By Gustavo Capdevila
GENEVA, Jun 17 2004 (IPS)

The number of refugees and others attended by the United Nations refugee agency fell dramatically in 2003 to 17.1 million people, the lowest total in a decade, according to figures released just days before World Refugee Day, Jun. 20.

The causes behind the 18-percent reduction are various, according to former Dutch prime minister Ruud Lubbers, who now serves as the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

But he cited two factors in particular: greater efforts by the international community to find solutions ”for millions of uprooted people” and the continued work of UNHCR and its partners to resolve ”protracted” refugee situations, some that have gone on for decades.

The provisional figures on the situation at the end of 2003, released Thursday by the high commissioner’s office in Geneva, show a significant reduction with respect to the 20.8 million people who received assistance from the U.N. agency in 2002.

The decline is even greater – reaching 22 percent – with respect to the data from early 2001, when Lubbers took the UNHCR helm. At that time, the agency was attending to 21.8 million people worldwide.

UNHCR provides humanitarian assistance to people who have been forced to leave their countries because their lives or liberties are at risk. Over more than 50 years, the agency has helped more than 50 million refugees ”to pick up the pieces of their lives and start anew,” said Lubbers

UNHCR has issued criticisms in the past years each time that the countries of Europe have tightened their policies on granting asylum to foreigners.

The UNHCR office in Austria launched a poster campaign this week that aims to change the way asylum seekers are perceived by the public, said agency representative Gottfried Koefner.

Contrary to popular opinion, asylum seekers are not responsible for most of the drug-related crimes committed in Austria, says the office.

The fact is that 74 percent of such crimes are committed by Austrian citizens, not by the Africans awaiting determination of their refugee status, who are often fingered as the guilty ones, according to UNHCR.

”Refugees desperately want to go back home – a sentiment we have seen dramatically played out time and again in places as diverse as Kosovo and Cambodia, Mozambique and East Timor,” said Lubbers.

The best solution for refugees, according to UNHCR, is voluntary repatriation, ”going back to one’s original homeland once all the right conditions are in place.” Last year, 1.1 million people returned to their home countries.

The biggest group were the 646,000 Afghans who returned to Afghanistan, ”bringing to more than three million the number of Afghan refugees and displaced who have gone home since 2002,” said the high commissioner.

The Afghans began returning once the situation was returned to relative normalcy after the U.S.-led invasion of their country in late 2001.

Last year, other major contingents of refugees headed home to Angola, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Burundi, Cote D’Ivoire, Croatia, Eritrea, Liberia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Somalia, even though the situations in some of those countries are far from ideal, says UNHCR.

Of the 17.1 million people that UNHCR attended to in 2003, 9.7 million were refugees, 1.1 million were former refugees who returned home, 4.2 million were internally displaced persons, 233,000 were the internally displaced who returned home, 995,000 were asylum seekers, and 912,000 were in other situations, including stateless people.

Regionally, at the end of 2003 there were 5.4 million people ”of concern to UNHCR” in Europe, while four million were in the area covered by Central and Southwest Asia, North Africa and the Middle East (shorthanded to CASWANAME), another four million were in sub-Saharan Africa, 2.3 million in the Americas and 1.4 million in the Asia-Pacific region.

”The top five asylum countries in 2003 were Pakistan (1.1 million); Iran (985,000); Germany (960,000); Tanzania (650,000); and the United States (452,500),” states the UNHCR report. All five saw reductions in their refugee populations of two to 25 percent.

The nationality with most refugees is the Afghans, with 2.1 million, followed by the Sudanese with 606,000 and Burundis with 531,600.

Applications for asylum or recognition of refugee status reached 807,000 in 2003, submitted in 141 countries.

”Most asylum seekers came from the Russian Federation (38,900), China (37,100), Serbia and Montenegro (36,700), Democratic Republic of the Congo (35,800), Turkey (33,800), Iraq (32,100), Colombia (29,400), Afghanistan (22,400) and Nigeria (21,300),” says UNHCR.

”Some 150,000 asylum-seekers were granted refugee status, and another 40,000 were allowed to stay for humanitarian reasons.”

When refugees cannot return to their home countries, UNHCR and its partners works on two other alternatives, either ”local integration in the country of asylum or resettlement to a third country.”

”This requires real generosity and burden-sharing by asylum countries – often poor themselves – and by the relatively small number of predominantly developed nations that accept the bulk of resettled refugees,” said Lubbers.

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