The Current - UN Security Council ‘not fit for purpose,’ says refugees chief

Episode Date: November 5, 2024

The world has “become incapable of making peace,” says UN refugee chief Filippo Grandi, allowing escalating conflicts to force more than 120 million people from their homes in places like Gaza, Lebanon, Sudan and Mexico. Grandi talks to Matt Galloway about the plight of those refugees and why he thinks the United Nations is failing to protect the victims of war. 

In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news, so I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with Season 3 of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy.

On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is The Current Podcast. For years, we have heard stories of refugees fleeing Syria for Lebanon. fleeing Syria for Lebanon. But now, as Israel's war with Hezbollah continues, many of those refugees are actually going the other way. The road at the Al-Maznah border crossing has been pounded to rubble the result of an Israeli airstrike last month.

A steady stream of families, many with small children, clamber over the deep craters. They are weighted down with backpacks, duffel bags, shopping bags. Lebanese authorities say Israel's offensive has displaced more than 1.2 million people, and it is alarming to think that Syria might actually be a safer place for those people to be. This humanitarian crisis is one of many my next guest is contending with. Filippo Grandi is the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. He is in Ottawa this week. High Commissioner, good morning. Good morning to you. I want to talk specifically about that border crossing, but there is a statistic in the UNHCR's latest Global Trends Report. It says the number of forcibly displaced people is now over 117 million.

That's one in every 69 people that have been forcibly displaced. This is triple the population of this country, Canada. When you take a look at that statistic, and again, we'll talk about specifics, but when you take a look at that statistic, how difficult is it for you to wrap your mind around that? How difficult is it for you to wrap your mind around that? And how difficult it is for my colleagues in the different crisis locations to have to deal with growing numbers of people forced to flee. In fact, that figure in the last few months since it was issued has grown to well over 120 million. What is striking is that it has grown constantly, relentlessly for the past 12 years. You know, I say this all the time, but I think it bears repeating. We have become unable to make peace in the world. That's the fundamental driver. Conflict is the fundamental driver of this place.

And so you have seen the impact of that conflict firsthand. You were at the Al-Masnah border crossing just a little over a month ago. What does it say to you that so many refugees are now fleeing in the other direction, that they find Syria a safer place to be? Definitely. In fact, we are close to reaching half a million people having left Lebanon to Syria, fleeing Israeli airstrikes. Half a million people, that's a lot. And about a third are Lebanese. So you have now Syrian refugees in Lebanon fleeing back to Syria and Lebanese refugees fleeing to Syria. I mean, there's a civil war there. Millions of people have fled the country because of that civil war. The cities are in ruins. We know that Israel has also been striking targets within Syria. So how much safety are they actually able to find? Well, they go back, as you said, to a very fragile situation. But they go back in large numbers.

I was there as well just last month, spoke to many of them. Now, there are two tracks, two elements here that need to be considered. One is their security, the possibility for them to go where they want, to be reintegrated as best as they can into their communities. We need to talk to the Syrian government, and we do that. We are, through this exodus, through this crisis, we have now the space, the permission to monitor returns. And I think this is positive. This is something we need to build on.

But, you know, they go back to a very fragile situation. So we're asking donors to help address the challenges they have to face when they go back to often staying with families that are even poorer than they are. It's quite frightening because, as you said, Syria comes out of years of conflict, divisions that continue in the country of sanctions so the the humanitarian conditions of the existing syrian population are terrible and in addition to that now they have to absorb back people that are coming from lebanon it's a really difficult situation but we have no choice but to work on the one hand with the syrian authorities on the other with international donors to try to

to do our best in the present circumstance. This is part of the widening conflict between Israel and its neighbors that was sparked by the attacks by Hamas on the 7th of October of last year. You've been calling for an immediate ceasefire and a peace process. And you said at the beginning of our conversation, in many ways, what we've seen is that we as a world can't find peace. How do you understand why it's so difficult to get to that point of peace in this conflict in particular? Until the logic is military, is confrontational, it is going to be impossible to reach that political phase of the conflict that should be the goal of everybody. At the moment, with the tensions between Israel and Hamas, between Israel and Hezbollah, between Israel and Iran, as we have

seen in the last few days, it seems very remote. And where does that leave you? Very pessimistic that we will get out from this constant cycle of violence, a cycle of violence that we saw, you know, triggered in Gaza, now expanding to Lebanon, and the potential for this conflict to expand even further and to become an incredibly dangerous threat to not only regional peace, but world peace, that likelihood is very high. And I trust that everybody has conscience of that, because if we really have conscience of that, we should put much more pressure on all concerned to go back to that, you know, looking very remote now, but that negotiating table that should be the only goal. In the meantime, there are those who

are caught in the middle of this conflict. We were talking about what's happening in Lebanon last week. Israel's parliament passed a law banning UNRWA, the UN agency responsible for Palestinian refugees, from operating within the territory that it controls. What are you hearing about the impact that that is having on the ground? impact that that is having on the ground? Well, that law, it's a very unfortunate occurrence, of course, because UNRWA is such a fundamental provider of services. That law has a 90-day period before it gets implemented. And I hope some solution can be found because without UNRWA, not only key humanitarian services cannot be provided to school. And more than half of the Palestinian population in Gaza and the West Bank will be deprived of basic health services. Imagine an entire population of several million people without education and without health. That's what

