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The Refugee: A Problem for International Organization

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 May 2009

Patrick Murphy Malin
Affiliation:
Professor of Economics at Swarthmore College, was from 1940 to 1942 American Director of the International Migration Service (now the International Social Service). From 1944 until shortly before its dissolution he served as Vice-Director of the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees.
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Extract

In everyday speech, the word “refugee” means any person who has to leave his home because of a general catastrophe — natural or social. People whose dislocation was caused, in one way or another, by the second world war came to be called “displaced persons” or “DP's.” The largest remaining group of such displaced persons is in China, where there are perhaps 25,000,000 people who are still living away from their former homes; but the problem which they present, though it is almost unimaginably vast and tragic, comes within the jurisdiction of a single nation. The same is true of the second largest remaining group, the perhaps 10,000,000 Soviet citizens who have not returned to their pre-war places of residence. The perhaps 8,000,000 Germans recently transferred from East Prussia, Silesia, the Sudetenland and other areas into the four zones of diminished Germany and Austria pose an international problem; but it is being handled by the occupying authorities — jointly or separately. Apart from several hundred thousand persons of Chinese nationality driven by the war from their homes in non-Chinese portions of Southeast Asia and some tens of thousands of Indian nationality, similarly displaced, who do not raise vexing political questions, the persons with whom a general international organization for uprooted people must deal are almost exclusively the perhaps 2,000,000 European refugees — refugees in the narrower technical meaning of the term, bristling with political complications.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © The IO Foundation 1947

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References

1 For a summary of UNRRA's work, see International Organization, I, p. 181–183, also this issue, p. 555.

2 For a summary of the work of the Intergovernmental Committee, see International Organization, I, p. 144– and 382; also, this issue, p. 556.

3 See International Organization, I, p. 141–2.

4 The High Commissioner for Refugees under the Protection of the League of Nations from 1939 to 1946 was Sir Herbert Emerson, formerly Governor of the Punjab; and the Deputy High Commissioner was Dr. G. G. Kullmann, a Swiss jurist. They also served the Intergovernmental Committee, without remuneration, as Director and Senior Assistant Director respectively; and whatever success it had was due preponderantly to them. Sir Herbert is now retiring on account of age, but Dr. Kullmann is an important member of the secretariat of the Preparatory Commission for the International Refugee Organization.

5 See International Organization, I, p. 137 und 359.

6 See this issue, p. 577f.