Barham Salih – a former refugee who leads the refugee issue in the face of a world where displacement is expanding

He wasted no time getting down to the field. Within days of taking office on January 1, he left the conference rooms at UNHCR headquarters in Geneva for refugee camps in Kenya and Chad, a sign of how he will lead an agency burdened by crises that are multiplying faster than the system designed to respond to them.

He said in an interview with UN News, clearly impressed by the enormity of the task: “The responsibility in every sense of the word is enormous.”

For Mr. Saleh, a former president of Iraq, this role is not just a theoretical idea – he does not define displacement as a statistic, but as a lived experience.

He was born in Iraqi Kurdistan in 1960, became a refugee as a teenager, and spent years away from his homeland, within a generation formed by oppression and war under Saddam Hussein’s rule.

He studied in the United Kingdom, built his political career, then returned to his homeland and became the eighth president of Iraq in 2018, a path that today affects his view of the millions of refugees who are still stuck in difficult situations.

Saleh says: “Behind every life statistic, there is a human being with ambition, a right to dignity, and a right to a better future.”

This repeated emphasis on human dignity stayed with him throughout his first months in office. But there is also a hard truth: the global system designed to respond to displacement is exhausted. As displacement increases, humanitarian funding shrinks, affecting organizations such as UNHCR.

Never-ending crisis

Barham Saleh confirms “Asylum is not supposed to be inevitable, but rather a temporary situation.”

For decades, the refugee protection architecture has been based on the assumption that displacement is a temporary solution. People flee, receive protection, and eventually return home when it is safe to do so.

But as conflicts continued and political settlements faltered, this principle gradually collapsed. Today, nearly two-thirds of refugees are living in what humanitarian organizations call “protracted displacement”: 5, 10, or even 20 years or more without a durable solution. An entire childhood is spent in camps. Generations grow up never seeing the homes from which their families fled.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees does not mitigate the true description of this situation, saying: “This is an unacceptable situation, a violation of the basic human right to dignity.”

His plan is ambitious. He has set a goal of halving the number of people trapped in “prolonged displacement” who depend on humanitarian aid within a decade, a goal that far exceeds the capabilities and resources of his organization alone.

He acknowledges that: “I know, and fully realize, that this far exceeds the capabilities and capacities of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees today.”

The strategy is based on something the humanitarian system has long strived for: moving from emergency aid to economic inclusion. He stresses that refugees should be able to work and contribute to the communities that host them, rather than remaining dependent on aid.

This requires a broad coalition: development banks, private investors, donor governments, and host countries, many of which are under economic pressure. It also requires a shift in political will, at a time when many richer countries are tightening border measures rather than expanding opportunities.

host communities

One of the enduring ironies of the refugee crisis is that it falls mostly on the countries least prepared to deal with it, so Mr. Saleh says: “We need to help the host countries, which are mostly low- and middle-income countries.”

From Colombia to Uganda, and from Chad to Bangladesh, these countries absorb the vast majority of displaced people, often with insufficient international support. Struggling efforts are being made in their schools, hospitals and labor markets to accommodate the new arrivals, even as their compatriots face economic hardship.

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees speaks of these host communities with a mixture of admiration and concern. He says: “I am humbled by the generosity of many of these host countries and communities.”

But generosity has limits. Without sustained investment and effective inclusion, the system risks becoming a permanent crisis – a global underclass of displaced people, detained in designated places rather than welcomed.

A message to the displaced and the world

In the Kakuma refugee camp in northern Kenya – one of the largest refugee camps in the world, with about 300,000 people residing there – and in various Turkish cities hosting Syrian refugees more than a decade after their displacement, Mr. Salih says he saw something that resisted the language of despair. “The story of resilience that I saw in every refugee I met is real and realistic.”

He sent a message to refugees, especially young people who grew up in unstable conditions, and said: “We will work to help you empower you to make your own decisions.” Emphasizing not only the field of protection, but also the availability of capabilities.

The word “empowerment” is intentional, as it indicates a shift in perception of refugees from being mere victims, to recognizing them as actors in their future. This speech also places the responsibility on the international community to create the conditions that enable them to exercise this empowerment.

Currently, these conditions remain unstable. Conflicts continue to flare up, including the recent escalation in the Middle East. Humanitarian aid budgets are dwindling. Political consensus is fading. The number of displaced people is constantly increasing, and each number represents, as Barham Salih emphasizes, a life disrupted.

At the end of his first travels, what stuck in his mind was not only the extent of the crisis, but also its continuation. He said, returning to the idea that constitutes the core of his mission: “Once again, refugee status is supposed to be temporary, not permanent suffering.”

But for millions of people living in camps like Kakuma, that reality has already faded.