Why Was UNHCR

During the Second World War period
Actually, the UNHCR was not the first refugee organization at the end of the Second World War. The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) was set up by the Allies in November 1943 whose mandate was simply limited to help civilians from allied states and displayed people in states with temporary emergency aid. Although it was not a true refugee organization with authority, it succeeded in helping these people in the beginning and continued its relief and rehabilitation operation until June 1947. Apart from the UNRRA, another temporary International Refugee Organization (IRO) was also established in 1947 with a five-year mandate to ensure the settlement of refugees and displayed people.
The reason why UNRRA, IRO or UNRWA was not so effective and helpful is that all of them assumed that the refugee problem was just temporary and local. Later then the turning point was the 1951 UN Refugee Convention where the UN finally realized that the refugee issue is not temporary which could be a potentially permanent one.
At that time, there were tens of millions of people who had been forced to leave their homes due to the conflict; therefore the initial mandate of the UNHCR for the first three years was to resettle 1.2 million European refugees left homeless by the Second World War.
The concern about the refugee issue was proved to be right where its permanence was reflected during the 1990s by two major conflicts in Europe and North Africa. Huge wages of refugees from Africa and Asia was the inevitable consequence of the Hungarian uprising of 1956 and the Algerian war of
The Cold War at the UN
Shortly after the end of the Second World War, another political turmoil started. The Cold War between ‘East’ and ‘West’ (the Soviet and the US) was not simply a power struggle between two groups of states; it was more like a source of the refugee problem in Europe. Whatever it was the Korean War (1950), the Hungarian uprising (1956) or the Suez Crisis, the UNHCR made a lot of efforts to help refugees. And in 1954, the UNHCR awarded the first of two Nobel Peace Prizes for its work with European refugees.
The North-South division and Vietnam War
During the 1960s and the 1970s, there were different kinds of opinions concerning about the virtual division of the territory of Vietnam within the UN states. Due to their various preferred forms of government and political system; China and the Soviet Union supported the northern part, while the US, the UK and France supported the southern part. At first, the UNHCR may have nothing to do with this kind of regional political and military conflict. But in order to prevent further movements of population who had a fair chance of being refugees, the UNHCR decided to open the local office in Bangkok, Thailand and in Hanoi, North Vietnam so that it can monitor and control