GENEVA, Dec 20: UN High Commissioner for Refugees Ruud Lubbers on Thursday said his agency (UNHCR) must move away from its Western origins to help more than 21 million refugees worldwide more effectively.

In a year-end interview with the UNHCR’s magazine, “Refugees”, Lubbers said it was time to increase the influence of other religions and cultural backgrounds in the agency, which has been overwhelmingly funded by Western countries since it was created in 1951.

He suggested the move would help to overcome chronic underfunding and growing hostility to refugees which are hampering the UNHCR’s work.

“There is refugee fatigue. It is rather dramatic,” Lubbers said at the end of his first year as High Commissioner for the agency.

Lubbers warned that the growing trend towards closing borders to refugees, most recently from Afghanistan, bore a resemblance to the situation in Europe shortly before World War II, when Western countries failed to decide on a policy to help Jews fleeing Nazi Germany.

“In 1938 there was an international conference in Evian (France) and an international attitude of ‘Don’t let the Jews go out’ emerged. Then the drama of the Holocaust happened,” he added.

“We are now at 2001 and at our own crossroads. What are we going to do? Close our borders again?”

The agency and the international refugee protection regime were originally set up in 1951 to deal with Europe’s refugee crisis after World War II, and western countries still dominate the UNHCR’s mainly voluntary 881 million dollar (978 million euros) annual budget.

Fourteen countries and the European Commission account for 95 per cent of the funding.

“We went on the wrong track when we globalized the mission of UNHCR, in that we were not able at the same time to globalize it to incorporate different cultures and religions,” the High Commissioner said.—AFP