Refugee aid and protection in rural Africa: working in parallel or cross-purposes?

Over the past decade there has been an ongoing debate about how to reconcile the different
priorities of defending basic human rights and providing life-saving humanitarian aid during
complex emergencies. This debate has focused on how the delivery of aid can be (or is
always) used to political ends. At the extreme it may effectively become a weapon of war as
most vividly seen in ongoing conflict in southern Sudan. Many humanitarian aid agencies are
increasingly aware of that they must look beyond simplistic responses of offering aid and
consider the wider impact of that aid on the underlying problems. Human rights agencies are
also coming to a greater recognition that humanitarian aid plays an important role in enabling
the full range of human rights to be upheld, for example ensuring access to people under
threat (for a useful summary of the current debate see Minear and Weiss 2000).

UNHCR has long been at the forefront of such debates as it is a major player in most
complex emergencies and it has a dual mandate to provide protection and humanitarian
assistance. It has been faced with extremely difficult choices and has been open to much
criticism, with varying degrees of justification. Its co-ordination of the huge aid programme
for the massive Rwandan refugees camps in Goma, which also acted as the base for the
exiled genocidal former government sparked widespread debate as did its support for their
eventual forced return in December 1996 (Pottier 1999). Its policy of preventative action in
countries of origin prior to refugees’ flight to enable them to stay, the so-called ‘right to
remain,’ in Iraq and the former Yugoslavia has also been challenged (Cunliffe and Pugh
1997, Barutciski 1996). When UNHCR is dealing with states which will not uphold the
minimum standards of protection for refugees, it continually faces the question of whether it
should be involved in a bad protection option when the alternative is worse (Morris 1997).

In these debates the focus is on how UNHCR should provide both assistance and protection
to refugees from external threats, often arising from the state of asylum or origin and also, of
increasing concern, from non-state actors including factions within the refugee population
and local hosts. In this paper, I want to look at a different aspect of the problem and consider
how the two mandates may create internal contradictions within UNHCR: in particular, to
consider how the provision of aid may undermine protection and even result in threats to it
arising from UNHCR itself. Likewise, measures required to facilitate the provision of
protection can diminish the quality of the aid provision, particularly from a developmental
perspective. The paper arises from field-level observations and experience and highlights
management practices which can create these difficulties. The focus of the discussion here is on refugees in Africa.