He wasted no time in taking to the field. Within days of taking office on January 1, he had already left the conference rooms of his headquarters in Geneva to seek the dust of refugee camps in Kenya and Chad, a sign of how he intends to lead an agency overwhelmed by crises that multiply faster than the system created to respond to them.
“The responsibility in every sense of the word is astonishing,” he said in a recent interview, his voice slightly capturing the enormity of the task.
For Salih, in his sixties, the role is anything but abstract. The new High Commissioner for Refugees understands displacement not as a statistic but as a lived experience.
‘Behind every statistic there is a life’
Born in Iraqi Kurdistan in 1960, he himself became a refugee as a teenager and spent years in exile, part of a generation marked by repression and war under Saddam Hussein. He studied in the UK, built a political career and eventually returned home, rising to become Iraq’s eighth president in 2018, a trajectory that now informs how he views the millions still trapped in limbo.
“Behind every statistic there is a life,” he said, “a person with aspirations, with the right to dignity, with the right to a better future.”
That insistence on individual dignity, like a refrain, is present during his first months on the job. But so is a harder truth: the global system built to respond to displacement is under pressure. Even as displacement increases, humanitarian funding is being reduced, forcing agencies like yours to use already limited resources to meet increasing needs.
A crisis that no longer ends
For decades, the architecture of refugee protection was based on the assumption that displacement was a temporary solution. People fled, received protection, and eventually returned home when it was safe to do so.
“Being a refugee is not a destiny,” Salih said. “It’s supposed to be a temporary condition.”
But as conflicts drag on and political agreements stall, that premise has quietly collapsed. Today, almost two-thirds of refugees live in what humanitarian agencies call “prolonged displacement”: five, 10, even 20 years or more without a durable solution. Entire childhoods are spent in the camps. Generations grow up without ever seeing the homes from which their families fled.
The UN refugee chief does not soften the diagnosis.
“That is not an acceptable situation,” he said. “This is a violation of basic human rights to dignity.”
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Barham Salih during a visit to refugees in Zaatari camp in Jordan.
Ambitious plan
His plan is ambitious. He has set a goal of halving, within a decade, the number of long-term displaced people dependent on humanitarian assistance, a goal that far exceeds his agency’s capacity or resources alone.
“I know, and understand very well, that this is far beyond the means and capabilities of [UNHCR] today,” he acknowledged.
The strategy depends on something the humanitarian system has long struggled to achieve: moving beyond emergency aid towards economic inclusion. Refugees, he argues, must be able to work and contribute to the societies that host them rather than remain dependent on assistance.
This would require a broad coalition including development banks, private investors, donor governments and host countries, many of which are under economic pressure. It would also require a shift in political will at a time when many wealthier nations are tightening borders rather than expanding opportunity.
The weight of hosting
One of the enduring paradoxes of the refugee crisis is that it is largely borne by the countries least prepared to deal with it.
“We need to help the host countries, which, by the way, are mostly low- and middle-income countries,” Salih said.
From Colombia to Uganda, from Chad to Bangladesh, these countries absorb the vast majority of displaced people, often with insufficient international support. Its schools, hospitals and labor markets struggle to accommodate newcomers, even as its own citizens face economic hardship.
The UN refugee chief speaks of these host communities with a mix of admiration and urgency.
“I am humbled by the generosity of many of these host nations and communities,” he said.
But generosity can only go so far. Without sustained investment and inclusion, the system risks becoming a permanent crisis, in which a global underclass of displaced people is warehoused rather than welcomed.
UN Refugee chief Barham Salih (centre) talks to Sudanese refugees at a women’s center in Farchana, Chad.
A message to the displaced and to the world
In Kakuma, a refugee camp in northern Kenya, one of the largest in the world and home to around 300,000 people, and in every Turkish city hosting Syrians more than a decade after their exodus, Salih says he has seen something that resists the language of despair.
“The story of resilience of every refugee I have met is genuine and real,” she said.
It is this resilience that shapes his message, particularly for young refugees growing up in uncertainty.
“I tell young people that we are going to work to help them with their agency,” he said, emphasizing not only protection but also possibility.
The word “agency” is deliberate. It means stopping seeing refugees only as victims and recognizing them as actors in their own future. But it also places a responsibility on the international community to create the conditions under which that agency can be exercised.
“A refugee should be a temporary situation, not a permanent pain.”
For now, those conditions remain uneven at best.
Conflicts continue to break out, including the latest escalation in the Middle East. Humanitarian budgets are shrinking. The political consensus is eroding and the number of displaced people continues to increase; each figure represents, as Salih insists, a life interrupted.
At the end of his first travels, what remained with him was not only the magnitude of the crisis, but also its persistence.
“Once again,” he said, returning to the idea that frames his mission, “a refugee should be a temporary situation, not a permanent pain.”
For millions of people living in camps like Kakuma, that distinction has already been blurred.
