The Work of the International Refugee Organization

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T tHE International Refugee Organization owes its being to a Resolution of the United Nations Assembly in December I946. It is significant that the Constitution of the I.R.O. was framed by a Special Committee of the Economic and Social Council and that there were, at that time, upon the Committee representatives of all the Powers chiefly concerned, including the Eastern Powers. Many passages in the Constitution bear testimony to its origin, and I.R.O. has experienced difficulty in interpreting and administering a mandate which, though framed in many particulars to meet the views of the Eastern Powers, has not in practice been supported by them. Who are the refugees whom I.R.O. is trying to help? I do not know whether anybody knows how many refugees there are in the world to-day. In Europe alone there may be ten to twelve million. There are many more in the Far East and in the Middle East. It is not the task of the I.R.O. to deal with more than a fraction of that problem. Many of the refugees are Germans, or persons of German origin, scattered throughout Germany. We were set up for a quite specific task. Without going into technical and legal details, and there are eight pages in our Constitution on the subject, the I.R.O. is concerned with the non-Germanic refugees who were left at the end of I945 in Germany, in Austria, and in Italy, with certain groups of pre-war refugees, the Spanish refugees, the so-called Nansen refugees, Russians, Armenians, etc., and with groups of both Europeans and Chinese refugees in China. We are also expected to do what we can for the group known as neo-refugees-those people who are, even to this day, still flowing into Western Europe from Eastern Europe. There are certain exceptions. We are not to help war criminals, or quislings, or traitors. We are not to help persons who evidently assisted the enemy. We are not to help criminals who could be extradited, and certain other specific categories. When we first came into existence in July I947 we estimated the number of refugees within the terms of our Constitution to lie somewhere between one and one-and-a-half million. We believe that on i July I948, there were some 8oo,ooo-goo,ooo refugees who were both eligible under our Constitution and in need of our assistance. I cannot give a complete breakdown of the figures, the statistics are not complete. But we have already obtained fairly complete figures for the groups of refugees who are actually receiving assistance in our camps. On i July I948, some 590,000 refugees were receiving care and maintenance in our camps in Germany, Austria, 66