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of the nation state to something which belongs much more to shall I say?-world government.
I finish with this simple comment: that all the methods which hitherto have been advocated for the alleviation of the distress of those who are refugees depend for their authorisation and fulfillment on the will of the nation state. We need an overall authority to go beyond that. Inasmuch as I began by saying something in this context of the trouble when we think of the religious adherence to prospects of domination in terms of land, let me finish with another quotation which comes from Micah. It is that everyone will walk in the name of his god, and every man will sit under his vine and under his fig tree, and none shall make them afraid. When we cease to make refugees because we make them afraid, I think we shall begin to see that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.
3.43 p.m.
The Lord Bishop of Winchester: My Lords, the world's compassion for refugees is bedevilled by false assumptions. This is why I so welcomed the remarkable maiden speech of the noble Viscount, Lord Brentford, particularly for his lucid and informed account of the situation that helped us to see the human side behind the millions. When we talk about people in millions, or even in tens of thousands, we inevitably generalise. We reduce all of them to a stereotype, a single image that stands for the lot and immediately we go wrong.
That happens whether we are dealing with statistics and the figures disguise the human face, or whether we watch the television screen and see those familiar stock images of destitution which now assail our minds and our eyes, with almost little regard for the country in which it is once again happening. There is a uniform of need, and those who wear it are condemned to make an impression on those who watch, which entirely removes the question: of what kind is the need? We merely see people in need. We imagine that we know what they need, but needs are so different and this, again, is where we make our mistakes.
If I may venture on a personal reminiscence, I remember sitting somewhere in India with an Indian woman journalist who was also a photographer, and she was literally shocked to the core after some weeks that she had been spending in a famine area. She told me-and broke down in the telling-of how one evening she had gone into the home of an Indian peasant family and had watched the mother of the household doling out to the wide-eyed children in a little circle the food that they were to receive-the first in 48 hours. It was only every two days that she could afford to give them a measure of food. As the photographer watched from a corner she saw one little 12-year old girl slip out from the circle with her tiny bowl of rice into the yard just beyond, and offer her food to an emaciated little calf in the corner which was her personal pet.
Let us never forget that, however hungry a starving person may be, he or she has even greater needs than the need for food. It may be the need to have one other creature dependent on your love. These are people that we are talking about when we describe refugees. Their needs cannot necessarily be summed up and we
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do not necessarily know best what is best for them. Two of the assumptions that we so easily fall into are these: Poor nations are not good at organising or paupers are incapable. Neither of those has the remotest basis of truth and yet we assume it over and over again when we plan for those who are in need.
The ebodiment of these false assumptions is the refugee camp, where you see people after 10, after 20 and sometimes, as we have had heard, after 40 years, totally stagnated-a dead end, with no hope and no way out. They are merely dependent on the world's charity for the rest of their lives. Those camps were intended for temporary emergency, but there has been no solution and not very much attempt to open up any new life. They are permanently depedent.
But the pauper is not incapable. One has only to see the very poor people in any of the great cities of Nigeria to realise the enormous, ebullient entrepeneureship that will break out over and over again as one little man fails in a lorry business and within six months he has started a hairdressing salon. It goes on and on. It is natural for the human creature, when he is on a basic survival level, to produce extraordinary brilliance in ways and means of resourcefulness, and this is what we are dealing with when we talk about refugees.
I remember a Swiss couple in a very poor country. She devoted herself to the poorest of the wives. He went around in a quixotic way. For example, he told me once that outside a fruit shop which had a plate glass window there was a man with a little fruit stall trying to undercut. In front of the fruit stall there was a little man squatting on the pavement, with two dozen oranges on a dirty white cloth, and he was trying to undercut as well. You see this in every Asian and African township. The Swiss man went over to the man with the dirty cloth and they got into conversation. He asked him: "If you suddenly had £10, what would you do?" Without hesitation, the man said; "I would get the materials and make myself a barrow and I would be made.” “All right” said the Swiss, "here is £10. Here is my address and pay me back when you can." The Swiss spent 14 years doing that. He raised the money from small charities in the western world and went back. He told me that in those 14 years he had never yet met one person who did not have an immediate answer to the question "What would you do if you had £10?" and in the 14 years there had been only four cases that had not paid back the £10.
