Bredjing, a refugee camp in eastern Chad, close to the border with the Darfur region of Sudan. Twelve camps in the region house a quarter of a million Sudanese who have fled to the area and are now caught between warring armies. Photograph by Christoph Bangert.
www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/01/05/090105fa_fact_harr
This is an excellent article from Chad on how UNHCR camps are set up, how they are run and how they evolve. A few quotes:
"Some refugees had been there for months, and more came every day. Every so often, they saw in the distance a column of black smoke rising from another burning village. In the month before Sturm’s arrival, thirty thousand new refugees had crossed into Chad. The total number gathered along the four-hundred-mile border with Darfur, by rough estimates, came to seventy-seven thousand.
Sturm had a pragmatic cast of mind. The scene evoked in him a sense of urgency, but it neither shocked him nor caused him great distress. “I had been involved in other situations that were just as bad, even worse,” Sturm told me. Years earlier, in Goma, eastern Zaire, he’d been part of a team trying to cope with a million refugees and an outbreak of cholera that, at its peak, had killed seven thousand people a week."
"The task of assisting some thirty-three million refugees, asylum seekers, and internally displaced people in more than a hundred and ten countries around the world costs the U.N.H.C.R. about $1.2 billion a year. The bulk of that sum comes from voluntary contributions made by wealthy nations. The top ten donors account for eighty-five per cent of the agency’s budget. The United States is the largest contributor, followed by the European Commission, Japan, Sweden, and the Netherlands."
"Managing this money, accounting to donors for its expenditure, and overseeing the agency’s far-flung operations requires a bureaucracy. Like most bureaucracies, the one created by the U.N.H.C.R. has evolved into a cumbersome apparatus."
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