UNRWA is about. And so if it cannot fulfill its role in these areas, the damage will be not just humanitarian, but much, much, it will go much further than that. The head of UNRWA has said that when it comes to the funding of that agency, suspending the funding of that agency is a form of collective punishment. Do you agree with that? Yes, I do. I think he's right. That's a war crime. Well, that's not for me to determine, but to say that it's a collective punishment, I think it's pretty obvious. Sorry, it's not for you to say, but a collective punishment is a definition of a war crime, is it not? Certainly a collective punishment goes beyond the proportionality of measures that one takes in a war and therefore goes against international law.

Israel has been, as you know, very critical of UNRWA even before staff members were fired over involvement in the October 7th attacks. There's been concern that UNRWA's funding can get siphoned off by Hamas, that its schools radicalize children, that there were Hamas tunnels that were found under UNRWA buildings. Do you think that the United Nations has done enough to ensure that UNRWA is neutral and worthy of trust, if I can put it that way? In that very fraught and difficult context in which UNRWA operates, there is a long tradition of Israel raising with UNRWA its concerns about its neutrality. And an equally long tradition of UNRWA investigating and responding and acting when that neutrality was not upheld. So I think we need to go back. Ideally, we should go back to that relationship,

which was difficult, was fraught, but was always constructive from that point of view. I hope this can be restored. And let me say, I speak for an agency that is not, you know, it's another organization, but I think that this is really the situation as it should be. I just wonder whether those concerns that Israel has raised, whether you think that they're valid concerns. They need to be investigated.

You know, these concerns regard different events and they need to be investigated. There were investigations. The Catherine Colon investigation was carried out and was published. So things were responded. It needs to go back to that type of dialogue, difficult as it may be. In the absence of that dialogue, you tweeted last month that the UN has never been in under so much political, moral, and even physical attack. Were you thinking just about Israel or were you thinking more broadly there?

Much more broadly. You know, in fact, my organization is not involved in the response in Gaza and the West Bank. This is the prerogative of UNRWA and of other organizations. But, you know, we lost two colleagues, for example, in Lebanon at the beginning of this escalation. Our colleagues in Sudan face incredible risks at the hand of the military groups fighting each other for supremacy in that country. We have colleagues in Myanmar that had to be evacuated recently because also of civil strife between the military people in power and the different local groups. You know, I can continue for quite a while and tell you how much colleagues, not only of UNHCR, but of other UN and humanitarian agencies, are risking all over the world.

And not only risk physically because of the security dangers because of conflict, because of the security dangers because of conflict, but risk also because they're put increasingly under pressure by these warring parties, and this is extremely difficult to manage. In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news, so I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with season three of On Drugs.

And this time it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy. On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. When it comes to the political and the moral pressure that your agency is facing, what do you think, and that the UN is facing, what do you think is at the root of that? First of all, I would say that it's not just the physical risk that's bad enough. It's the disrespect for humanitarian action. You know, that's severely at variance with international humanitarian law, with international law. And the disregard, the violations to international humanitarian law have become almost a feature of every such conflict.

I just wondered, I mean, you would well know that the United Nations, in the face of those conflicts, has been unable to stop war in Ukraine, has been unable to bring people to the table in the Middle East successfully, in parts of Africa as well, has failed to prevent gangs from taking over Haiti and causing mayhem and misery there. In the face of that, what would lead you to believe that the UN is still worth defending? You have to make a distinction here. The UN as a political system, meaning essentially its member states, I agree with you, is failing.

When I said that the world has become incapable of making peace, that's what I was referring to. States have, you know, 75, 80 years ago, almost, in fact, 79 years ago, put in place a system essentially aimed at resolving conflict, the United Nations and its different organs, that system is not fit for purpose anymore. This is very true. Now, the United Nations system also has many other organizations like mine. And I think especially the humanitarian agencies continue to deliver. That part of the system, if I may say, continues to work, is very much needed and needs to be funded. I'm grateful to Canada for supporting us in this respect. But what needs to be looked at, it's the political system, it's the Security Council, it's the veto system, it's the way that peace and security are dealt with by the UN as a whole, as a global organization, that's not fit for purpose.