Those are the kind of people that we are dealing with when we speak about the very poor. We have to make use of their resourcefulness for their own pride and also in order to solve the problem. The refugee camp is no solution whatever. Over 60 per cent. of the refugees all over Africa are being coped with by African states, mainly by local communities who have absorbed them. They have provided land and the materials for housing. Then the refugees have made themselves self-supporting at a subsistence level, and very often have started to organise themselves communally for basic practical education and for health services. When we see on a television screen that long pilgrimage of people pushing their only possessions on small barrows or carrying them on their heads we should remember that every one in a
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hundred might be a well-qualified doctor; several might be school teachers. They are not all helpless peasants; they are as varied as any other part of the population, but they are on the run. When they can settle down there is an enormous amount of expertise and ability, and a strange communal power of organising for survival. This we must make use of In the last moment that is allowed me I want therefore to plead for more responsibility to be given to the voluntary agencies. I do not want to disparage the commission, but the voluntary agencies have a very special advantage. They can produce personnel who are willing to go down and be involved at the grass roots. They know about an appropriate technology because they are closely in touch with the Intermediate Technology group. They know about the small use of executive personnel. Their executive superstructure is on the whole much lighter and far less of the total funds are spent in that way. They are much more free from the political undercurrents and so they are able without Government jealousy to benefit the total community and not just the refugees in the area.
I greatly welcome the assurance that was given by the Minister for Overseas Development at the Second International Conference on Assistance for Refugees in Africa last July that in a new direction it is the intention of that Ministry to pour more funds into backing projects undertaken by the voluntary agencies. I do believe that there is our hope, because those are the people who are working to bring into operation all the resourcefulness of those who are the poor and the refugees.
3.52 p.m.
Baroness Elliot of Harwood: My Lords, may I add my thanks to the noble Viscount, Lord Buckmaster, for inaugurating this debate at what I believe to be a very vital moment in the terrible problems of refugees? Perhaps I may also add my congratulations to the noble Viscount, Lord Brentford, on his absolutely brilliant maiden speech. I hope very much that we shall have the honour of hearing him many times, if not on this subject, then on other subjects in which he obviously has great skill.
My interest in refugees dates back to the year 1960-61, when the World Refugee Year appeal was organised by the United Nations, and resulted in an magnificent amount of money being raised and work being done. It happened that I had been for a number of years a delegate to the United Nations. I was asked if I would head in this country the World Refugee Year appeal, which I did with trepidation but in the end with remarkable success. The fact was that we raised more than £10 million in one year for refugees and this was something which had never been done before.
The money was raised for the purpose of clearing the camps in Europe and also in the Middle East. We succeeded, and what is depressing to me today is that, while we ended up with fewer than a million refugees at that time, we now have, as the noble Viscount said, 14 million refugees. This is a tragedy and everybody who has spoken today has offered very remarkable suggestions as to how we may be able to help.
I should like also to congratulate the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the office which
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operates here. They have continued all the time and without hesitation to press the urgency of these matters. They have had a tremendous response from the voluntary agencies, as the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Winchester has just mentioned. I too feel very strongly that we must try to do all we can to help the voluntary agencies because they have a great advantage. They are working on the spot; they are non-political; and they are not subject to propaganda and the problems of different types of religions. The voluntary agencies are in many ways the most important agencies to help with this refugee problem. I should also like to add my thanks and congratu- lations to the Minister, Mr. Timothy Raison, who has just been mentioned and who has now found an extra £5 million for the voluntary agencies. This follows on 1984, when £10 million was given by Her Majesty's Government to help with these great problems. I am sure that this money is well spent but we could do with much more if it were available. Unfortunately, as we know, it is not.
One thing that has been very encouraging is the remarkable response to the tragedy which is going on in Ethiopia today. The Ethiopian appeal, which we have all been watching on television, has again raised the interest and shown the generosity of the British public in the way in which World Refugee Year did 25 years ago. That in many ways is very remarkable and also very encouraging. I saw only yesterday or the day before that Oliver Walston, the son of the noble Lord, Lord Walston, has raised more than £1 million from the farmers and has gone over to Ethiopia to help at this very moment with the problems of starvation which we all know exist in Ethiopia.
Obviously, permanent settlement is what we should most like to help with. In one of the excellent documents which I have been sent for this debate by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner, I have read of the work which is being done by the Ockenden Venture, directed by Miss Joyce Pearce, and also the remarkable work done by the Save the Children Fund and by other voluntary organisations, all actively engaged at this moment in doing practical things.
I do agree with the right reverend Prelate when he says that we can help these workers, that we can train them and that we should do everything we can so that they are able to establish a permanent method of helping the refugees to help themselves. I am sure that that is one of the most important things we can do.
In Britain, we have been very generous in the past in taking refugees and giving asylum, but it remains extremely difficult because, although we should like to help as much as we possibly can, we are in the awkward position of having a great many unemployed and not much work to offer to these people. I think that self-help and resettlement, on which the High Commissioner and the voluntary agencies are working so hard in these countries, seem to offer a better solution than bringing people into the European picture again.
We should do all we possibly can to help the people on the spot to learn to earn their own living. As the right reverend Prelate has said, many people are doing it now, but there could be many more if help was