'I know the pain': ex-refugee takes over as UNHCR chief

KAKUMA, Kenya: Barham Salih has known torture and the wrenching loss of exile. Four decades after his own ordeal, he has taken the helm of the UN refugee agency as it grapples with a funding shortfall and ever-rising needs.

A former Iraqi president, Salih, 65, became the first former head of state to run the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) at the start of the year.

“It is a profound moral and legal responsibility,” Salih told AFP during his first trip in the new role — to Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya.

“I know the pain of losing a home, losing your friends,” he said.

The Kakuma refugee camp, which Salih visited on Sunday, is east Africa’s second largest, hosting roughly 300,000 people from South Sudan, Somalia, Uganda and Burundi. It has been in place since 1992.

The world “should not allow this to continue”, Salih said, praising a new initiative by Kenya to turn its camps into economic hubs.

“We should not only protect refugees… but also enable them to have more durable solutions,” he said, while adding: “The better way is to have peace established in their own countries… nowhere is nicer than home.”

‘Electric shocks, beating’

The son of a judge and a women’s rights activist, Salih was born in 1960 in Sulaymaniyah, a stronghold of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), which sought self-determination for Iraq’s Kurds.

He went into exile in Iran in 1974, spending a year at a school for refugees. As a teenager in 1979, back in Iraq and already a member of the PUK, he was arrested twice by former dictator Saddam Hussein’s regime.

“I was released after 43 days after having suffered torture, electric shocks, beating,” he said.

Upon release, he still managed to rank among Iraq’s top three high school students, according to a former colleague, before fleeing with his family to Britain where he earned a degree in computer engineering and a doctorate.

Salih has “real experience of exile… He brings a personal perspective of displacement, which is very important,” Filippo Grandi, his predecessor at UNHCR, told AFP last month.

Salih went on to a successful career in Iraqi Kurdistan and Iraq’s federal government after Hussein’s overthrow in 2003, holding the largely ceremonial role of president from 2018 to 2022.

‘Serious budget cuts’

Refugee numbers have doubled to 117 million in the past decade, the UNHCR said in June, but funding has dropped sharply, especially since Donald Trump returned to the White House.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres recently praised Salih’s experience as a “crisis negotiator and architect of national reforms” at a time when the agency faces “very serious challenges”.

“We have had very serious budget cuts last year. A lot of staff have been reduced,” Salih told AFP.

“But we have to understand, we have to adapt,” he said, calling for “more efficiency and accountability” while also insisting the international community meets its “legal and moral obligations to help”.