That's a remarkable thing for you to say, that the UN Security Council and that political organization is, your words, not fit for purpose. It may be remarkable, but unfortunately I've said it many times before, and it is the truth. You know that the Security Council finds difficulties, remarkable difficulties, even finding the unanimity necessary to issue humanitarian resolutions. I'm not talking about political resolution. There is no consensus, even on the most fundamental of obligations, which is to help the victims of war. So I think it is failing and it needs reform. One of the things that often comes up in the conversations that you and I have is about what we aren't talking about. The situation in Ukraine took up a lot of oxygen and there were other crises that weren't being discussed. The situation in the Middle East obviously is taking up a lot of attention for good reasons, but it's not the only crisis that you're dealing with. What keeps you up at night that we aren't discussing? That we have discussed so far keeps me up at night. But in addition, I would say, what about the other crisis? What about the Democratic Republic of Congo? I was in East Africa last week. I met women coming from the east of Congo. And I can assure you that in my long career, I have seldom heard stories of abuse as horrifying as what I heard from those women. And frankly, Matt, this is not

new. This has been going on for years now. Who is moving to address that? There's so much, and rightly so, attention for the plight of women in humanitarian crisis. What about these women that suffer the most undignified, horrifying criminal violations and in a situation in which nobody's trying to address the cause of this, which is a very complex, but nevertheless, a conflict that could be resolved if there were adequate humanitarian pressure. Same thing in Darfur, in the west of Sudan. You may remember that in 2003, there was a very bad conflict there with important ethnic overtones. The same is happening now.

We hear the stories of refugees arriving in Chad, women in particular. Same horrors. Who is moving? There is a monumental election in the United States in which Donald Trump could become president. He is promising mass deportations if elected U.S. president again. He's also talked about withdrawing, if not funds, then certainly attention from some of those conflicts around the world. What do you think when you hear those sorts of promises from a politician who could soon be leading the most powerful country in the world? I think that the United States has faced for a long time very, very complex challenges along its southern border. And we have worked with all administrations,

including the Trump administration before, the Biden administration, and even before. The last few years, Canada was part of that discussion. We have started, you know, some more innovative approaches along those routes that lead to that border. We think that we need to scale up and intensify these solutions, giving opportunities to people along the way, creating legal and safe pathways as alternatives to what the traffickers and smugglers are doing. That's the way to go. We think that mass deportation, which are, of course, against international law, whichever administration does them, we would not agree. And so what I was down at the US-Mexico border just in the last couple of weeks, and one of the things we heard from people who were very close to that is a sense of frustration that those efforts have not done anything to address a situation that they see in front of their very eyes. And they talk about sealing that border,

for example. When you hear that, what goes through your mind? Well, I do understand the frustration of the people that have to manage such a difficult and complicated border. Unfortunately, all efforts that you do to better regulate, if you wish, the inevitable flow of people, which requires cooperation between many, many countries, not just U.S. and Mexico, but many other countries further upstream, they will not give quick results. They require patience, but they require to be scaled up. Everything that has been done has been done in too microscopic a way compared to the size of the challenge. In this country, we have seen the impact of those crossing into Canada over time.

And this country, I think many people believe, has had a general consensus on the benefits of immigration. But there's now a conversation about whether there are too many people arriving in this country, whether jobs are going to those who come from abroad, whether people who are coming from abroad perhaps are driving up the cost of housing. This becomes a political narrative in this country. Do you think that the consensus on immigration in Canada is being threatened? I think the consensus or rather the more positive view towards immigration, and of course as a subset of that, refugees, continues to be strong in this country. But of course, there are challenges. Now, it is important that these challenges are addressed.

I understand that the government has been more prudent in future plans for immigration because it is mindful of these challenges. I think it's also important to be mindful because without proper tools to integrate large numbers of people arriving, that can backfire. At the same time, I have a strong appeal for the Canadian government and people don't lose your very specific and very unique positive attitude towards immigration, towards refugees, which in the end has saved many lives in the case of refugees, but has also been very beneficial to the country. What is your message to the Prime Minister, to Justin Trudeau? You're there in Ottawa

speaking with him. What do you say to him about that? I will say what I just said. We'll support measures to increase the integration capacity of the country for people arriving, in our case, mostly refugees. But I would say preserve that window that you have always kept open for people that are fleeing from violence, from persecution, because it has been so valuable in saving so many lives. Let me just end by, you and I have spoken a number of times about the work that you do, and these aren't good news stories when we talk. The numbers, as you've said, continue to go up and up in terms of the number of people who have been forcibly displaced. How do you avoid despondency? don't think there is a risk of despondency. And you know why? Because we're there. We see,

we talk to these women who have been raped and separated from their families, whose children have been killed in front of their eyes. When you see that, you understand that despondency is a luxury that we cannot afford. What I'm worried about is the despondency of the international community. A friend was telling me the other day, you know, we keep putting out these figures, millions displaced here, thousands killed there, hundreds of thousands at risk of hunger or other hardship. The world has become numb to these figures because there's too many. It's almost a reaction, right? We don't want to hear this anymore. We put our head in the sand and we forget about the crises that are happening elsewhere. You know, these crises concern all of us.

If you were in Europe, when you see all these people arriving across the Mediterranean, seeing countries that in the past didn't even know what a refugee was, you can see how it has become an issue of global concern. So, unfortunately, it is important to fight back the despondency and continue to be concerned, just as my colleagues and I continue to be. I'm always glad to have the chance to talk to you. Filippo Grandi, thank you very much. Thank you very much.

Filippo Grandi is the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. He is in Ottawa this week. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.