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15
Mr. Murray, UND
DITCHLEY CONFERENCE ON REFUGEES
1. Many thanks for your briefing. I removed the confidential papers (attached) and thrust them in my pocket for security's sake: hence their crumpled condition! On UNRWA, I spoke both to Mr. Rydbeck and to Ambassador Douglas. Mr. Rydbeck showed me in confidence records of meetings with Douglas in November 1982 and (from memory) in early April 1983. These records showed Mr. Douglas to be very critical of UNRWA's performance, and there seems to be little doubt that he had favoured a cut in the level of US financial support. In particular, he was critical about UNRWA's handling of the Simel (?) incident.
2. When I tackled Douglas, he reacted with a pretty abusive, but rather unspecific, attack on UNRWA. He said that UNRWA officials had to get used to being treated robustly by the donor countries and to accept a degree of criticism and direction from the latter. After having got this off his chest, however, he said that the US Administration would not withdraw (or, I thought by implication, diminish) its financial support, though UNRWA would of course have to be wound up in the context of an eventual political settlement. I stressed the need to maintain the current level of donor support, not least at a time when the US needed to appear even-handed in their treatment of Arab and Israeli interests in the area.
3.
Perhaps I should also record that, though Ambassador Douglas makes a very aggressive impression initially, he knows a great deal about the various refugee situations in the world and has an excellent practical approach to the solution of problems, particularly, I would say, on that of the Cambodian refugees in Thailand, though he strongly criticised the State Department's reluctance to be firm with the Thais in the interest of giving these Cambodians better treatment and a less exposed geographical habitat.
On the rest of the Conference, I must record that Prince Saddrudin did his best to push the recommendations of his study on human rights and mass exodus. We had no difficulty in getting the Conference to agree that the definition of a refugee in the '51 Convention and the '67 Protocol should be sacrosanct, though there was a tendency to feel that an additional internationally agreed definition dealing with temporary status for emergency migrants could help the UNHCR and ICRC to obtain adequate protection in indeterminate categories. But, despite my attempts to keep the issue open, all those who took the floor supported the Prince's idea for a special representative for humanitarian questions, though there was a suspicion (actually expressed in the plenary by Lord Cranbourne) that he appeared to be writing his own job description. Ambassador Douglas told me that
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