TNAG-0975-FCO40-1194-Resettlement-of-Vietnamese-refugees-from-Hong-Kong-in-other--1980 — Page 52

CONFIDENTIAL

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23 Overhanging all of this is the question of how to handle the political factors. It is the wisdom of experience that the handling of refugee problems can best be undertaken on a "non- political" basis, i.e. that the emphasis should be on dealing with the consequences in human terms of man-made disasters rather than with their root causes, discussion of which belongs elsewhere, i.e. in the General Assembly or the Security Council. The greater the numbers of refugees in the world, the harder it is to maintain this practical distinction. The problems of co-ordination in the UN system will inevitably have an increasing political dimension. Beyond that, the question will become increasingly tied up with discussion of human rights. For example, the US are pursuing the possibility of utilising the resolution passed by the UN Human Rights Commission last March on the mass exodus of refugees, which requests the Secretary-General to make a report every time this phenomenon occurs. The US idea is for an automatic triggering mechanism whereby the Secretary-General would make contact with governments responsible for a mass exodus, but it would be for UNHCR to monitor and report the facts in the first place to the Secretary-General. Naturally the US see implications for the out- flow of refugees from Cuba and Afghanistan in this procedure.

24

The importance in the refugee context of Afghanistan and Cambodia for example, has prompted some experts to suggest somewhat fancifully, perhaps that the international community is trying to deal in the humanitarian context with what are in fact failures in the field of collective security. Be that as it may, it is significant that at their Venice meeting the Heads of State and Government did not confine themselves to referring to the plight of refugees. They also made "a vigorous appeal to the governments responsible

to remove the causes of this wide- spread human tragedy and not to pursue policies which drive large numbers of their own people from their own countries".

25 In face of these complex and delicate factors, there is a clear risk that re-jigging the international machinery for dealing with humanitarian problems will create as many problems as it solves. As far as the Geneva scene is concerned, I believe that the system of contact, informal and formal, which we now have, in particular through the Executive Committee of UNHCR and liaison

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