is not repatriation.

We are just trying to save lives here. We are not sure whether we will manage, but we just try to save lives. But what does it mean for people to go back to their country? It is not that self-evident. You need to have physical security. What do we mean by "physical security?" Often countries which have been in conflict have demobilized soldiers, who are often unemployed and need to make ends meet. They get into robbery and many sorts of crime. You can have a tremendous turmoil still within the region before real peace sets in, although the war may have stopped. You have also more social and psychological security. When people go back to their homes, they may be happy to go back, but they may be received back with some feelings of contempt. To give an example, within Bosnia there was a certain stage towards the end of the war when people from outside wanted to go back. The people who had stayed inside were saying, "you are cowards, you fled. We lived through the war." So you have this type of feeling which somehow you must be able to overcome. Then you have a legal insecurity. You need to go back to a situation where you feel protected by the law, by the courts, where you are not a minority and find yourself back in prison because you belong to a certain ethnic grouping. That is an aspect one must take into account. Then, you have material security: you must eat, you must live.

But one thing which is working for us, which is absolutely vital, is that whatever assistance you give to people who go back, you must give it to the community. You must not just favor the people who are coming back. By doing that, you turn them into privileged—or perceived privileged—people, and they may have a tough time. What is important for us is to find ways that people, the communities, see a benefit—that because [refugees] are coming back, we are providing assistance which is helping the community, which is helping everybody, so they encourage people to go back so that [everybody may] receive assistance. That is what we call positive conditionality. That is something which we are trying out for the moment. You may have heard about Bosnia, where we talk about the "open-city" concept: if a town goes out and encourages minorities to return, we say great, we will give you assistance. We are going to help you rebuild houses. But we want you first to make the gesture. You first must say to your people, "come back." We will help you and make it happen. We have more and more towns in Bosnia who see that if they want to have assistance, they will have to make the gesture first. That seems to be taking off slowly—it takes a long time.

We in the West are often too impatient. We always think that when peace is there, that the war is over and people can go back. But the whole process of reconciliation, of healing the wounds, is a very long process. We need the patience, we need to let time heal the wounds. Our wish is that we want to go on with our lives here in the West, and they should just get on with theirs, and reconcile. It does not work. What we are also trying to do is to work very closely in this process with development organizations, with the World Bank, with multilateral agencies, with more developmental NGOs, to make this process of re-integration happen in such a way that it will not fall back into a recurrence of violence and other civil war. That is an issue which is very little understood today, how easy it is to fall back into the trap of ethnic violence once you are just getting out of it.

Going back to Bosnia, I think the impatience is that the military should leave, that the soldiers should go home, they have been here long enough. In my frank opinion, we need military in Bosnia for a number of years to come. We have no choice. If we do not have the military there, they will go back into ethnic violence and then you will have a different intervention force. You would regret the need to send European and American soldiers back to a real fighting war. This time for reconciliation, for healing, is very important.

There is one group of people whom I want to quickly talk about, [people] who do not fit into any category. Those are the people who are the stateless people. People who have no nationality. In the past, they have always existed, but it was not a real worldwide problem, as it is becoming. Nothing is worse for a human being than not having a nationality, not having even a potential place to go back to. A refugee, in principle, flees his or her country and can wait until they can eventually go back to that country. But a stateless person does not even have that luxury. He or she has nothing, nowhere to go back to. With the break up of Yugoslavia, with the break up of the former Soviet Union, and with the creation of new states coming to the fore of ethnic conflicts, we see more and more states adopting legislation with an ethnic bias, legislation on nationality with an ethnic bias. As a result, many people fall through the cracks of the system because they are the wrong ethnic group. A very important case in point here is the mixed marriages: people who marry from various ethnic groups and all of a sudden, they are neither here nor there—they are lost.

There is no legal international instrument to deal with this, and we are trying from our side to give whatever legal advice we can to governments who are adopting legislation. We try to encourage them to make that legislation as broad-minded as possible to avoid the problem of statelessness. But we are afraid that we will be confronted with hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people who could find themselves in that situation. For the first time, the book The State of the World's Refugees is talking about having an important chapter on this group of people in order to highlight this problem. The hope is that legal minds and others will get together to try to find a solution.

What can we do with all of this? I have given you a pretty depressing picture. One of the reasons why we are in this pretty depressing world is that we see a lack of political will of many of the countries who could make a difference to make a difference at the right moment. There will be talk about early warning systems, as many are talking about in think tanks around the world: how can we know better when this is going to break out? I can tell you with all the communication systems, with all the wonderful technology that we have, I do not think that early warning is any problem. We know when a problem is going to occur, but when are we willing to do something about it? That is the question. Now we regret, why didn't the world—Europeans and the U.S.—intervene in Bosnia in 1991 or 1992? We would not have the problems we have now, we wouldn't have the discussion of whether or not the military should stay for one or two more years, had we intervened then. The whole disaster in the area of the Great Lakes in Africa—what if the world had reacted in 1994, at the start of the genocide which everybody knew was coming? No one has an excuse. I was very pleased to hear that Madeleine Albright had the courage to admit that the world, including the U.S., must carry [much of ] the blame for what has happened. That is a step forward because we must acknowledge that people were killed because we sat back and decided not to do something about it. So what can we do about this?

Yesterday, I assisted at the presentation of the final report of the Carnegie Commission for the Prevention of Deadly Conflict, a commission co-chaired by David Hamburg and Cyrus Vance. Taking part in that commission are eight foreign ministers and two former prime ministers, so it is a very high-powered commission. Very precisely, it has not talked about early warning, it has talked about prevention: what can we do? Where is the political will? They are coming out with quite an interesting array of measures which I hope policymakers will read. It is a report which is very complimentary to the UNHCR report on the state of the world's refugees. It takes off where we stop. So that is another important event.

In The State of the World's Refugees, the High Commissioner is proposing a sort of humanitarian agenda, which can only be very broad. What must we concentrate on? The eradication of poverty: we must do much more, as that is one of the root causes of the problem we see today. The promotion of human rights and democracies: I started off talking about how [the creation of] democracies can lead to civil wars, but how can we better steer the newly- created democracies so that they do not fall into this cycle of civil war? The curtailment of arms trade: as long as arms are flowing, there will be war. What can we do about it? I recently saw a statistic indicating that sixty to seventy percent of the arms traded are coming from four countries on the Security Council. Accountability of leaders, which would lead to the importance of an international tribunal. It is not easy to set it up—we have all seen the problems of having an international tribunal, as in Bosnia and Rwanda. But it is a start. It is not for us [to tell them to] stop because it does not work that well. No, we must look at it. It must work, it must be institutionalized, because such a court would make a difference. Certain people who feel that they can do just anything may then think twice. Those are a number of measures which we believe could play an important role in this whole period of transition, from war to peace on a global level.

What will the twenty-first century be like for us? While we are working on that, two important issues are that we should never abandon the principles of human rights, which is why we celebrate today our fiftieth anniversary, and we should never abandon the principle of asylum. With all that together, we should jointly be able to get to a better world. The choice is yours, the choice is ours. And all I hope is that we make the right choice.