Barham Salih knows the pain of torture and the wrenching loss of home. Four decades after his own ordeal, the former Iraqi president, 65, has taken the helm of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), guiding the agency through a funding shortfall and ever-growing global needs.
Salih became the first former head of state to lead UNHCR at the start of the year.
“It is a profound moral and legal responsibility,” he told AFP during his first trip in the new role, visiting Kenya’s Kakuma refugee camp on Sunday. “I know the pain of losing a home, losing your friends.”
Kakuma, East Africa’s second-largest refugee settlement, hosts roughly 300,000 people from South Sudan, Somalia, Uganda, and Burundi. The camp has existed since 1992.
The world “should not allow this to continue,” Salih said, praising Kenya’s initiative to transform refugee camps into economic hubs. “We should not only protect refugees… but also enable them to have more durable solutions. The better way is to have peace established in their own countries… nowhere is nicer than home.”
A life shaped by exile and torture
Born in 1960 in Sulaymaniyah, Iraqi Kurdistan, to a judge and a women’s rights activist, Salih grew up in a region controlled by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), which sought self-determination for Iraqi Kurds.
He went into exile in Iran in 1974, attending a school for refugees. Back in Iraq in 1979, Salih—then a teenager and PUK member—was arrested twice by Saddam Hussein’s regime.
“I was released after 43 days, having suffered torture, electric shocks, beating,” he recalled. Despite this, he ranked among Iraq’s top three high school students 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,” said Filippo Grandi, his predecessor at UNHCR.
After Hussein’s overthrow in 2003, Salih enjoyed a successful political career in Iraqi Kurdistan and Iraq’s federal government, serving as president from 2018 to 2022.
Facing funding and staffing challenges
UNHCR reports that refugee numbers have doubled to 117 million over the past decade, while funding has fallen sharply, particularly during Donald Trump’s presidency.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has praised Salih 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 added, calling for “more efficiency and accountability” while insisting the international community meet its “legal and moral obligations to help.”
AFP
