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Organisation and Management
8. The High Commissioner, in his address, stated that the field is where UNHCR succeeds or fails and more attention must be given to strengthening the work in the field. He also added that the UNHCR structure needed to be adapted to modern management methods. These two comments received general agreement of the EXCOM Members.
Contacts with Governments
9. The High Commissioner stressed that he wished to maintain the continuing dialogue with State Members, states with refugees and states who could help solve refugee problems. He also added that he wished to reinforce the consensus within EXCOM.
Documentation
10.
The enclosures to Mr de Mello's letter of 20 January contain the latest documenes produced by UNHCR on this subject. Many Member States referred to this subject. There was still no consensus on whether the narrative parts should be deleted completely, although the need to shorten the report was obvious. Argentina, who had introduced the original proposal, said that they had sought solely to simplify activities, but drew our attention to the fact that the Secretariat had already produced two lengthy reports on the subject. In sunning up Mr Hocké asked Hr de Mello to arrange a meeting shortly in order to establish a Working Group in mid-March which could consider the whole subject and report to the June informal EXCOM.
11. The only political issue raised was between Greece and Turkey. Greece in their statement referred to displaced persons in Cyprus from 1974: Turkey subsequently complained about the Greek reference to a political issue and informed us that the root causes went back to 1964 and not 1974 and that there were displaced persons from both communities in Cyprus. Algeria and Morocco made no reference to Tindouf.
12. Other items raised by Member States, which were not specifically included in the High Commissioner's address, included the question of burden sharing among resettlement countries which was raised by Canada who stated that the resettlement of refugees should not be regarded as the sole responsibility of the traditional resettlement countries such as Canada, Australia and the US: more burden sharing was required such as was now being done through the RASRO and DISERO programmes and there should be more planning to involve the non-traditional resettlement countries. However, this was, not surprisingly, not received with great enthusiasm by the latter: Tanzania in particular drew attention to their already over-loaded resettlement burden. Although Tanzania had given permanent residence to many long-term refugees they felt that UNHCR should still take a certain responsibility in dealing with these refugees.
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