A Singaporean Helping Refugees Around the World
Janet Lim joined UNHCR in 1980. She spent over three decades working on refugee crises around the world. And she says something that’s hard to argue with: humanitarian work is probably the area where Singapore has been the least engaged with the UN.
This is part of my retelling of “50 Years of Singapore and the United Nations” (Tommy Koh, Li Lin Chang, Joanna Koh, 2015, ISBN: 978-9814713030).
Chapter 26 is written by Janet Lim herself, a Singaporean who rose to become UNHCR’s Assistant High Commissioner for Operations. That’s an Assistant Secretary-General level position. She oversaw all five of UNHCR’s regional bureaux covering operations worldwide. From the Vietnamese boat people in the 1980s to the Syrian crisis, she saw it all.
How It Started
When Janet Lim joined UNHCR in 1980, Southeast Asia was in the middle of one of its biggest humanitarian crises. Thousands of refugees were fleeing wars in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Some crossed overland into Thailand. Others left by boat and ended up in the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, and even Singapore.
The tragedies were enormous. The world paid attention. It resulted in one of the biggest mobilizations of humanitarian assistance at the time, with refugee camps scattered across Southeast Asia.
That was Janet’s introduction to UNHCR. From there, she worked both in the field and at UNHCR’s headquarters in Geneva. She was involved in the humanitarian consequences of most major crises of our era. The first Gulf War in the 90s. The Balkans. The African Great Lakes region. Afghanistan. The ongoing crises in the Middle East and Africa.
What UNHCR Actually Does
UNHCR was created by the UN General Assembly in 1951, originally to protect and assist refugees from the Second World War. Its mandate kept expanding. Today it covers all refugees worldwide, except Palestinian refugees who fall under a separate UN agency called UNRWA.
UNHCR’s core job is protecting people who have no state protecting them. That’s what makes refugees different from other displaced people. They’ve left their own country and have no government looking out for them. Over time, UNHCR’s responsibility expanded to include stateless persons and internally displaced people too.
One particular challenge is telling refugees apart from other types of population movements. When people move in large groups, you get refugees mixed in with economic migrants, victims of human trafficking, and people who’ve been smuggled. UNHCR works with governments to set up systems that can figure out who qualifies as a refugee.
This matters because there are international legal frameworks, specifically the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol, that spell out what governments owe to recognized refugees. In mass displacement situations, refugees can be recognized on a group basis rather than case by case, based on whether there’s widespread violence in their home country.
At the time of writing, UNHCR had 462 offices in 127 countries, staffed by about 9,400 people. Nearly 90 percent of those staff work in the field, right where the refugees are.
The Numbers Are Staggering
Janet Lim paints a sobering picture of the humanitarian landscape. In the five years before the book was published, there had been a massive jump in the number of simultaneous crises. More than 51 million people had been forced to flee from wars, conflict, and violence. Over 17 million became refugees by crossing international borders. The rest were internally displaced within their own countries.
That was the most dramatic forced displacement since World War II.
When the Cold War ended in the late 1980s, people hoped things would get better. And for a while in the 1990s, UNHCR managed to help refugees from several conflicts return home. But the end of the Cold War also brought a rise in wars within countries, driven by ethnic, tribal, or religious divisions.
More recently, conflicts got even more complicated. Multiple armed groups with different affiliations, some with international criminal or ideological links, fighting in the same territory. Syria and Iraq are the obvious examples. In Africa, countries like South Sudan and the Central African Republic saw conflicts resurge. Somalia and Afghanistan became protracted crises lasting decades.
What Refugees Actually Face
The majority of refugees and displaced people are women and children. They face specific vulnerabilities. In large crises, the immediate challenge is delivering basics: food, shelter, water, healthcare. But even more fundamental is protection. The most important thing for any refugee is finding safety in a country that will take them in and won’t send them back to danger.
Janet describes how refugees often find themselves exploited and abused, sometimes even while they’re still fleeing. Many undertake dangerous journeys across deserts and seas. Many die. Some end up as refugees multiple times, caught in cycles of conflict or finding that the country they fled to has itself fallen into war.
Humanitarian workers face their own dangers. They used to be protected by their neutrality. Not anymore. Today, aid workers are targeted. They’re sometimes used as weapons of war. And governments sometimes restrict access to the people who need help most.
The Stories That Stay With You
Janet shares individual stories that hit hard.
She met Carina Hoang, a Vietnamese woman now living in Australia as an award-winning writer. Twenty years earlier, Carina and two siblings were crammed onto a wooden boat with 370 other people trying to escape Vietnam. They endured violent storms and pirate raids. They ended up marooned on Kuku Island. UNHCR rescued them after three months, but not before some had died from disease and malnutrition. Carina was eventually resettled in the United States and later moved to Perth, where she was pursuing her PhD.
Then there’s Doaa, a 19-year-old Syrian woman who in September 2014 got on a smuggler’s boat in the Mediterranean with her fiance, trying to reach Sweden. Over 500 people were on that boat. An unidentified vessel rammed them. The boat sank. Doaa spent three days in the water. She watched most of the initial 100 or so survivors die in the sea. Desperate parents handed her their babies. She managed to keep one baby alive until rescue. Her fiance didn’t make it. Only 11 of the 500 people on board survived. When the book was published, Doaa was on the Greek island of Crete, determined to reach her relatives in Sweden and start over.
And there’s Chol Yaak Akoi from South Sudan. In 1999, he fled his home in Jonglei State to avoid being forced to join one of the armed groups. He ended up in Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya. He kept studying, won a scholarship to a university in Nairobi, and was honored at the World Innovation Summit for Education in Doha for his leadership and grades.
Janet says something important about these stories. Refugees, especially young ones, don’t just want to survive. They want to thrive. Many carry their school certificates and records when they flee, hoping they can continue their education. Given a chance, they can succeed despite everything.
And the flip side is just as important. If refugees are left to languish, they become a lost generation. And lost generations can become the roots of future conflicts.
Why Singapore Should Care
Janet makes a direct appeal. The world of conflicts and displacement might feel far away from Singapore, where people have enjoyed economic progress and peace for decades. But humanitarian crises have become global. No country is immune from their effects, however far away the fighting might be.
Singapore has a good reputation for responding to natural disasters with technical expertise and efficiency. Janet argues this should extend to humanitarian operations related to conflicts too. Today’s ever-increasing conflicts affect international peace and security. No country, big or small, is unaffected.
She notes that the entire international system for managing forced displacement is built on solidarity and shared responsibility. In a world that’s more interconnected than ever, forced displacement is driven by interrelated global trends: population growth, urbanization, food and water scarcity, climate change. Without international commitment to address the root causes of conflict and manage its consequences, the cycle of conflict and displacement will never end.
About the Author
Janet Lim was recruited into Singapore’s Administrative Service at the Ministry of Finance, but left in 1976 for postgraduate studies in Germany. While there, she got involved with Indochinese refugees, which led her to join UNHCR in 1980. She served in Thailand, Malaysia, Syria, Turkey, Western Sahara, Sri Lanka, and Afghanistan. At UNHCR headquarters, she helped build the organization’s emergency response capacity and security management system. From 2004 to 2009 she was Director of the Bureau for Asia and the Pacific. In 2009 she became Assistant High Commissioner for Operations at the Assistant Secretary-General level, overseeing UNHCR operations worldwide. She also worked with UNAIDS and the peacekeeping mission in Afghanistan. She retired from UNHCR in January 2015.
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